Mosques attacked, Nazi salutes, hotels housing asylum seekers targeted… A week after the knife attack that killed three girls in Southport, the United Kingdom is facing its worst riots in a decade. The violence broke out in the north-west English town and has spread to several other urban centres after unsubstantiated rumours spread about the religion and origins of the perpetrator.
“We’ve seen Muslim communities targeted… attacks on police and acts of violence accompanied by racist rhetoric. So, no, I won’t hesitate to call it what it is: this is far-right brutality,” denounced Prime Minister Keir Starmer. According to counts made by the British media, more than 400 people have been arrested in the past week. What is the context of this violence? What is the profile of the rioters? Franceinfo interviewed Maud Michaud, lecturer in British civilization at the University of Le Mans.
Franceinfo: On July 4, Labour won an absolute majority in the legislative elections. A month after the vote, the new government is facing serious far-right riots. How can we understand this?
Maud Michaud: The general election marked the end of fourteen years of Conservative rule, but it was a sham victory for Labour. Due to the British electoral system, which is a first-past-the-post system, Labour did indeed win over 400 seats out of 650, but when you look at the breakdown of the votes, you see a very strong rise of the far right. The far-right Reform UK party won five seats in Parliament. That’s not much, but it still represents 4 million votes. By comparison, the Liberal Democrats, the third party in the House of Commons, won 72 seats, but with 3.5 million votes.
This is the first time that a party officially classified as far right has entered the House of Commons, and with a fairly high abstention rate. Reform UK was led by Nigel Farage, a high-profile figure known for his many anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and nationalist statements. He had run for parliament eight times before being elected on 4 July.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has stressed the responsibility of social media.
The riots occurred following a fairly strong online mobilization. The British far right is less represented by traditional parties than by a galaxy of small groups that have managed to reorganize themselves in recent years via social networks. They do not have a strict hierarchy like traditional parties, but they organize themselves from the bottom up, by recruiting individuals online, by organizing events.
“These far-right groups share an anti-immigration ideology, a hatred of Muslims and the defence of a certain white British identity. Their discourse is also marked by the rejection of elites and conspiracy theories.”
Maud Michaud, lecturer in British civilizationto franceinfo
During these riots, the ideas that “Mainstream media is hiding the truth from the British” or “Government not telling the whole story about identity of Southport killer” have been relayed. Thanks to social networks, the extreme right has managed to bring together extreme right groups in the streets, but also “ordinary” citizens, especially men, who follow the activities of these groups on the internet.
What is the English Defence League (EDL), which the government has blamed for the riots?
It is a movement founded in 2009 that has long recruited from the white working class and ultra supporters. It was known for its street protests, often followed by violence, but it no longer formally exists. It remains, however, very active on social networks. Its leader is Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He enjoys a huge popularity on X, is followed by more than 900,000 people. His name is chanted in the riots, alongside slogans like “Enough is enough”.
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Tommy Robinson is known for his Islamophobic and anti-immigration statements. He believes that the government and the media are lying to the public, that Muslims are responsible for all the country’s problems. Because the English Defence League is unstructured, it is also difficult to control. For this reason, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has said she will consider whether the movement should be banned under anti-terrorism laws.
Keir Starmer said the rioters would “regret” taking part in the “disorder”.
We see a Prime Minister, just elected, who is trying to have a firm position on the violence. His party is attacked by the right and the extreme right on its supposed laxity, so he insisted on the fact that the prisons were ready to receive the rioters, that the number of police forces mobilized would increase…
The justice system is also taking part in this firm response. It has released the identity of the main suspect in the hope of breaking the spiral of disinformation. But by showing that he was a young black man born in Cardiff, there has been a backlash. This has benefited the far right, who have used it to question the ethnic composition of the United Kingdom and blame racialized people for insecurity.
Sunderland, Liverpool, Hull… What can be said about the cities where the riots took place?
