Where Does Racial Hatred Come From?
A man on a BBC panel asked where racial hatred comes from. Rachel Millward struggled to answer. The honest answer is four hundred years old, and a television studio in 2026 still cannot accommodate it
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A man on Question Time asked Rachel Millward of the Green Party to specify where racial hatred comes from. She struggled. He pressed. She reached for economic precarity, for scapegoating, for community cohesion. He declared victory. Lee Harris posted the clip with the caption “he beautifully exposes her stupidity,” and eight and a half thousand people liked it.
I was in the office when it happened. The attack, not Question Time. Phones started going off around the room – different alerts, different tones, BBC, Sky, whatever people had set. The same event arriving in pieces, already sorted into different packages before anyone had said a word about it. A man armed with a knife attacked Jewish men on Golders Green Road in broad daylight. Two were stabbed. The Metropolitan Police declared it a terrorist incident. I write about the far right on the side. It did not have a neo-Nazi look about it, and it was not, the attack was not far right. That matters, and I will come back to it.
The question is not stupid. It is one of the harder questions in political life. Where does racial hatred come from? Not in the sense of what triggers a particular incident, or which party is currently stoking it, but structurally – what produces it, what reproduces it, what keeps it available as a political instrument across centuries and conjunctures. Millward did not struggle because she had no answer. She struggled because the honest answer requires you to say something that a BBC panel in 2026 is arranged to prevent you from saying.
The wrong answers come easily.
Racial hatred is the product of ignorance – educate people and it recedes. It is the product of bad individuals – identify them, exclude them, and the problem is contained. It is the product of economic pressure – reduce poverty and the scapegoating loses its fuel. None of these answers is entirely false. All of them locate the problem in the present or the recent past. None of them explains why racial hierarchy is so durable, so readily available, so easily reactivated across centuries and completely different political conjunctures. A hatred that keeps returning in such different forms, in such different hands, is not a series of accidents. It has a structure. Finding that structure means going back to where the hierarchy was first built, and why.
Racial hatred does not precede conquest. It justifies it. You do not enslave a people because you have decided they are inferior – you construct their inferiority to legitimise the enslavement you have already chosen to carry out, for land, for labour, for profit. The ideology comes second. It is the receipt, not the motive. Eric Williams made this argument in Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, writing about the British empire specifically: the plantation economy came first, the racial hierarchy was built to service it. That was eighty years ago. The argument has never been seriously refuted. A BBC panel in 2026 still cannot accommodate it.
Colonial conquest is the crucible. The ranked hierarchy of human worth – the idea that some lives matter more, that some communities are criminal by nature, that some people belong here and others do not – gets formalised and globalised through empire. Britain did not stumble into this history. It organised the largest empire the world had seen and required, at every stage, an ideology that made the people being subjugated something less than the people doing the subjugating. That ideology did not dissolve when the empire ended. It got absorbed into institutions, into culture, into the common sense of a society that has never seriously reckoned with what it built.
Antisemitism does not map onto this schema identically. It has a longer pre-capitalist history, running through religious persecution and medieval exclusion long before the age of colonial expansion. But it functions within the same logic: a ranked hierarchy of human worth, and a scapegoating mechanism that becomes most virulent during periods of ruling-class crisis. When capital needs a visible enemy that is not capital itself, when economic pain needs a human face to absorb the blame, antisemitism has historically been the instrument of choice.
In 2026 Britain it does not come from one place. The far right has always carried it – that is its oldest political home. Some on the left have failed to hold the line between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews, and that failure has been real and damaging. Some within Muslim communities have crossed that line too, and the man charged with the Golders Green attack appears to be one of them. These are not equivalent formations. They do not have the same structural weight or the same historical roots. But they are all present, and refusing to name any of them is its own form of evasion.
