In the summer of 2024, the UK erupted in a surge of far-right violence. The explosive protests and riots – which included setting fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers in Manvers – were fuelled by false information spread online, after the murderer of three young girls in Southport on 29 July was wrongly identified as a “Muslim immigrant” by an X account called @EuropeInvasion. The fake news soon spread, with numerous accounts labelling the killer as an asylum seeker who had come to the UK on one of the infamous and widely discussed “small boats”. Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson, the latter of whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, jumped at the opportunity to pour fuel on the fire. Robinson declared that people were “justified in their anger”; Tate urged Britons to “wake up”.

The misinformation, violence and uproar that followed all happened under the guise of masculine protection. The overwhelmingly white male agitators were defending “our” women and girls from a brutal horde of “invaders”, namely men of colour and Muslims. Even the women taking part, the self-dubbed “Pink Ladies”, describe their concerns as being “kept safe from unknown and unchecked foreign nationals”. Ahead of the killer’s identity being made public, Reform UK politician and political commentator Darren Grimes wrote online that “foreign hate preachers” were “importing mental health issues”. The subsequent riots were framed by many on the right as a valid response to an external threat. On X, Elon Musk blamed the riots on “mass migration and open borders”, which are making civil war, in his words, inevitable. Also fantasising about war, but sounding more like an NHS leaflet, Robinson called upon men to form a “dedicated, fit, healthy, ready, British resistance”.

It was of little surprise to those who have been on the receiving end of unchecked aggression to learn that 41% of the men arrested in the 2024 riots had previously been reported to police for domestic violence crimes, including actual and grievous bodily harm, controlling coercive behaviour and stalking. The mental gymnastics required to view these protestors as protective, and their racially selected targets as aggressors, have only become more athletic in the 18 months since.

The summer of 2025 saw another wave of public violence. This was better organised and unfolded on a wider scale, fuelled by the US’s sharp rightward swing and the online juggernauts who support it, from Musk to Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage. Stories of violence perpetrated by men of colour had been cherry-picked from the news and cynically shared to support the racist swell, none so widely as the grooming gangs scandal – a heinous and appallingly policed set of crimes, that have been used by the far right to distract from similar examples perpetuated by white men.

This year’s proudly public display of anti-immigrant rhetoric saw the revival of the deeply contested St George’s Cross, as roundabouts and lampposts were criss-crossed with red and white as part of “Operation Raise the Colours”. The loud expression of what many on the right term “national pride” has been accompanied by a decisive lack of shame in sharing views that would, just a few years ago, have been seen as too risky to reveal so overtly and on such a mass scale. While a racist aspect has always run through the British collective, it has until recently been more obscured, often expressed more covertly within systemic racist structures, through microaggressions, private conversations and the dark corners of the web. Reports from a 2025 protest in Middlesbrough quoted the crowd chanting, “There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack”, while asylum hotels were painted with racist slurs.

Outward racist sentiment is now actively encouraged by mainstream political and public figures, from Farage – who could barely muster the energy to deny claims of frequent racist bullying towards fellow pupils at Dulwich College – to Musk and Robinson. As the Overton Window moves rightward, racist ideals now replace shame with righteousness. The flag is not merely a provocation or a power symbol. It is an icon of the moral high ground. Those painting them on roundabouts and hanging them from lampposts no longer accept being categorised as racists or bigots. They see themselves as concerned members of a community under attack. So, what’s happening in the collective mind to enable both such a strong denial of malicious intent, and such a proud engagement in behaviour that would recently have been viewed as risky?

The Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein suggested that early mental life operates from two key “positions” – in contrast to the foundational Freudian notion of “stages” of development. Klein opened up a new way of organising experience that did not necessitate the act of outgrowing or leaving behind the past, instead suggesting that we can return to past states throughout our lives, even when the decision to do so is ill-advised. The first of the two modes was the paranoid schizoid position, which babies experience up to the age of around six months, and is a position characterised by extremes. The baby, unable to hold together the vast complexities of human relations and life experience, creates a sense of internal control by splitting their experiences into good and bad. Moment by moment, they might feel completely calm or entirely unhappy. Hunger is experienced as a vicious attack; love as a safe embrace. The two rarely come together. The infant responds only to the present. The caregiver, or, in Klein’s usage, the mother, is likewise seen in a simplified form. When hungry, the mother is seen as a withholding and cruel force. When offering comfort, she is briefly perfect. As Klein describes the famous good breast/bad breast concept in her 1946 paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms”, “object-relations exist from the beginning of life, the first object being the mother’s breast which to the child becomes split into good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a severance of love and hate.”