Most of these are towns in the north of England with an industrial past. In the 1950s and 1960s, they welcomed immigration from former British colonies. From the 1980s, with the liberalization of the economy by Margaret Thatcher, these towns were hit by the economic crisis, unemployment. This situation was wrongly attributed to immigration by right-wing politicians.
Today, these cities remain poor compared to the south of England. The discourse against London’s elites being disconnected from the rest of the country is also very widespread. We can also observe a similarity between the cities where the riots are taking place and those that voted largely for Brexit.
“In these cities, there is a strong resentment among the white working class who feel disadvantaged compared to people from immigrant backgrounds. This feeling will be illustrated in particular by an attachment to the ‘greatness’ of Great Britain, to a nostalgic vision of its identity.”
Maud Michaudto franceinfo
This feeling of downgrading has been compounded by the rise in inflation and the cost of living. We have heard people say that they joined the riots because they could not make ends meet.
What is the role of politicians in this situation?
It’s huge. Immigration has been a central issue in every Conservative election campaign and government over the last two decades. Under Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Suella Braverman spoke very aggressively against immigration and introduced legislation to reduce it sharply. This culminated in the Rwandan refugee deportation bill. The Conservatives made this shift to the right because they were facing competition from Nigel Farage’s pro-Brexit party, Ukip. They also felt that they had to respond to the Brexit vote with very conservative policies. There was an increase in xenophobic and racist acts after Brexit.
These anti-immigration positions of the Conservative Party are not new. In 1968, the speech of the Tory MP Enoch Powell on the “rivers of blood” (“rivers of blood”) embodied this shift. In it, the MP blamed immigrants for the country’s problems and the “loss” of national identity. Although he was expelled from the party for these remarks, Enoch Powell was held up as a role model by Margaret Thatcher ten years later. In the 2000s, the attacks of September 11 and then those in London in 2005 rekindled these racist and xenophobic discourses. In 2011, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron considered that multiculturalism had failed in Great Britain.
Labour, for its part, has been accused of failing to tackle immigration head on. After the Islamist attacks of the 2000s, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair adopted rhetoric that was deemed Islamophobic. He passed controversial laws to allow terrorist suspects to be arrested more quickly, but these measures have been accused of disproportionately targeting Muslims.
Has the UK ever experienced such racist riots in its history?
There were outbreaks of racist riots throughout the 20th century. In 1919, at the end of the First World War, there was violence in the ports of Liverpool and Cardiff. The country was facing high unemployment and dockers blamed workers from the British colonies.
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In 1936, there was the famous Battle of Cable Street in London, in which anti-fascist activists opposed a march organised by the British Union of Fascists, the most important far-right party in Britain in the 1930s. Founded by Oswald Mosley, this organisation also took part in the riots against the black Caribbean population in the Notting Hill district of London in 1958. Oswald Mosley also contributed to the rise in anti-Semitic violence in the country.
“A notorious British fascist figure, Oswald Mosley enjoyed great popularity, even at the highest levels of the British establishment.”
Maud Michaudto franceinfo
After World War II, Britain emerged victorious from the fight against the Nazis, so it was hard to imagine a fascist party triumphing at that time. But in 1981, the Brixton riots in south London against police brutality were a reminder that racial tensions had not disappeared. In 2001, there were major riots in Bradford, in central England, between members of the far-right National Front and people of South Asian origin.
What links do you make between these riots and the country’s colonial history?
The contemporary history of the United Kingdom is crossed by its colonial history. The British far right has always targeted immigrants or descendants of immigrants from former colonies. When we hear the imperial song Rule, Britannia in the riots linked to the Southport attack, this is not insignificant. It shows that these events carry nostalgia for a time when the British Empire was on the roof of the world. The entire demography of the United Kingdom is shaped by this colonial past. But the extreme right opposes this multiculturalism. As the writer Salman Rushdie said, “The problem with the English is that they don’t know their history, because a lot of it happened abroad.”