The phoney Rule, Britannia! row shouldn't distract anti-racists from our real work

End the arming of police and the use of tasers. End the Islamophobic “Prevent” programme. End deportations. End school exclusions. These are some of the leading demands from anti-racist groups across the UK. You may notice “Stop singing Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms” isn’t among them.

Five days ago Mercy Baguma, a 34-year old woman who travelled to the UK from Uganda seeking asylum – protection – who was shunned into extreme poverty by our immigration system, left with no recourse to public funds, and was disallowed from working, was found dead, besides her malnourished one-year-old child. This was one day before 29-year-old Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police forces in Wisconsin, USA, and left paralysed and handcuffed to his hospital bed. Black lives do not matter.

Anti-racists are concerned with the material conditions of black lives. We fight for black lives to matter, to exist, to overcome. We take to the streets calling for police accountability, for vital youth services to be reopened, and for a global economic system predicated on race, class and gender exploitation to be overhauled. This is why we fight.

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Yes, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, one part of the movement to end racism is questioning the role of British culture, which may involve challenging the uncritical celebration of Britain’s imperialist history in statues, sports anthems or TV programmes. More often than not, these questions – legitimate and uncomfortable – come from individuals who work in these industries.

The other side of this movement is the day-to-day graft by thousands of people to rebuild mass power through anti-racist organisations – like the British Black Panthers and Asian Youth Movements, which were criminalised and targeted by the British state. It is upon this burgeoning movement that zealous nationalists are keen to foist a phoney culture war. Hence the manufactured Proms controversy, when under a week ago the Sunday Times suggested that the BBC was discussing axing Rule, Britannia for reasons related to Black Lives Matter.

A culture war implies an ideological battle for dominance – as if anti-racist activists have seized the BBC – whereas in real life, the British airwaves are dominated by rightwing punditry. Even the public, when polled, have noted this bias toward the right.

It is against this backdrop, besieged by precisely nobody, that Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Piers Morgan, Lawrence Fox, the ambassadors of this discourse, have been honing their sensationalist artform: shadow boxing an enemy in their heads. We’d do well to ignore them, except they are often the very same class of people whom anti-racist protesters seek to hold to account, and they are able to court the national press and social media.

Johnson’s televised plea to abandon “wetness” and “self-recrimination”, and instead give an open armed embrace to empire, (which means an open-armed embrace of the enslavement and torture of 3 million Africans and the plunder and underdevelopment of much of the global south: a process that helped determine the shape of the global economy today) is in response to, well, nobody. Nobody at the BBC called for Rule, Britannia to be removed from the Proms because of racial sensitivities. So why are Johnson and his cohort up in arms? Why has every media establishment been falling over themselves to have a televised debate on it?

Their culture war is two-pronged. On the one hand it is guaranteed eyeballs for media companies experiencing financial woes, and on the other, a blunt political tool, one which seeks to shore up the engineered fears of cultural loss and a purported breakdown of social order, which is sympathised with most keenly by the conservative base. Generation woke gone mad, is what they protest, but as Letetra Widman, Jacob Blake’s sister, testified: we don’t want apologies for the past, “we want change.”

This phoney culture war stirs up a steady moral panic around the perceived threat to “Britishness” that Black Lives Matter and the new anti-racist movements supposedly pose. Again, let me be crystal clear here: this “culture war” is the reprisal of the upper class who are fearful of the disenfranchised making headway in shifting hearts and minds. Anti-racists take note, they are scared.

Some have taken this opportune moment to cite positive public opinion polls, the drip feed of civil rights and the supposed absence of street fascism as evidence that strong liberalism has advanced British society, and that the divisive conservative culture war finds no real home within it. How wrong they are. The illiberal towering voices of the culture war hysteria have chilled British society, turned the gaze from the economic catastrophe enveloping us and entrenched a number of folk devils into the British psyche.

Britain is a deeply intolerant country. It is demonstrably intolerant of immigrants, of poor people, of Muslims, of trans people, of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, of racialised young people. The festival of fascism to defend a statue of Winston Churchill only months ago should remind us how quickly the streets can once more be filled with avowed racists. Johnson’s break from U-turns to quickly bolster the cultural air war will entrench social divisions and ultimately work toward the mandate of the far right.

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However, anti-racist work is gaining ground in its uphill battle, with a recent Hope Not Hate poll showing a growing awareness of both the scale of racism, and the need to take direct action against it. There is an emergent anti-racist consciousness from the workplace to street corner, one which interrogates the long-held common sense notion that racism isn’t a problem in Britain. For many thousands of people a commitment to Britain’s criminal justice, education and immigration systems has been shaken by research into and experience of the racist outcomes they produce.

The more anti-racist movements rally ourselves into an organised mass, the more the Foxs and Farages of the world pipe up to decry some sense of cultural loss, while their allies in the media stoke a culture war. We have far more important work to do. If they want to sing Rule, Britannia, let them: we have our own songs. Ella’s Song – based on civil rights leader Ella Baker’s call to get organised – might remind us of the task at hand: “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons / is as important as the killing of white mothers’ sons / we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”

• Joshua Virasami is an organiser and the author of How To Change It