Immigration | “The British model works less well than people say”

Despite an apparent return to calm, tensions remained high in the United Kingdom on Tuesday, following the anti-immigration riots that shook the country. The Press talks with political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation and specialist in the far right.

Six nights of racist riots in several cities. Migrant centres attacked, mosques stormed, hundreds of arrests. Would you say the British far right is more active than ever?

For several decades, in Great Britain, we have had regular tensions related to the issue of immigration that have arisen. It is important to remember that, as early as the end of the 1960s, a famous Conservative MP, named Enoch Powell, warned that one day, in the United Kingdom, the situation would be that of an ethnic civil war. There is a degree of exaggeration. But the British model, which is based on a fairly broad acceptance of communitarianism, works less well than is said.

In which way ?

People live together, but in a tense situation. And when a particularly horrible murder occurs, like the one in Southport a week ago [lors duquel trois petites filles ont été tuées]immediately, it is a pretext for confrontation. Remember in the fall of 2023, there was an attack targeting children in a daycare center in Dublin, Ireland. Within the hour, we saw several hundred people start attacking people of foreign origin, because the attacker was of Algerian origin.

The English Defence League, a far-right Islamophobic organisation, is being blamed for last week’s riots. What do you think?

The English Defence League no longer exists with the same force as it did in the 2000s. It has been partly replaced by social media, which has been the main force behind these protests. These are people who have the same ideology in their opposition to Islam and immigration, but the groups are mainly formed from social media and there are a lot of very young people… The riots started with someone who started a fake news saying that the murderer was a migrant who arrived by boat via the Channel, information that was later denied. With horrific attacks like the one in Southport, and the amplification of fake news on social networks, we must expect occasional violent mobilisations of this kind, where the state and the police are accused of protecting immigrants rather than the “natives”.

What is the link between the English Defense League and soccer culture?

In the 2010s, the English Defense League managed to synthesize the culture of hooliganism with the culture of a white working class that was very hostile to immigration and Islam. This hostility was exacerbated by the number of attacks that the country had experienced and the fact that there was a nebula of Islamists in Great Britain who had been free for 20 years to spread their propaganda, in what the British called “Londonistan”. It should be noted that in addition to far-right demonstrations, there were also demonstrations by Islamists who sought to thwart the far right. It’s more complicated than it seems. We really have a situation that is quite tense. There is even, at the moment, a major political controversy in the United Kingdom over whether Islamophobia should be criminalized. The Conservatives tend to say no. The Labour Party [au pouvoir] is divided.

Nigel Farage’s openly anti-migrant Reform UK party won five seats and four million votes in the last election. What role can it play in this crisis?

What Farage is trying to do is to stay within the bounds of decency, by weakly condemning the acts of violence of the extreme right, while hoping to pocket the political gains of the situation. This is also forcing the leaders of the Conservative Party, which has just been defeated, to react very strongly. Because they sense that there is competition developing on their right…