As riots spread, fear is the greatest threat to our dearest freedoms

Day to day, freedom of movement is one of the most meaningful rights we have. Most of us take this freedom for granted. It means different things. Within our means and our personal commitments, we all have the right to move jobs, move towns, move home. We can go where we like, ­travel where we like, spend time with who we like. The days of serfdom and being tied to the land are long behind us.

But freedom of movement has another aspect to it which, if anything, is even more meaningful to each of us day to day. ­Because if freedom of movement means anything, it means the ability to go about your daily life without harassment and discrimination.

In our society, many people’s freedom to walk the streets unconsciously – without fear or hypervigilance – is compromised every day.

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Many same-sex couples feel ­self-conscious exchanging the kind of public affection ­heterosexuals never think about. Some kisses can attract much more attention than others. Not every hand is held in the same way.

One of my PhD students is currently working on young women’s experiences of street harassment in Scotland and where the law fits in. Lucy has captured ­countless stories of how from their early teenage years onwards, girls and young women become conscious about occupying ­public spaces, developing coping mechanisms and ­survival strategies to undertake such risky activities as getting on public ­transport, walking home, or enjoying a night out with friends.

Conduct the same study with young men, and I reckon you’d hear a different social story.

I had one of the saddest moments in my teaching career in 2018, when several young women approached me at the end of a lecture to say they wouldn’t be able to attend classes next week. I expected to hear the ordinary explanations. A doctor’s appointment, an inflexible employer, a job interview – even an impromptu ­holiday. I thought I’d heard it all before. I was wrong.

“Andrew, I can’t come to class next week because my parents are worried about what might happen.”

People protest in Liverpool, following the stabbing attacks on Monday in Southport (Image: James Speakman)

A white supremacist had ­recently ­circulated letters across a range of ­British cities and towns. Entitled “­Punish a ­Muslim Day”, it suggested a range of ­violent crimes which should be ­committed against the Muslim ­population, their ­property, and places of worship. It ­outlined an obscene system of points which could be earned by tearing off a woman’s headscarf to firebombing mosques. The perpetrator was eventually jailed for 12 years.

I think I’d clocked the story on the newsstands, but thoughtlessly, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d witness the ­material force of this bigotry in my own classroom.

In retrospect, this was hopelessly ­naïve. I hope I had some level of ­cognitive ­empathy about the impact that this kind of menacing propaganda can have on ­people targeted by it – but confronted with the lived reality of it in my classroom, in our city, that cognitive empathy fell altogether short, abstract and altogether inadequate.

Perhaps the most upsetting thing about this row of petitioners lining up at the end of my class is that they were the ones who were embarrassed and apologetic about the lapse in their attendance. The fact they hoped I wouldn’t mind, the fact they were quick with justifications that they’d pull up the slides, pool notes with ­colleagues, and catch up on their own time enhanced the monstrous sadness and injustice of the precarious sense of social security they were describing.

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A missed seminar might seem like a small thing. But when your absence is ­driven by anxiety and a sense you can’t walk through your home town ­without feeling at risk of an acid attack, a hurled brick or even random abuse by ­emboldened thugs – it is much more ­consequential.

This will be an extremely difficult weekend for many of our Muslim ­fellow citizens, watching the unfolding scenes in Southport and Sunderland with ­significant anxieties – for their own ­safety, for their families, and for the ­integrity of their places of worship and cultural ­centres.

Because adverse impacts on ­people’s freedom of movement is a very ­common feature of crimes motivated by ­discrimination and prejudice. Some of these impacts are intangible, and so ­easily overlooked – but they shouldn’t be. ­Because they are as much a consequence – and often a wider consequence – of the organised mischief and intimidation we have seen in English cities.

If you experience harassment on ­public transport, you might decide to walk in ­future. If you get waylaid by bigots on your usual route home on foot, you might decide to rely on taxis instead. If you are given grief, you might decide to stay away in future. If a bigoted colleague makes your life in work hell and your employer can’t see it or won’t step in, walking out on your job might feel like the rational thing to do, even if you lose money and opportunities as a consequence.

Men wearing Union flag masks confront police in Leeds (Image: Owen Humphreys)

It isn’t just how people behave that can change as a result of this kind of ­persecution – but who they are. Research shows that after experiences of being ­victimised because of the colour of your skin, or your perceived religion or ­sexuality, people can find themselves less outgoing, less inclined to take chances on strangers, find themselves more socially isolated as a consequence.

How do you account for a lost ­friendship or an unkindled relationship which you never struck up because you stayed away from an event you might once have ­attended? What price can we put on ­people leading smaller, less ­integrated lives as a consequence of prejudice and discrimination?

These are not the kinds of harms the law is well-framed to recognise or ­capture either – not like broken bones or a ­blazing building – but all these ­consequences ­operate as powerful ­restrictions on ­people’s basic rights and ability to freely develop their personalities in ­society ­according to their own lights and ­within the law. They’re the real threat to ­freedom.

From time to time, some of the ­madder American newscasters like to ­broadcast that various towns and cities in the UK have become “no-go zones”, usually ­assisted in these lies by ambitious right-wing British blatherskites and ­conscious frauds, hoping to make it big in the States by pandering to the ­reactionary ­prejudices of their audiences, lending a gloss of ­domestic credibility to the most ­extraordinary fictions or paranoid ­fantasies about their own country.

Fox News appearances aren’t made under oath, but the power of this kind of rhetoric – mainstreaming far-right fever dreams – should be a reminder that this kind of wilful carelessness about the truth isn’t limited to social media.

Social media is a transmission ­mechanism. But it isn’t the only Petri dish on which these ideas have grown. Listen to news reports, watch the clips ­online, and the rioters’ rhetoric is just the

­amplified version of ideas and social ­diagnoses you can read every day in the comment pages of establishment ­newspapers, or find in the speeches of mainstream ­politicians.

Blaming social media for the ­consequences of their own ­recreational bigotry and fearmongering is now a ­standard rhetorical move when things go too far, putting all this profitable and ­respectable British chauvinism at risk.