Despite my excessively, almost self-parodically left-wing search history, I noticed recently that YouTube is trying to get me to click on videos of angry-looking white men doing walk-and-talk videos around London.
In these, said white men (and, occasionally, women) walk around multicultural areas of London like Brixton and Whitechapel – let’s face it, it’s often Whitechapel – and complain how they can’t see another white face, and how scared this makes them feel.
Occasionally, cheery locals will approach these influencers and ask why they’re filming and if they’re famous, thereby somewhat undermining the “no-go area” themed racist agenda of their intended content.
It would be easy to laugh it off, but this content is increasingly big business, and panders to various neo-fascist narratives about how “London Has Fallen”. Trump, Musk, and the rest of the American right have a mysterious problem with London having a Muslim mayor, and aren’t afraid to rant about it. London has replaced Paris, in the American imagination, as the European city that is a basket-case example of what happens if you allow uncontrolled immigration from… well, you can guess which ethnicities and religions these people have a particular problem with.
It rankles. I’m the whitest boy alive, and have lived in both Brixton and Whitechapel. I’d still happily be living there if I could afford the rent: the main problem, other than austerity, is gentrification, not our capital being taken over by “foreigners”, or “not English” people – these video bloggers’ euphemisms for non-white Britons, especially those from an Asian background.
Listening to the latest episode of the QAA podcast, an excellent source of investigations into the vagaries of conspiratorial and far-right online content, there is a special report by Annie Kelly on this phenomenom which seems to suggest there are two distinct categories of these influencers: amoral grifters, feeding the algorithm with what it wants, and out-and-out fascists, seeking confrontations outside mosques and interviewing “Tommy Robinson” (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) about the Great Replacement theory.
It’s the grifters that irritate the most. As Kelly reports, these influencers – I shan’t name any of them here, but one of the most popular is a white South African fellow – don’t even have a particularly political agenda.
As recently as a year ago, these people were doing more traditional travelogues. These, still, were often exploitative, but at least seemed to be motivated by a genuine curiosity about the world. Now, as the algorithm, demands, they have pivoted to walking around London’s Zone 2, complaining, and pretending to be scared.
In one particularly hilarious video, a couple with Irish accents complain about the lack of “English” restaurants while… walking down Brick Lane.
So, the facts: London is one of the safest cities in the world. Like many other places, it has its issues with homelessness, addiction, unsustainable rents, and far too many cars, often huge 4X4s driven by people distracted by their phones or their lattes. Like in many other places, 45 years of neoliberalism and 15 years of austerity has left public services threadbare and the social contract incresingly frayed.
But these fascists love neoliberalism and austerity. What they don’t like is seeing successful, vibrant, and joyous multicultural communities living side-by-side in the greatest city in the world, because London stands, and has always stood, for everything they wish to destroy.
jamesofwalsh 
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