In the hours before the riot, Nauru’s justice minister, David Adeang, suspended the country’s police commissioner – Australian Federal Police (AFP) officer Richard Britten. People may be surprised to learn that an Australian was leading the police force in Nauru – but over the last decade, the process of warehousing asylum seekers in the small Pacific nation has increased the number of Australian and expatriate officials in key departments within the country’s administration, including finance, policing, utilities and planning.

Five years on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, global capitalism remains mired in its deepest crisis since the Great Depression. This has produced not just economic breakdown but also a crisis of politics, with governments destabilised in their attempts to force austerity onto their citizens. Yet for the Left, which expected to benefit from capitalist crisis, the situation is less than rosy.

This summer has been tough time for anti-fascists and groups like Unite Against Fascism (UAF). After several years in which British far-Right organisations seemed to be in relative decline, that situation has reversed. Electoral success has made racism acceptable once more. The killing of British soldier Lee Rigby outside his barracks in May by two young black British converts to Islam has been used by our opponents against the Left.