This happens, Klein wrote, to stop the bad from ruining the good. If the baby accepts that the mother can be both loving and withholding at the same time, there is a fear that the bad mother could overrun and spoil the good mother. As part of this process, the baby seeks to project the bad aspects of itself out. They cannot risk their internal bad parts – including the internalised, bad mother – threatening the good. So they push it outwards, onto other objects or people.

Given a good enough holding environment, in the form of a caregiver who is able to withstand the baby’s extreme moods without retaliating or falling apart, the baby should move to the second position – the depressive position. While this position seems a miserable one, it symbolises a more balanced state of feeling and relating. In the depressive position, the child learns that their caregiver and wider community can be both good and bad. They find ways of repairing, understanding that after ruptures or arguments, it is possible to connect again with the “good” caregiver. Skills such as apologising, forgiving and understanding the richness of another person’s internal world are built up. Someone in the depressive position is better able to acknowledge the negative aspects of themselves without fearing that this makes them all bad and retreating into defence or attack. Klein writes that “the synthesis between the loved and hated aspects of the complete object gives rise to feelings of mourning and guilt which imply vital advances in the infant’s emotional and intellectual life.”

However, like many of life’s developmental moments, this move from the paranoid schizoid to the depressive position is not a given. For babies who have an unpredictable or unsafe caregiver, the depressive position might not be attainable. How can we move to a balanced place of repair and subtlety of feeling when our caregiver is a genuine danger to us? Or when their behaviour is so inconsistent that we experience extreme love and terror in one moment after another? It may seem safer to continue functioning in a paranoid schizoid state where we can keep alive the idea of a caregiver who is good and safe, rather than face the reality of an unstable environment that harms us. The middle ground cannot hold.

In times of heightened social and cultural turbulence, paranoid-schizoid functioning dominates the collective mind. As we are currently observing in the UK, a chaotic and cruel external reality of years of austerity and decimated public services – of which the general public remains largely out of control and terrified for the future – has led to an overly simplified moral battle. Rather than hold in mind the complexities of our current position and the apparent futility of positive solutions in face of a powerful ruling class, many have resorted to a position of illusory control, in which a bad group of “others” have been identified and isolated.

The psychoanalyst M. Fakhry Davids has written extensively on the paranoid-schizoid functioning of racism. He lived under apartheid in South Africa and now practices in London. In his 2011 book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference, he writes how “othering” of specific groups increases during times of social fear. In one passage, he homes in on the rapid rise of Islamophobia in New York following the attacks of 11 September 2001. He highlights how this event raised a sense of paranoia in the predominantly white collective mind, with many taking up a polarised paranoid schizoid position in response to an unpredictable and unsettling event. At the time, a blanket projection of badness was cast over Muslim communities, which arguably continues to this day. As he writes, “By successfully targeting citizens like us, going about our daily lives, these events underlined our vulnerability and hence mobilised massive annihilatory anxiety, the response to which was a racist construction in which Muslims or Islam were cast as the enemy.”

Davids further addresses the insidious nature of the paranoid schizoid function, in which an accusation of racism itself is seen as an attack, as the racist individual is unable to accept their own “badness” – so continues to project an attacking intent onto the victim of their racism who dares call them out. He writes that individuals accused of racism will split further, denying and pushing the accusation out onto the person who suggests this. The racist individual not only causes harm in the original act, but doubles down on that harm by rejecting responsibility and projecting their wrongdoing onto others. In doing so, they retain their position of moral superiority and condemn their opponent to the role of an oppressor. Davids uses the example of a civillian accusing a police officer of racism. The police officer’s “denial that anything untoward is going on … casts [the accuser] as the stereotyped, hypersensitive black person with a chip on their shoulder about race”. He continues, “Confronting the assailant directly with what they are doing would get nowhere, eliciting either outright denial or utter incomprehension”. Crucially, Davids places the internal functioning of racism as pre-verbal – a function that shuts down, defends or offends in the face of threat.

The concealment and manipulation of intention behind racist behaviour can be observed at recent protests. While the intimidating and racially driven activities of flag-bearing, rioting and public disorder are plain to see, these behaviours happen under the guise of protecting women. This claim of valiant intent denies what is clear when protestors have been filmed chanting “get your tits out” at nearby women. There has also been a horrifying rise in racially motivated sexual attacks, with two Sikh women in their twenties raped in Oldham and Walsall in 2025, with the rapists informing one victim, “You don’t belong in this country.” In Walsall, the attacker has been charged with religiously aggravated assault. These attacks are not just an obvious conflict with the narrative of protecting women, which acts as a Trojan horse for racists across the country, but were actively emboldened and excused by it. Did the rapists find it easier to deny their own violence, while telling themselves they were enacting a form of revenge or even defence of “their” white women?

