 In response to riots in Bristol against the policing bill, which would criminalize disruptive protest, Nigel Farage tweeted the following. In Bristol tonight, we see what the soft-headed approach to the anti-police BLM leads to. Black Lives Matter leads to. Wake up, everyone. This is not about racial justice. These people want all-out anarchy and street violence. And as you can see there, he's tweeting that with a video of a police van on fire. Now, there are a number of problems with this tweet, as you would expect for a Nigel Farage take on any kind of protest. But the ones here are particularly clear, which is this was not a Black Lives Matter protest. Now, in the videos I've seen, I think everyone I saw writing was white. I can't say that as a blanket rule, but from the videos I've seen. And no one actually claimed this was a demonstration about racial justice. It was about the policing bill. Now, obviously those issues intersect, but this wasn't people saying, we are here as racial justice activists. So why has Nigel Farage said this? Now, it could seem puzzling at first sight. Has he just misunderstood? Is it the case that he just has not read up the demands of the policing bill or he hasn't looked closely enough at the videos of the rioting that took place? It's possible. I think it's more likely this is part of his, I suppose, lifelong endeavor to associate non-white people with violence and racial justice movements with violence. That's exactly what he's doing there. He's looking at a riot, which from my perspective seems to have been involving overwhelmingly white people. They're not Black Lives Matter. What's the first thing he brings up? Black Lives Matter and racial justice campaigners who he wants us to demonize and assume because they're talking about racial justice actually want to burn down police fans. Now, Ash, this is all very gross. Do you think that we've just sort of chosen one tweet, the most obnoxious but marginal opinion, which is Nigel Farage, who's now a politician condemned to the past anyway? Or is this sort of association that people draw between any kind of violence, whoever's committing it, and for whatever end, with Black people and racial justice issues to associate them together? What do you make of it? Well, this is actually a tactic which is being deployed by other sort of shock, jock figures on the far right. Whenever there is anything to do with protest, immediately it's BLM defund the police in Marxist anarchists on the street. It doesn't matter what the cause is. It could be the Sheffield tree defenders. That's going to be the narrative that they pull because what they're trying to do is import a very Americanized law and order culture war, which is explicitly racialized and use the exact same coordinates for framing and understanding UK politics over here. I think we're going to see a lot more of it and it's going to be commonplace. Just like McDonald's, Starbucks, Friends, and MTV, the most annoying things which dominate America will eventually find their way over here as well. There's, I think, another aspect to this which is worth bearing in mind, which is that we have an incredibly shallow media culture and it also, I think, creates quite a shallow political understanding as well. You've got to understand that when people look at images, they're reading them through other images which they have a grasp on and can understand. It doesn't matter that all of those people are whites. They look like the same antifa that the far right have been distributing videos of who've mustered in Portland or Washington, D.C., or wherever else it is. It forms part of a network of images which shape a right-wing paranoiac political imagination. Nitroforage appeals to that kind of imagery because he knows that it works, it lands. It's also something which gets recycled upwards and finds its way in the framing which exists in mainstream media. There is a conveyor belt of framing images rhetoric which start on the weirder corners of far-right internet and then find themselves in the Times and the BBC at the evening standard and wherever else you care to mention. Obviously, this is ignorant. It's untrue and it's misleading, but it's not an accident. It's deliberate and I think it will have an effect. It's important to mention as well. You're talking about this network of images. It doesn't actually just come from right-wing shock chocks. It was a really important study that was in the Huffington Post just about a week ago where they had compared the number of people found guilty of a crime in a six-month period in London with the number of people whose convictions were press-released by the Metropolitan Police. So this is showing you white people and black people and in the blue column is the share of people who were sentenced and in the green column is the share of people who were press-released their sentencing. So you can see here that of people who were sentenced, who were arrested in London, 45% of them were white, but 33% of the people who were press-released by the police were white. So you can see there's this big disparity and you've got the same thing on the other side obviously. So the share of people who were sentenced who were black in London was 29%. The share of people who were press-released saying that there had been a crime and there had been someone who was convicted, 44% of those were black. So you've got this complete disparity and whether or not that's intentional or otherwise, I mean that probably is a sign of institutionalised racism where you're a police force, you choose whether or not to press-release different convictions. You don't press-release them all and you're way more likely to press-release them if the person in question is black than if the person in question is white. You're completely right to point that out is that it's not just far right shock jokes, it's also a strategy which is employed whether knowingly or not by the police. But the point about institutional racism is that it doesn't matter really whether it's conscious or not. It has these impacts which contribute to the ongoing criminalisation and unfair treatment of black people within our criminal justice system. But you can also see the police playing into a kind of culture wars media framing in terms of how they responded over the last week. So one of the things that's happened is that the Metropolitan Police put up a guard around the statue of Winston Churchill following the Sarah Everard vigil. Now the statue of Winston Churchill I think had one of the BLM demos had racist graffiti on it. Now of course criminal damage is a crime but it's also a fact in this case. But nobody had any interest in the statue of Winston Churchill following the abduction and killing and arrest that was made in the case of Sarah Everard. And absolutely nobody was bringing Churchill into the conversation after the heavy-handed police tactics prompted a kind of nationwide debate about the appropriateness of those kinds of measures. No one was talking about Churchill but just by having the visual of coppers in their hives surrounding the statue what it was symbolising is we are part of this culture war and we are on the side of this very reactionary very nationalistic and very paranoiac political fantasy of what the battle is and who our opponents are. So the police are taking a very active role in this at the moment and it's because you've got this kind of unholy triangle of political interests of Cressida Dick the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the nation's most senior cop Priti Patel and Boris Johnson. Each of them is covering the other's right flank and so I think that you are going to see I think a much more active role being played by the police in this cultural framing of what their job is.