Louise Gilmour: It’s time for Scotland to stand up and say racist, thuggish riots have no place here

This sodden summer was grim enough before the headlines of last week edged the needle from despondency to despair.

Asylum hotels in flames; mosques besieged; libraries gutted; shops looted; children led into riots by parents and grandparents, all chanting the same racist poison; minorities in fear; and politicians in panic. It has been relentless, harrowing and may not yet be over.

There is no excuse for the thick and thuggish mobs still reeling around towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland but there is enough blame to share.

Luckily, Tory politicians were on hand to explain where to point the finger despite 14 years of misrule when they not only failed to quell the far-right but encouraged it.

First, the big lie of Brexit and its hollow promise to “take back control” disguised prejudice as principle.

Then, ministers’ race-baiting rhetoric and Rwandan fantasies never hid their failure to build an immigration system fit for purpose or tackle the poverty and resentment seeping into the bones of left-behind towns.

So, last week, like arsonists, reeking of petrol and Swan Vestas, weeping as the flames lick higher, senior Tories came out to wring their hands.

Here was Priti Patel, for example, fresh from doing the Monster Mash with Nigel Farage at the Conservatives’ conference, now murmuring the leader of Reform may be going a little too far.

There was James Cleverly (don’t laugh), the Shadow Home Secretary, suggesting the new prime minister – in power for all of four weeks – was not acting with enough urgency.

A blow torch could not scorch their brass necks.

If there were easy answers, even the most hapless of five recent Tory prime ministers might have stubbed their toe on one but, once order is restored, Labour must be tough on the thugs, tougher on their puppeteers, and toughest on the issues prising our communities apart.

Lies on social media are now halfway around the world before the truth is awake never mind getting its boots on and, for a start, we must dam the misinformation and bile pouring into the torrent of hate online.

In Scotland, meanwhile, partisans on both sides of the constitutional debate spent the week arguing about whether we are less racist than the English or, you know, just the same?

Does the relative calm here mean we do not have England’s problems? Do our poorest postcodes not share the same resentments and disbelief that politicians can improve their lives?

Only a fool would think so or imagine the kindling set alight in England last week is not piling higher in our communities too.

We must learn the same lessons as the rest of the UK from recent days and adopt the same heightened awareness.

The far-right has found stony ground in Scotland so far but our own ragtag racists are still here and still organising.

Nigel Farage famously fled pursued by protesters in Edinburgh in 2013. Eighty years earlier, Oswald Mosley and his black shirts were driven from Glasgow Green in similar disarray.

Next month, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, a liar, fraudster and former leader of the English Defence League, is threatening to leave his five-star resort in Cyprus to speak here.

Whether he comes or not, Robinson and those like him will never be welcome here and must be disabused of any notion that our communities might also be riven by racism then set alight.

On Saturday September 7, trade unionists, campaigners and decent-minded Scots will tell them so – peacefully, organised, united, in numbers, and on the streets of our biggest city – and again confirm their hate has no place here.

Louise Gilmour is GMB Scotland secretary