“Big up Southampton!”” trills a voice on the livestream as a small band of brave patriots skips down St Denys Road past the big Sainsbury’s. As they approach the gathered throng, a spontaneous chant of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” goes up, accompanied by a salute of raised beer cans and plastic pint glasses. Indeed, almost everyone on the protest seems to have brought a refreshing beverage of some kind. Nigel Farage has sounded the alarm, and the patriots of southern England have responded with pure cold ales. One of the most striking elements about last week’s riots in Southampton, watching back the many hours of citizen footage, was just what a brilliant time everyone seemed to be having commemorating the murder of an 18-year-old student. The booze. The laughter. The football songs. The music pumping out of a portable speaker daubed with a “Stop The Boats” sticker. The counter-cultural kink of reclaiming the knee, screaming “I can’t breathe” in the service of making Britain intolerant again. As if this were the birth of a new, groundbreaking social movement. “Hey, what if we did the George Floyd protests … but for the whites this time?” Even the anger had a licentious, thrill-seeking, lads-on-tour quality to it. Someone is prising a brick from a garden wall to use as a projectile. Someone hurls a recycling bin at the police cordon, and everyone cheers. “I’ve been stabbed!” one guy in the crowd shouts. “You can’t have been stabbed, you’re white!” another responds, to peals of laughter from the assembled mourners. Perhaps you consider this........

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