An unprecedented wave of rioting has broken out in Britain for a long time, beginning in Southport, where three girls were killed and several others seriously injured at a dance class. The riots have since spread from the initial attack on a mosque in Southport to targets as diverse as a police station in Sunderland, a library in Liverpool and a Shoezone branch in Hull. Soon their political protests against mass immigration evolved into violence across the UK.
When 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, born in Southport on 29 July to Rwandan parents, brutally murdered three little girls and injured six others, the initial assessment was that it was an ‘outburst of violence’. However, as many people, manipulated by social media, joined the riot, the violence escalated further and at the same time distracted from its purpose.
Britain’s fledgling Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, cited the far right as the main threat facing the country, describing them as ‘violent thugs’. These statements gave unexpected ammunition to those who claim that the white working class is being discriminated against. However, despite all this, some analysts’ characterisation of this wave of violence as a “civil war” should be seen as a rather far-fetched interpretation.
An examination of where the riots started and spread reveals neighbourhoods that have changed drastically in recent years due to economic decline and social losses, where shops have been boarded up and houses demolished, and where local politics have become more heated as a result, so characterising the riots as a group of people galvanised by social media posts may be at least as far-fetched as the definition of ‘civil war’.
Britons’ digital rights and freedom of expression under threat
The government is determined to pursue not only those who took part in these demonstrations, but also those who are suspected of inciting, supporting or even posting videos of violence on social media. The government went even further, announcing that courts would operate 24/7 and bail would be refused in advance to all but those under the age of 18. The posts of social media users allegedly inciting the incidents were viewed an average of 54.3 million times a day. Prime Minister Starmer was then forced to declare that social media is ‘not an area exempt from the law’.
Opponents of the ruling Labour Party accuse Prime Minister Starmer of still being a prosecutor. They are not entirely wrong, given that Starmer is working to tighten controls on social media using powers in the Online Safety Act. Recently, the European Union has also weighed in with a new censorship threat against X. European Commissioner Thierry Breton suggested that live-streamed riot footage could even breach the EU’s Digital Services Act. This Communications Act criminalises sending offensive jokes on social media, even in private group chats.
YouGov, an internet-based market research and polling company headquartered in the UK and operating globally, shows in its latest opinion polls that Britons condemn these protests (only 8% sympathise with the rioters), seven in ten Britons see immigration policy in recent years as a major contributing factor to the violence, and six in ten sympathise with peaceful anti-immigrant protests. Regular opinion polls show that the vast majority of Britons want much lower immigration.
Another serious issue in the opinion polls is not only that the vast majority of Britons want immigration to be significantly reduced, but also that immigration is perceived as one of the most important problems facing the country at the moment. In opinion polls conducted on 5-6 August on ‘the most important issues facing the country’, 76% of Conservative voters cited immigration as the most important issue, as did 90% of Reform voters and 51% of all voters. Even in the midst of economic turmoil and the collapse of the health service, immigration is apparently the most striking result for all voters today as the most important issue facing the country.
Starmer, previously one of the most senior prosecutors in the UK, led a swift legal response to the riots that broke out after the shooting of a black man by police in North London in 2011, and worked hard to bring those responsible to justice. He decided on a similar process for these violent demonstrations, and so far there have been hundreds of arrests of demonstrators aged between 16 and 69, dozens of rioters charged and sentenced to prison terms ranging from a few months to three years.
However, there has also been a public backlash against these demonstrations. In cities such as Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, people took to the streets and organised protests against the demonstrators, who were described as far-right.
For Starmer, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and other Labour figures, the violence and its causes are largely rooted in far-right racism and anti-immigrant bigotry. But in some of the areas where the most intense rioting is taking place, there is no immigration problem.
The most important issue fuelling the social reaction is the British state’s failure to take any concrete action, other than to act as a ‘referee’, rather than intervene, in an era of great demography that is shaking the entire international order to its foundations. This is because, despite the heterogeneity of the participants in the uprising, ‘I want my country back’ has been the slogan chanted by most of them and the central claim frequently voiced by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. Although the political elites and the media have tried to portray the participants as an angry, nihilistic, white working class, nihilistic, white working class who have distanced themselves from the liberal elites and feel betrayed by globalisation, and who are channeling their despair into hostility towards mass immigration, the fact that social grievances have no political counterpart should not be underestimated.
It should also be remembered that the UK is not as fragmented and culturally divided a society as France, Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, European countries where nationalist populist movements are on the rise. The violence that erupted across the country from the south-west to the north-east in the days following the horrific murder of three girls and many others injured in a knife attack by a 17-year-old murderer on a children’s dance class on a quiet residential street in Southport on 29 July may have been quelled by the new Prime Minister Starmer using the full force of the state, but the genie may be out of the bottle.
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