In the past week, the United Kingdom has seen widespread civil unrest, from protests and marches to looting, arson, racist attacks and violence against police. The nominal trigger was a tragic event in the small town of Southport in the northwest of England on July 29, when a 17-year-old went on a rampage with a knife, killing three children, aged 6, 7 and 9, who had been at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Two adults and eight more children were seriously injured.
Rumors quickly circulated online, falsely claiming that the murderer was a Muslim asylum-seeker (he is from a devout Christian background, born in Britain to parents who were born in Rwanda). A fictitious Arabic-sounding name was even circulated. Existing social media networks not only amplified this narrative but also began to mobilize people by fueling the anger. A vigil for the victims in Southport itself was hijacked when a mob gathered outside a mosque, which soon descended into violence against police and property. The following day saw a group of volunteers from around the city, including members of the mosque and also non-Muslims, come together to rebuild the mosque’s wall and clear up the mess. Gatherings began proliferating across many towns in England and Northern Ireland — both far-right rallies and counter-demonstrations insisting that these people did not represent the U.K.
This has all come barely a month after a decisive general election, held on July 4, in which the Labour Party achieved a huge majority and the incumbent Conservative Party suffered the worst defeat in its history after 14 years in power. Just one month before the U.K. went to the polls, the European Union also saw elections, in which many countries returned far-right candidates, including Austria, Germany and France. Italy and Hungary currently have far-right governments in power. And so when the U.K.’s election results came in, there was a sense of relief, even smugness: The country had dodged the far-right bullet, despite the loud voices coming from the anti-immigration Reform UK party during the run-up to the election.
Yet, one month later, we find that over a dozen towns and cities have experienced violence at the hands of the far right, specifically aimed at ethnic minorities. Videos are circulating of individuals being dragged from their cars or encircled by mobs. Businesses run by people of color have been listed as targets. Hotels where asylum-seekers are believed to be housed have been attacked. Often, the violence has spilled over into more mindless destruction and looting. Police attempting to keep the peace have been attacked and sometimes hospitalized.
To date, there have been over 400 arrests, with 500 prison places cleared for the ongoing, expedited court proceedings against those found guilty. Politicians have promised severe consequences for anyone involved, which is not a surprise to anyone familiar with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s history. The last major riots in the U.K. were in London in 2011, when he was director of public prosecutions. The sentencing for anyone found looting or damaging property during those riots was punitive.
Starmer is not only in a very different position 13 years on, but the political landscape of the whole country has fundamentally changed. The Brexit referendum held in 2016 is just the most high-profile event from a long period during which immigration was pushed up the agenda at the expense of other issues while policy consistently failed to deliver on its promises. Figures on the right in the U.K. have long attempted to fuel, manage and exploit public concern over immigration as it suited them, with media voices, far-right activists and political organizations, and factions with the Conservative Party (and to a far smaller degree Labour) regarding it as an issue that represented not just a problem but an opportunity to gain a hearing and to differentiate themselves from opponents.
While Labour under Starmer can punish rioters and gain plaudits for restoring order, altering this national conversation and overturning its legacy will be a far greater challenge. Claims that numbers of migrants in general, of asylum-seekers, or of those crossing the English Channel in small boats would be swiftly brought down if the political will was present have been made loudly and repeatedly, drumming home a message that will take time and concerted effort to change. In the meantime, while the far right appear to be sacrificing some credibility, they are banking on these issues remaining both high on the agenda and politically intractable.
The Conservatives went into the 2010 general election with the stated aim of reducing net immigration from roughly 200,000 to “tens of thousands.” To the surprise of many, Theresa May then made this policy her own and retained it for the entirety of her six-year tenure as home secretary, and again during her subsequent period as prime minister, despite the target remaining stubbornly out of reach. In the process, she was responsible for the notorious “hostile environment” that aimed to deter immigration and make life as difficult as possible for those without a full and documented legal right to reside in the U.K., a policy that contributed to the Windrush scandal that saw citizens of the Commonwealth who had long been in the country unable to meet new requirements to prove their right to remain.
During these years, the politics of immigration were shaped by a sense of high-profile failure, as May used the issue to burnish her credentials despite being unable to deliver her central goal. The issue played an obvious role in the Brexit campaign, and in May’s subsequent decision to entirely jettison freedom of movement between the U.K. and the EU. Yet little public discussion was ever given to the reasons why immigration targets might be unreachable, including the country’s need for workers, its obligations under international law and its successful higher education sector.
The home secretaries who followed May, including Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, likewise sought to use the office to present themselves as hard-liners while arguably neglecting to either explain how overall numbers could be significantly reduced or ensure adequate processing of asylum-seekers. This ineffectual performance of severity culminated in the debacle of the U.K.’s policy to deport immigrants to Rwanda, a costly exercise that achieved little and whose legal challenges led many in the party to call for the country to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. While the political focus for the past few years has been on stopping small boats of refugees crossing the channel, net immigration figures have also remained high, not least because of the U.K.’s need for health and care workers, its active recruitment of foreign students and its official migration routes from Hong Kong and Ukraine. As well as being actively damaging to the economy, these plans were also impossible to achieve, and the repeated missed targets ensured that the issue remained in the public eye, while the high emotions swirling around the issue only increased. Opportunists were quick to capitalize on, and thereby further, the anger.
