UK's far-tight riots foretell a painful reckoning

By Adrian Wooldridge

Britain is recovering from a weekend of protests, riots and right-wing thuggery. Having enjoyed a month-long honeymoon in which he visited the Paris Olympics, hobnobbed with global leaders and announced an ambitious agenda, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now trying to reassert not just public order but public confidence, delivering an address to the nation on Sunday and chairing an emergency Cobra meeting on Monday.

The scale of the rioting was shocking. In Rotherham, a crowd tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers. In Liverpool, rioters burned down a children’s library. In Middlesbrough, hooligans roamed through residential neighborhoods, breaking windows.

Mosques were attacked, shops looted, cars set on fire. Balaclava-wearing thugs swathed themselves in Union flags or flags of Saint George, turned street furniture into makeshift weapons, and shouted, “we want our country back”.

The unrest began in Southport on July 29 when a man killed three young girls and injured several others at a Taylor Swift dance party, and angry protesters afterward hijacked a local vigil.

Protests then spread rapidly — mostly in the north but also reaching some southern cities such as Portsmouth — propelled by false rumors on the internet that the perpetrator of the stabbings was a Muslim refugee (he is, in fact, the British-born son of parents from Rwanda) and exploited by far-right activists who are always spoiling for a fight.

Starmer has moved quickly to reassure minorities that they are safe and to warn “right-wing thugs” that they will be punished with the full force of the law. More than 400 were arrested over the weekend, and police will now use photographic evidence from body cameras and security footage to arrest hundreds more.

The Prime Minister brings unique expertise to all this, having been the director of public prosecutions during the last big riots in Britain in 2011, when the courts sat for 24 hours a day.

But this time around, the state is more seriously stretched. In many places, the police were badly outnumbered by protesters: In Rotherham, for example, the police line temporarily broke, and rioters invaded the hotel. The prisons are full to overflowing and the courts clogged.

If the riots die down, as seems likely, the government will be able to muddle through, albeit with the system under stress; if the riots continue, the capacity of the British state to perform its most basic duty will be severely tested.

Social media clearly bears some blame for fanning the flames of discontent. Elon Musk has not only allowed irresponsible people (including Russian-front organizations) to roam relatively freely on Twitter/X. He personally contributed to the conflagration by tweeting on Sunday that “civil war is inevitable”.

Far-right politicians have stirred the pot as well. Laurence Fox, a former actor and leader of the Reclaim Party, tweeted that “for decades British girls have been raped by immigrant barbarians” — a post that has been viewed more than 3 million times.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, made inflammatory comments from Cyprus, where he is currently sunning himself. Many of the most hardcore protesters are thought to have links to the English Defence League, an organisation that Robinson founded in 2009 and that has since adopted different names and identities.

Police are worried by the size of the largely peaceful, if distasteful, protests that Robinson has succeeded in organizing in London over the past month before Southport but also by the fact that the organization seems to be putting down deep roots across the north and midlands.

Nigel Farage played his usual game of voicing the concerns of the rioters without actually endorsing them, suggesting that the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 had left the impression of “two-tier policing.”

This time, he may be in danger of being burnt by the fire that he likes to play with: Priti Patel, a right-wing Tory and former home secretary, went out of her way to condemn his “two-tier” remark.

There is a possibility that Farage’s Party, Reform, will suffer the same fate as Germany’s AfD, which saw its popularity plummet after it was revealed that its leaders had met in private to discuss mass deportations.

What about the deeper causes of the riots? Traditionally, it’s the left that raises the question of the “social causes” of popular protests and then struggles to rebut the right-wing assertion that trying to explain criminal behavior is tantamount to justifying it.

This time it’s the other way round: Starmer and his home secretary, Yvette Cooper, have insisted that there is no excuse for thuggery. So far, they’ve limited the job of explaining it to looking at the role of social media in spreading contagions.

This sort of argument is as counterproductive when it comes from the left as if it comes from the right.

There is clearly a hardcore of thugs who are committed to breaking the law either because they are far-right wing ideologues (some had swastika tattoos and made Hitler salutes) or because they like violence or a mixture of the two.

There are also a number of young people who were looking for entertainment on the school holidays.

But the protesters also included average people who feel that the British state has failed them. They also have some legitimate questions to ask: Why does immigration keep going up when successive governments have promised to reduce it? Why do refugees keep arriving in boats only to be housed in hotels?

And why has the “levelling up” agenda that the last government promised not produced an improvement in opportunities in the north? It is counterproductive to lump such people in with far-right thugs or to dismiss their worries as nothing more than the product of extremist propaganda rather than an expression of real angst about the state of the nation.

Sometimes these complaints can be addressed with facts. The police were obliged to use riot shields in Rotherham not because they are applying “double standards” but because the protesters were trying to burn down a hotel.

In the year ending March 2023, the police carried out 24.5 stop-and-searches for every 1,000 Black people compared with 5.9 for every 1,000 Whites, hardly a sign that they have imbibed BLM ideology.

But, more generally, the complaints need to be addressed by reforming institutions and improving public policy. Less than half the British now have confidence in their local police forces, down from 63 per cent ten years ago.

The continuing flow of asylum seekers across the channel is straining national resources as well as people’s patience. Riots will undoubtedly recur if the government can’t reduce the flow of refugees and speed up the process for dealing with them.

Though some people have called for Parliament to be recalled, this would be a pointless gesture, as Britain needs swift action, executed by ministers, rather than more talk.

It’s also up to Starmer to do more to address the sense of hopelessness in many working-class communities, particularly in the north, which feel marginalised by economic and social change and then ignored by the British state. Let’s be tough on riots, by all means, but also let’s be tough on their causes.