Great Britain: Uncertain Seed of Violence

On 29 July 2024, in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool, three girls aged 6, 7 and 9 were stabbed to death and eight other children and two adults were injured. A young man was arrested. He was just under 18, born in Wales from parents who had immigrated from Rwanda. Soon far-right groups rioted, injured police officers, burned vehicles, raided shops, punched a woman wearing a hijab while she was holding her baby, and they damaged Muslim shops, a public library and a hostel where refugees were kept. Wrongly assuming the suspect was a Muslim they also attacked mosques. The riots spread to other parts of the country: in Hull, Liverpool, Leeds, Belfast, and Manchester.

Soon there were numerous arrests of far-right-rioters. Counter-demonstrations, much larger than the riots, soon took place receiving the praise of the police, the mayor of London and even of the generally right-wing Daily Express.

The events, seen live on television, caused widespread consternation and, obviously, extensive condemnation from the main parties, though Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (the far right) blamed the riots on the inability of successive governments to stop immigration. In an opinion poll conducted immediately after the riots to the question of what the most important issues facing the country one-third of Labour voters ranked immigration fourth (34%) after the economy (51%) health (45%) and crime (39%). For conservative voters, however, immigration was by far the most important issue (76%) and, unsurprisingly, for 90% of Reform voters it was the main issue. Only 3 percent of the country is overtly racist (defined as people who think only whites are really British), but 8 percent think that violent demonstrations outside hostel for asylum seekers are acceptable, and 23 percent say the riots are born out of “legitimate concerns.” Three-quarters of those polled think that far-right extremism and racism are serious issues and 53 percent say that the UK is unsafe for Muslims (it was 25 percent in May 2024).

Riots are relatively rare in the United Kingdom, but they do occur. They are usually started by protest from ethnic minority groups against alleged police racism as was the case in London in 1981, 1985, 1995, and in 2011 and in some cities in northern England such as Oldham and Bradford. These became known as “race riots.” Had the participants been white, they would not have been called race riots. In Bolton, where local Muslims organized in their self-defense against a movement that had shown murderous intent, the BBC called the far-right rally a “pro-British march,” while ITV described how “anti-immigration protesters” were met by “300 masked people shouting Allahu Akhbar.”

One riot (in 1990) was directed against a poll tax introduced by the Thatcher government. Other riots have been connected to football. For instance, in Trafalgar Square (London) in 1996 after the England football team was defeated by Germany in the UEFA Euro, some 2,000 hooligans, mostly drunk, pelted police with bottles, smashed shops and overturned cars.

So, the anti-immigrations riots of July and August were relatively new, at least in modern times (the last important one started by white youths, then known as “teddy boys” was in Notting Hill, London, in 1958). The recent riots were largely spontaneous, though they of course attracted the support of extremist groups such as the followers of the virtually defunct English Defense League or the British National Party or neo-Nazi groups, but they were not organized by a single organized center or party that could be banned or sanctioned. They were facilitated by viral online posts and recommendation algorithms on TikTok and X, as well as dedicated Telegram channels. These were the manifestation of the growing Islamophobia peddled by the so-called “influencers” using social media now made more “liberal” by Elon Musk. People believed the fake news on social media because they confirmed their prejudices and justified their fantasies of revenge.

The vilification of immigrants had been amplified in the mainstream by “respectable” politicians of the main political parties. Main of the rioters reflected decades of racism and anti-immigration rhetoric, chanting “Stop the boats” a slogan embraced by the previous prime minister Rishi Sunak, meaning the small boats used by some refugees to make their way across the channel. Keir Starmer tried to outdo him by demanding the accelerated deportation of illegal immigrants, singling out, for some reason, Bangladesh (a country which has virtually no refugees in Britain) while Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary drew a direct link between immigration and rising crime. In fact, soon after the attack, fake news (and a false name) began spreading on Twitter alongside posts alleging that the Southport attacker had recently arrived in the UK via a small boat and that he was Muslim. The day after the attack, the false name had received more than 30,000 posts. Another slogan used by rioters was “we want our country back,” a slogan reiterated often by Nigel Farage but used more than twenty years ago by the “moderate” leader of the Conservative Party William Hague. Further back in time William Whitelaw, Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary, remarked that “it is time to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we used to rule.”

More recently, the then Conservative Home Secretary, Suella Braverman (herself a daughter of immigrants) referred to refugees attempting to enter the country as “an invasion.” Along with the rest of the Conservative Government (those of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak) she promoted the so-called Rwanda scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Declared illegal by the Supreme Court, it was never implemented and it was costly: £700 million. Robert Jenrick, a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party and a senior politician said the police should “immediately arrest” people who shout Allahu Akbar in the open (it means in Arabic “God is great”) – the equivalent of the Christian hallelujah. The Labour Party, even when in opposition, also thundered against “excessive” immigration as if illegal immigration was a serious problem.

Unsurprisingly, The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racism voiced concern over persistent use of racist hate speech by British politicians and influential public figures (UN News, 23 August 2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153496)

Those who tried to explain the recent riots – or justify them – mention poverty, and the increasing disfunction of basic social services, such as the health sector, alleging that they are caused by mass immigration. But the victims of the rioters are, overwhelmingly, not recent immigrants, they often are children of immigrants, and usually live in the same neighborhood and suffer the same predicament as those who attacked them. In other words, white rioters and their black and brown victims belong, on the whole, to the same class, what separates them is the color of their skin. And white rioters were not, as some claimed, “poor” whites though many of those arrested and convicted were people with a criminal record. The Chief of Scotland Yard explained that “Around 70 percent have previous convictions for weapon possession, violence, drugs and other serious offences. Some have football banning orders.”

The popular press has also, long ago, joined in the islamophobia with headlines such as the Daily Telegraph’s “Islamist plotters in schools across the UK,” the Sun asserting that one in five British Muslims are pro-Jihadis and the Daily Mail saying that “Migrants spark housing crisis.” The white rioters were described as “thugs,” angry “deplorable” white people, but as explained by the think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute, the oldest think-tank in world, founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington), if the rioters had been brown or black they would have been described as “terrorists.”

Few politicians have had the courage to praise immigration and to point out the great need for immigrants especially in the health and care where there are more than 130,000 vacancies. Brexit was sold as a way of decreasing immigration but in fact Brexit was followed by a surge of immigration from outside the EU.

Contemporary politicians, not just in Great Britain, do not change anything. They follow a trend, then they encourage it in their desperate pursuit of votes and support. They remind me of the republican politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin who, during the French “revolution” of 1848 declared: “Eh! Je suis leur chef, il fallait bien les suivre.” (Ah well! I am their leader, I had to follow them!)