Tommy Robinson is chief among these figures. Born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, he co-founded the anti-immigrant English Defence League in 2009, and in 2016 claimed that Europe was experiencing a “military invasion” by refugees coming from Muslim countries. Robinson was due to appear in court, for allegedly breaking an injunction to stop spreading lies about a Syrian refugee, but has surfaced on social media, egging on the rioters from his five-star hotel in Cyprus. Banned from Twitter in 2018 for violating its rules on “hateful conduct,” Robinson was recently reinstated by Elon Musk, and a quick scan through his feed shows he’s still using the same grievances and themes to maintain his profile. One tweet is about immigrants filling hotels, which became targets for mob violence, for example in Hull. Women and children are at risk from “imports,” various tweets claim; one center of violence has been Rotherham, linked to a notorious scandal of a sexual exploitation ring formed of British men from Pakistani backgrounds. Part of the scandal was that many opportunities were missed to stop this violence against children, leading to conspiracy theories about how Muslims are protected by the ruling class. Robinson is still making the same claims: Muslim gangs are not stopped from violence, Muslims are not stopped from espousing hate — but he is.
Not all grievances from his followers are specifically about Islam. Some themes are more generically anti-immigration, blaming incomers for the collapse in public services: From housing to health provision, the problems are blamed not on the cuts the Conservatives have made throughout their 14 years in power but on the immigrants adding pressure to the system.
This is an old trope in the U.K.’s political discourse but it has been given a recent boost. A new addition to Parliament this year was Reform UK, led by the notoriously divisive figure Nigel Farage, founder of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), whose sole raison d’etre was leaving the EU. After the Brexit referendum achieved this goal in 2016, Farage retired from politics, saying he’d attained his aims. Yet he couldn’t keep away. He led the newly formed Brexit Party to a resounding victory during the 2019 European elections and, as campaigning got underway this summer, just weeks before the general election, he announced his decision to run for Parliament as head of Reform (the Brexit Party’s successor). In total, Reform won five seats, and Farage became a parliamentarian for the first time.
The U.K.’s first-past-the-post voting system makes it hard for many smaller parties to gain a foothold and rewards those (like nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales) with regional bases of support. It’s this barrier that previously kept Farage out of Westminster. Yet there are reasons to think that the 2024 election heralded some change in what’s politically possible. Alongside the five Reform lawmakers, the Green Party went from one seat to four and a further four independent candidates won seats on the back of dissatisfaction with the U.K. government’s handling of the war in Gaza. Hiding beneath these figures is a swath of seats across the north of England and the midlands where Reform is now the second party behind Labour, and a large number of seats across London and cities including Bristol, Manchester and Sheffield where the second party is now the Greens. Electoral geography has revealed how the country’s politics could continue to splinter if the Conservatives fail to significantly recover and Labour begins to lose support. The votes for Reform did not translate into many seats, but they gave an indication of the strength of feeling around the issues it stands for, which are now being expressed on the streets.
Responses to the riots and attacks have been telling. Farage himself has chosen a path that keeps Reform clearly apart from the mainstream. Although he has condemned the violence, he has simultaneously shown sympathy for its motivations. In an official statement, he claimed that, “The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of mass, uncontrolled immigration.” He also compared the current violence with the Black Lives Matter protests, claiming that the “soft policing” of those events led to a “sense of injustice.” Reform’s talking points — that there is a “two-tier” system of policing, a phrase that has been widely picked up and circulated, and that the underlying problem is a lack of societal cohesion caused by high immigration levels — have been clearly laid out and are now being pushed by its members of Parliament and their sympathizers, including Elon Musk.
Even those on the right of the Conservative Party who have helped to foster the anti-immigration atmosphere have condemned these remarks. Patel was home secretary from 2019 to 2022, and therefore in charge during the Black Lives Matter protests. Although she regards Farage as a “friend,” she described his comments on the riots as “deeply misleading.” As ever, reactions to these events are being used as positioning statements with long-term implications. Given his new foothold in Parliament, Farage might have been expected to move toward the center, signaling a willingness to operate within the political system and bolstering the plausibility of Reform as a long-term replacement for the Conservatives. Instead, he has chosen to stick to his hard-line sentiments and force others to respond to Reform’s stance. Others on the right have taken the opportunity to distance themselves from his rhetoric, but all will be thinking of the implications. A Conservative leadership election is ongoing, in which the final two candidates will be voted on by the rank-and-file membership, who have previously been reliably drawn to the candidate furthest to the right.
So far, however, Conservative politicians seem more likely to support a strong law-and-order response from Labour rather than use the opportunity to tack to the right or strongly attack the government. And while the violence is ongoing and there are reports that further unrest is expected, including new targets such as immigration lawyers, the end result will probably be that Starmer gains in stature for punishing those responsible and reinforcing the majority’s moral outrage at the violence and solidarity with the U.K.’s Muslim communities. For Farage and Reform, however, the gamble is that the U.K. will slowly move the same way many European countries are moving, and that by the next election, in five years, they will appear as the party of common sense to more voters.
The riots are far from over. Axel Rudakubana, the accused in the Southport killings, turns 18 today, and with another court appearance in October before the trial starts in January, there are potential flashpoints coming. The stage is set for a hot August of disorder, with the government looking to display its credentials as the real party of law and order, activists seeking to sow division and rally support for extreme ideas, and those like Reform and Farage seeking to do a delicate dance between giving succor to far-right tropes and superficially condemning the inevitable violence, all the while with an eye on the prospect of a far-right future for the U.K.
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