A masked young lad is filming from his seat on a runaway tourist train as it careens through the Paris streets. “Waaaooh” he shouts as it whizzes along, waving at other kids dressed all in black, to the sounds of cheering. His eyes tell the story – he’s high as a kite on adrenaline and the unexpected joy of total freedom, unshackled, for a fleeting moment, from the grinding manacles of economic necessity.

He is one of tens of thousands. They’ve filled the streets for weeks, clambered onto statues, fought the cops, made demands for their futures. As police violence has escalated against them, they’ve fought back in kind under the slogan “if we burn, you burn.” An increasingly literal interpretation as public buildings collapse in flames. The youth in full, uninhibited revolt the likes of which we haven’t seen for many years. 

And their furious rebellion has been caught by the wind, spreading across Europe, reflecting the economic and social malaise that afflicts the entire Western hemisphere, a crisis of capital and demographics that States have decided the young must bear and fix, white offering nothing in return. The motivation for that delirious nihilistic moment of a stolen buggy rampaging down cobbled tourist streets, a wild young man hollering to the crowds, is as understandable as it is universal.

But the kid is brown, and that’s all the excuse the commenters need.

Similar can be found under every news item posted by every news organisation. They’re not protesters, they’re jihadis taking their chance. They aren’t French students, they’re Muslim foreigners. Never mind that in every video we can see how young the people kicking off are, never mind how many white faces are all over the place, never mind what the demands are or the many anarchist and socialist slogans that have been daubed on every wall. 

For those of us with a bit of grey along their temples, the words sound all too familiar. We hear some variation on the theme whenever any social rebellion begins, from Hosni Mubarak and pals during the Egyptian revolution in 2011 to Donald Trump shrieking about anteefa after the January 6th riots. It’s the elites’ favourite excuse – outside agitators. It can’t be what it looks like, we must unite against an amorphous, pernicious alien influence and, merely by happy accident, preserve the status quo. 

Blah blah blah. It’s as tiresome as it is predictable. We know it’s bullshit. So why are the far-right’s socials full of exactly that rhetoric? 

Surely, as they have been telling us for years now, the coalition of GB News viewers, Facebook keyboard warriors and the beer-bellied slack bloc Danny Tommo recruited from (themselves partial to a bit of masked-up direct action cosplay) is an insurgent force? Why would they suddenly be cheering on the cops’ repression of young people, and playing loyal mouthpiece for Establishment talking points? 

The answer is obvious. They aren’t rebels at all. They never have been. They’re patsies, quislings and collaborators sweating in outfits that never really fit them. For years now they have presented themselves as representing the interests of the working class in Britain, but when any section of the working class demands changes that might put their paymasters – that cross-class alliance of PayPal “patriots” – out of pocket, along comes the pearl-clutching condemnation. The denial of reality. The construction of comforting myths to justify their spineless bootlicking.

They don’t address the first thing about the real needs of the working class, which is multicoloured and has endless problems, none of which start with the words “migrant” or “muslim.” Working class problems start with words like “landlord,” or “boss,” or “cuts.” Students put up with words like “damp” and “raac” and sweat through summer in uninsulated, unventilated rooms with no air conditioning while overworked, underpaid teachers crushed by penny-pinching privatised institutions stress quietly around them. 

Prospects – there’s a word with some baggage to it. Farage’s kids had plenty of prospects. The entire political class has kids with prospects. So do their paymasters. For kids rioting all over Europe at this moment though, prospects are in short supply. They’re rioting over something real and tangible, for which the ruling class has no answers. And nor do their pet migrant bashers.

Thus we see the same people who have been whining about “two tier” policing suddenly find a thorough respect for the police again. Blowing kids’ arms off is ay-okay as long as order is restored and the convenient, entirely fictitious Foreign Influence vanquished. These self-styled Rebels, these Revolutionaries of Dover, are exposed as wind-up toy soldiers for the wealthy. As the frauds they always were. Hard men who can only find their courage when the target is a skinny brown person the State couldn’t care less about. 

The far-right has always been this. Their obsession with migrants is a simple admission that they’re too weak and cowardly to pick a fight against real power. And when braver people than them, children no less, show the guts they lack, they shrink back into their fantasies. 

British students are yet to stand up like their continental brother and sisters. Perhaps they will soon. But for the young this should be one of many lessons from France. The migrant panic is Them. It’s the owners. Paid for by the owners. Run by the owners. Hyped by the owners’ media. The “lads” who moan on and on about it belong to the owners too. 

And when working class people really, truly stand up, they show their true colours.