What you cannot do, if you are serious about where this comes from, is name those sources while refusing to name the soil they are growing in. For two years, Muslim communities in this country have watched tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza – many of them children, most of them killed with weapons that the British government licensed and supplied. They have watched a US and Israeli assault on Iran prosecuted in their name and everyone else’s, with British bases in the logistics chain. Every institution that was supposed to speak for the people watching those images – parliament, the media, the Labour Party – has either endorsed it, excused it, or looked away. That does not justify the attack in Golders Green. It is not an excuse for antisemitism in any form. But it is the political atmosphere in which some of this hatred is being generated, and pretending otherwise is not seriousness – it is exactly what most of the right wing press have spent days doing.
Nigel Farage went on television after Golders Green and said this was not just an attack on Jewish people, it was bigger, broader, more fundamental – and if Jews are the group currently being targeted, well, who is next. Local elections are four days away. That is a recruitment pitch dressed as solidarity, and Farage is not a credible vehicle for it. The Guardian spent much of last autumn documenting his school years at Dulwich College – more than a dozen contemporaries on record, including a Jewish pupil whose grandparents had fled Nazi Germany, describing sustained antisemitic targeting. Farage denied it. He did not sue. Worth being clear about what the “who is next” move is and who benefits from it.
Laura Dodsworth, writing in The Free Mind, went further. “I have never once thought about stabbing a Jew in the face at the Lidl checkout,” she wrote, presenting this as a refutation of Millward’s argument. It is not. It is a substitution. Replace the structural question – what conditions produce racial hatred and keep it available across centuries – with a single demographic threat, and the analysis disappears. What remains is Dodsworth’s actual argument: ban the hate marches, crack down on extremist mosques, stop the boats. The Golders Green attack as the entry point for remigration politics dressed as concern for Jewish safety. Jews as the canary, Muslims as the carbon monoxide. Howie reposted it.
Josh Howie’s summary went like this: “This is incredible.” “Who is killing Jews?” “Food prices.” That is not a criticism – it is a demolition job performed in bad faith. Millward did not say food prices are killing Jews. She said economic precarity generates the conditions for scapegoating, and that political narratives then direct that scapegoating at specific communities. Howie collapsed that into an absurdity and posted it on X, a platform that has become one of the primary distribution networks for antisemitic content since Elon Musk took ownership and systematically dismantled its moderation infrastructure. Howie works for GB News, which has platformed Restore Britain and its ethnonationalist politics, hosted figures connected to the remigration agenda, and provided the media infrastructure through which the far right has normalised ideas that would have been unpublishable a decade ago. The combination is worth sitting with: a Jewish commentator, on an antisemitism-hospitable platform, working for a channel that amplifies ethnonationalism, mocking a politician for failing to explain where racial hatred comes from. The irony.
Which brings us back to Millward. She was not wrong. She named economic precarity. She named the scapegoating mechanism. She named the political narratives that direct blame onto communities rather than onto the systems producing the misery. What she did not do was go one level deeper – did not say that the mechanism has a history, that it was built for purposes that were never innocent, that the institutions reproducing it include the government that called an emergency COBR meeting about antisemitism while refusing to account for what British foreign policy has done to the political atmosphere it operates in.
She could not say that in ninety seconds on a BBC panel. The format does not permit it. The question, from that man, in that setting, was not asked to generate understanding. It was asked to generate a clip. Harris got his clip. He called it magnificent.
By the morning, Lee Kern was calling Millward a Nazi accomplice and a foot soldier in the war against Jews, on a platform he might want to examine more closely before lecturing anyone about hatred. That is where the ecosystem ends up. Harris called it magnificent.
The answer to racial hatred will not be found in the hot takes on X, where the ecosystem runs from “magnificent” to Nazi accomplice in the space of a morning. Millward was reaching for it. She just was not going to be allowed to get there.
Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.
At our May Day/Wellingborough Diggers Festival last night we had Alexei Sayle. He made exactly the same point about the growing links between Zionists and Israel and the far right, particularly with people like Tommy nine names and some in the Jewish establishment. Quite bizarre, but has a certain logic if you define your politics around support for Israel or discrediting the progressive left through allegations of "antisemitism".
Just as you say, she could not cover the whole of the history in that particular brief programme.