It was never likely that Sir Keir Starmer would enjoy much of a honeymoon after winning July’s general election in a Labour landslide. But not even the most dire of forecasts could have predicted the grisly events that have transpired over the past few weeks.
First, on 29 July there was a horrific mass stabbing in the seaside town of Southport, near Liverpool in England’s northwest. Three young girls were killed in an attack at a Taylor Swift dance class on a residential street.
Then came the vicious reprisals. Before the suspect’s identity was confirmed, far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists had spread disinformation, saying the suspect was a Muslim recently arrived in the UK to claim asylum. As it turned out, the suspect was neither a migrant nor a Muslim. But the facts were irrelevant to the rioters, many of whom were seeking to enact their own mob justice or simply exploit the chaos in order to loot.
They used public horror at the knife attack to whip up tension between communities, stoke anger at immigration and spread Islamophobic sentiment.
Anti-immigrant violence
The first riot erupted in Southport on 30 July after a peaceful vigil for the girls. Extremists used social media to organise a march to a nearby mosque. More than 50 officers were injured as rioters threw bricks and bottles and torched a police van. The violence quickly spread to Hartlepool, Manchester, Aldershot, and even the home of the prime minister on Downing Street in London.
More than 100 arrests were made in London alone, with disorder escalating over the weekend in northern towns such as Rotherham, Middlesbrough and Sunderland.
In the past two weeks, England has experienced an explosion of far-right violence unseen for decades. Towns and cities have been besieged by masked mobs chanting anti-immigrant slogans. Hotels housing asylum-seekers and mosques have been attacked during clashes with police. More than 420 arrests have been made.
Blaming foreigners
Britain’s society is often described as broken. The events of the past few weeks, coming in the wake of a tired election campaign, would seem to confirm it.
Despite Sir Keir and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper labelling the rioters as a “thuggish minority”, the scale of the unrest reveals a broader issue. While most Britons have positive attitudes towards immigration – in some studies, amongst the most positive anywhere in Europe – the anti-immigrant sentiment is far from isolated.
This is not new. Such tendencies to blame “foreigners" have been common in the UK for decades, going back to Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech. But such sentiments moved from the fringe to the mainstream in that ground zero of modern Western politics – 2016.
It was the Brexit referendum that brought questions on immigration to the forefront. With Nigel Farage the embodiment of such polemics, a vote to “take back control” of Britain’s borders was, at least in part, an act of rebellion against immigration. Now, much of the far-right frustration is due to those empty promises of Brexit. It has not stopped immigration and, in the minds of a few, the crimes that immigrants commit.
In the post-Brexit political chaos and drift, these opinions have only been reinforced. Studies show that the last Tory government’s anti-migrant rhetoric “fed" the far right, with spikes in hostility whenever ministers spoke negatively about refugees.
While it is too facile to argue that the last government is responsible for the riots, there can be little doubt that their rhetoric and policies (such as attempting to illegally deport asylum seekers to Rwanda) in many instances validated suspicions that the problems within modern Britain are not due to failures of their own government, but rather a consequence of immigrants.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of these riots, with universal application, is this: what can seem like harmless debate, defended vociferously by supposed proponents of "free speech", can end up normalising a set of odious opinions based on dubious assertions of reality. These can then erupt into the carnage that has been witnessed across the UK. Festering resentment, even if held by a minority, can quickly metastasize and spill over into mass violence.
Calm restored, tensions remain
Thankfully, the rapid arrests have deterred the assailants and restored a sense of order to the streets of England. Hundreds of culprits have been convicted and sentenced. Threatened further protests have not materialised.
However, the fractures in British society are clear. Sir Keir himself has come in for widespread criticism, including from Elon Musk on X, that his government is using double standards in policing. Citing questionable sources, they have accused the police of using harsher methods on the “British" rioters than on any “Muslim" troublemakers. The moniker Two-Tier Keir has swiftly made the rounds on social media.
It is self-evident that the only way the UK will be able to restore some sense of social cohesion is for its economy to grow inclusively, and not merely for a privileged elite.
Angry groups who feel they have been left behind need to start feeling that the country is working for them, not against them. As the FT reports, it is not a coincidence that seven out of 10 of the most deprived areas in the UK saw riots this past fortnight.
However, that will take time. More immediately, it is the responsibility of governments and all conscientious citizens, in the UK and elsewhere, to desist from inflaming tensions on social media and in the streets.
Britain’s broken society needs time to heal. DM