Riotous summers seem to occur in Britain with about the same frequency as sunny ones: roughly every decade. Sometimes it’s Afro-Caribbeans protesting (Brixton in 1981), sometimes Asians (Oldham in 2001). The white working classes rioted over the poll tax in 1990 and in Southport this year. The riot in Harehills, Leeds, last month was precipitated by social services removing children from a Roma couple.
Whatever sparks the unrest, what all riots have in common is that they involve mindless destruction. Rioters smash and burn their own communities and opportunists descend, trying to exploit the situation for political ends. Fake news and misinformation abound.
So it is with the current round of riots, which began in Southport last week, sparked by the killing of three girls, and the serious injury of several others, at a dance class. The riots have since spread from an initial attack on a Southport mosque to targets as diverse as a police station in Sunderland, a library in Liverpool and a branch of Shoezone in Hull.
The term ‘far right’ has become seriously debased in recent years. If you opposed illegal migration or the Covid lockdowns or the imposition of low traffic neighbourhoods you might be called ‘far right’. But for once some of these rioters really do seem to deserve the label. At least some of them seem to be motivated by racial ideology, waving banners that say things like ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’.
Starmer has played into the hands of those who claim the white working classes are discriminated against
Even so, to call them ‘far-right riots’ is to over-estimate the level of organisation involved. It didn’t take long for Labour to say it was ‘looking at’ banning the English Defence League, though the EDL no longer really exists, and hasn’t for years. In contrast to many European countries, Britain doesn’t have a far-right political party, or even a far-right movement of any significance. What has happened over the past week is a spontaneous eruption of violence. Opportunistic rabble-rousers of all types have been galvanised by social media. As with most riots, the thuggery has spread.
This makes these riots extremely difficult to tackle from a legislative point of view. There is very little to ban – unless the government wants to stop adults communicating on social media. Even a Humza Yousaf-style hate crime bill would be unable to be used against many of the perpetrators.
Keir Starmer has not yet made any huge and obvious mistakes such as jetting off on holiday in the middle of the crisis. But in singling out the far right as the principal threat facing Britain, and in describing them as violent louts, he has played into the hands of those who claim that the white working classes are discriminated against.
When the Black Lives Matter movement started rioting in the US in 2020 – the most expensive bout of social unrest in US history, to measure by the damage caused – Starmer behaved very differently. He called in the cameras and was photographed taking the knee alongside his deputy, Angela Rayner. He wasn’t condemning rioters then.
His failure to be even-handed now has led to low approval ratings in polls, with less than a third of the public approving of his performance. It has also given credence to Elon Musk’s accusations of ‘two-tier Keir’ – although Musk will inevitably find himself having to answer questions about Twitter’s role in helping spread misinformation at the beginning of the riots. The battle against Russian bots has not yet been won.
This week, though, the Prime Minister has responded strongly with the idea that courts will work through the night to dispense rapid justice – something he had experience with as director of public prosecutions during the 2011 riots. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper tells us that prisons are open and ready to receive the culprits. On Wednesday, a 58-year-old man was jailed for three years.
Yet James Timpson, the prisons minister, is on a mission to reduce the number of people in jail and Starmer has suggested that even perpetrators of knife crime could be imprisoned less often; he wants greater use of electronic tagging and curfews. Are prisons mainly to be receptacles for the far right and not, say, for the men who were filmed fighting with machetes in Southend last week, in a non-riot-related gang incident? If that is an impression Starmer is happy to give, he is not going to help defuse these riots.
If Starmer hasn’t done much to settle the situation, nor has Nigel Farage, which is a wasted opportunity. Farage could once reasonably have claimed to have done more than anyone in Britain to suppress the far right. Until he built up Ukip, the BNP was in the ascendant, winning 6.2 per cent of the vote and two seats in the European parliament in the elections of 2009. Farage provided ordinary people with a non-racist, non-xenophobic outlet for their concerns about migration, and the public flocked to it – leaving racists on the fringe.
But the Reform leader chose to feed the conspiracy theory that the Southport knife killings constituted an Islamist terror attack. ‘I just wonder if the truth is being withheld from us,’ he said. The following day he was on GB News and should have admitted then that he had made a mistake and condemned outright the thugs who had attacked a mosque in Southport the previous evening. But instead of denouncing the rioters, he seemed more interested in defending himself against Brendan Cox, who earlier in the day called him ‘Tommy Robinson in a suit’.
In another post he did at least say ‘I don’t support street violence, I don’t support thuggery’ but added: ‘What you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport is nothing to what could happen over the course of the next few weeks.’ He suggested that the riots had been brought about by concerns over a breakdown in social order, adding: ‘Let’s have proper law and order.’
Why has Farage found it so difficult to condemn the rioters? He has since tried to excuse himself by blaming Andrew Tate for spreading the misinformation, but it doesn’t seem enough. If any public figure has influence over the rioters, it is surely Farage. So why doesn’t he tell people that there is nothing to be gained by damaging their own communities, and that it is idiotic to claim you are standing up for law and order when you’re smashing shop windows?
Some points Farage has made this week are valid. It is true that sometimes police and other authorities have been slow to recognise or admit when an attack has been genuinely motivated by terrorism. The murder of the Conservative MP David Amess was a prime example. Farage is right, too, to criticise the Prime Minister for fixating on the threat posed by the far right and failing to mention some of the other riots and disturbances which have occurred in recent weeks. But unless Farage is prepared to condemn the rioters, he can forget any ambitions of taking the Reform party into the mainstream.
It is easy for governments to panic in the face of a crisis and to dream up new laws so as to feel as if they’ve found a solution – ignoring the obvious point that any violent acts the rioters have perpetrated are already illegal. No, the country is not in a state of civil war, as some have ludicrously suggested. Most neighbourhoods in most of our towns and cities are calm and functioning as normal.
What we are witnessing is one of Britain’s regular outbreaks of thuggery, yet it does have its basis in some genuine grievances. Many marginal towns, especially in the Midlands and north, can quite reasonably complain that they have been left behind by an economy which is increasingly focused on the big cities. The failure to tackle illegal migration really has led to cases where Britain has ended up giving shelter to terrorists and serious criminals.
That is not the case this time, however, and in any case it would not excuse what has happened this week. Nevertheless, the government would be foolish to dismiss the link between social conditions and social unrest – just as the governments of the day would have been foolish to dismiss what lay behind the Brixton and poll tax riots.
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