Social media has fuelled this flip of victim and perpetrator. The online world is one of the least “holding” environments imaginable, in psychoanalytic terms. An ideal holding environment is boundaried, consistent in its care, and calmly contains rather than escalates the more destructive parts of the individual. Online, there are no boundaries and few checks, and a decisively paranoid-schizoid form of communication is the foundation of its appeal. It is where nuance goes to die, and deeply entrenched, loud opinions win the most attention. This form of communication has become more extreme in recent years thanks to Musk, a chaotic and unpredictable parent if ever there was one. Fearmongering, conspiracy and bullying all belong to the paranoid schizoid position, with individuals able to dig into their beliefs thanks to an algorithm that pushes like-minded accounts together. The paranoid extremes that guide anti-immigration rhetoric and fears of cultural takeovers find a home in the echo chamber of X.

But you don’t have to be on the side of the flag-bearers to find yourself pushed into a paranoid-schizoid state online. During the November 2024 US elections, I noticed my feed splitting into a clear divide between right-wing commentators, and Democratic supporters who claimed that the election was rigged. I was sucked into this division, refreshing the page every few minutes, my heart racing, as I lay in bed scrolling at 4am. Even when I deleted the app for the sake of my own sanity and returned to more balanced news sources, a voice at the back of my mind told me I was missing the real story unfolding on X.

Many of the protesters and flag-raisers narrow entire cultures, religions and races down to base stereotypes. In turn, this is how they themselves are perceived. This summer, I watched the protesters descending on London as a monolithic blob, each one an indistinguishable, terrifying troll that I hated with my entire being. Yet within the estimated 150,000 who protested on London’s streets, there inevitably will have been a range of people, from the proudly fascistic to the misinformed and utterly desperate. How much of my own hatred and violence is projected onto them? Am I driven by a desire to deny racism in myself? Am I splitting myself off from the horde “over there”?

The flag has become a symbol of cultural splitting that can feel maddening to debate. Many of those wrapped in the flag at protests, or spraying the flag onto roundabouts, are also vocal in their expression of racist beliefs. Yet rather than stand completely by these beliefs, they simultaneously frame the flag as an innocent pronouncement of national pride. Flag bearing for their communities to see – and fear – is both presented and denied as an act of intimidation. It is, they claim, the horrified response to the flag that symbolises their own oppression.

To acknowledge outright the intent of intimidation would be to accept a threatening motive and perhaps even an internal badness. This tussle between outward expression of racism and cynical denying is a game of highly calculated risk and gaslighting. There is much in British and global culture that has signified that it is safe to express extreme views. Yet the fine line between how openly people are willing to show their bigotry and how much they want to retain the position of victim is continually toyed with. The safe place of paranoid schizoid splitting is always there to retreat to when racist views or actions are questioned too heavily, allowing indivduals to maintain an illusion of internal goodness even when their aggressive motive is plain for everyone to see.

In 2024, newly elected prime minister Keir Starmer said that he “utterly condemned the far-right thuggery”. Just a year later, he was notably absent as thousands took to London’s streets, with Musk and Robinson speaking to the crowds from big screens. He also fed into the deniability of the flag’s intimidating intent by releasing a video sitting in front of a string of Union Jacks and playing into the cynical argument of harmless national pride. Yvette Cooper, Labour’s secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, declared on BBC Breakfast, “I’ve got St George’s flags, St George’s bunting. I’ve got the Yorkshire Rose bunting as well. I’ve got Union Jack flags and tablecloths. We’ve got the lot.”

Starmer enables paranoid-schizoid splitting to overflow thanks to his lack of containment and direction. This follows over a decade of revolving door care figures in the UK, each prime minister either too flimsy or too corrupt to run the country with any sense of dependable leadership that might enable the emotional and relational complexities of the depressive position. Klein recognised a number of parental traits that help to facilitate this more measured state, which are useful for any government that hopes to encourage a reparative and thoughtful society to emerge. Reliability is crucial, helping the child, or national community, to understand that they will not fall apart and fail in their leadership. Important too, is the ability of the care figure to withstand ambivalence, maintaining a consistent stance whether they are facing the wrath or adoration of their wards. In a political sense, this means a leader who is predictable in their response, not constantly changing their messaging depending upon the prevailing mood.

And perhaps most essential in our current political moment, Klein highlighted the necessity for caregivers to model reparation, creating a space in which to express and feel guilt or shame and find reconnection. These holding behaviours all create a sense of heightened safety in the inner world. While Starmer’s sudden transformation into a good-enough holding figure certainly won’t eradiate racism in the UK, it would be a step. As Klein writes in her 1940 paper “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States”, “if greater security in the inner world is gradually regained, and feelings and inner objects are therefore allowed to come more to life again, re-creative processes can set in and hope return.” Until then, the St George’s Cross remains a visual expression of a nation’s split psyche, the red arms of the cross neatly dividing good from bad; their resurrection in our towns and suburbs is a population flaunting its own internal partitioning. .