What’s Really Behind the Recent Race Riots in the UK?

A police van on fire during the July 30th riots in Southport. Photo by StreetMic LiveStream, CC BY 3.0

by Charles Irwell

“Everyone scared of blacks, everyone scared of Puerto Ricans, ain’t nothing more horrifying than a bunch of poor white people. That’s the scariest shit in the world because they’re capable of anything… They will blame black people for everything!”

                                                                                          – Chris Rock

The past few weeks have been, to put it mildly, abysmal for an Englishman. For the first time in a generation, race riots tarnished our streets. 

In one of his final articles before his death in 2011, Christopher Hitchens remarked that the riots that summer – sparked by the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of armed police, leading to unrest in London before spreading to Birmingham and Manchester, at the time an seeming unending orgy of destruction – was nothing new at all. Remarking on the general anarchy on the cobbles of Dickens’ London, he remarked “No one was crueller to the English than the English.” I am also reminded of Hillary Mantel’s description of the English, put into the mind of Thomas Cromwell, that they, “will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed whenever they get off their own island.”

I do not wish, however, to blow off the disgrace of the past fortnight as simply Im Westen Nicht Neues. Rather, the symptoms, actors and aftermath need to be taken into account, as to do so is to resist fascism and ignorance.

Firstly, a disclaimer. I will not be going into the details of the crime which led to this foolishness in any depth. To quote Hitchens again, the murders “involved no struggle, no sacrifice, no principle. They were random and pointless.” Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, a 17-year-old from Cardiff, Wales, entered a dance class in Southport, Merseyside with a knife, killing three little girls and wounding almost a dozen others. He was apprehended later that day, and is facing trial.

Here’s where everything goes even further downhill.

In the hours after the murder, Rudakubana’s name was not mentioned in the mainstream press. He is not a legal adult, and can be subject to legal protections unless the reporting restrictions are lifted. However, the identity of the attacker was immediately speculated on, and rumours began to pop up and are widely circulated on social media – the killer was an asylum seeker, the killer was a Muslim and so on.

[Before we continue, it is important to highlight the loaded terminology surrounding this discourse. ‘Asylum seeker’ is often used interchangeably with ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘immigrant’ in the British tabloid press, and these words are used in the modern lexicon as such by the right wing. While the term ‘Muslim’ is just as loaded in the United States when mentioned in a political context, it hits even harder in the UK, as a great many of those citizens of South Asian and sub-Saharan African descent are Muslim. In short, these are catch-all smears, which are often applied to all black and brown people by the far-right.]

Speaking of which, the evening after the horrendous events in Southport, the town gathered for a vigil. The northwest of England is one of the most diverse places in the UK, and a great many of the community gathered to show support. However, whipped up by disinformation, which spread at alarming speed on Telegram, Whatsapp and Twitter (more on this later), buses and trains of self-styled ‘protesters’ began arriving and flooded the local pubs. Outside a mosque on St Luke’s Road, the riots began. In the days following, other towns – Rotherham, Hull, Middlesbrough, Liverpool, London, Manchester among others – had similar disorder.

As with the murders which sparked this bullshit, I will not give the details much attention, as they are of a sameness – the trashiest of white trash gather around mosques or hotels containing asylum seekers, often drunk, and confront either riot police or counter-protesters (In Rotherham, protesters attempted to burn the hotel down). The non-idea being that England is ‘lost’ to these people, these murderers, these vermin, which the government apparently invites in. Most concerning were the riots in Middlesbrough, where flag-draped cretins actually began stopping cars to check the ethnicity of those driving. If you wish to watch footage on YouTube, then do your own legwork. I will not link that footage.

As the grandson of two men who had lived through the menace of fascism – one as a boy, dodging Luftwaffe bombing raids, and the other spending four years in Nazi captivity after the defeat at Crete – my view of these hordes is understandably dim. I am also a Muslim convert and married with a child to a woman of Bangladeshi descent. This is the first time in her adult life she has been scared to leave the house. The charitable group we volunteer with to feed the homeless have cancelled successive feeds for fear of becoming the target of far-right violence. This is notwithstanding the groundswell of anti-fascist counter protests, which, while enormous and largely peaceful, cannot definitely make the ogres go away. To highlight their idiocy, one should look at the riots occurring in Belfast, Northern Ireland where Protestant Ulster Unionists and Catholic Irish Republicans march side by side, Union Jack and Tricolour flying, vowing to ‘protect borders’ that they do not agree on or recognise, and which they have been killing each other over for centuries. I wish I was fucking joking.

Anti-imigrant protest in Stoke-on-Trent on August 3rd. Photo by LumixTrax, CC BY 3.0

However, I am also from the same community that the rioters themselves come from. White British working class, and often at the very bloody bottom. I was privy to the conversations they had in pubs when they thought they were the only people in the room, and witnessed the contempt they had for the system, education and work they were born into. If I was in a heartless mood, I would simply accuse them, like any fanatics, of indulging in both self-loathing and self-pity. Whinging about circumstances you had every opportunity to change is not a good look, and we did not grow up expecting to be on the other end of racial profiling by police, or housing officers, or doctors, all of which are everyday realities for my fellow citizens of Black and Asian heritage. We went to the same schools, studied the same subjects, went to the same doctors, and generally had the world on our doorstep. Slipping into ignorance and bigotry and fear appears to be a wilful choice. While it is, one must also look at the map I attached earlier, and you will notice something.

With the exception of London, Aldershot, Weymouth and Plymouth, and the aforementioned Belfast, the majority of the protests centre on the North of England. These are locations which were the historic home of the Labour Party, trade unions and the industrial working class. They are also lagging behind developmentally with London and the southeast. In every facet – income, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, housing, employment and all the rest – these areas feel left behind. The satellite towns – those surrounding major cities – are where this discontent thrives. One only need look at which shops were looted – phone shops, vape shops, Greggs bakery, Lush cosmetics and Shoezone (an establishment providing the most pitiable with discount, no brand footwear) – to see the immediate concerns of those partaking in the violence. Most shocking of all was the torched library in Merseyside. Although not a conscious hark-back to 1930s Germany, it can’t help but freeze a thinking person’s blood. 

Recently, such communities proved fertile ground for the Reform Party. The head of this party – Brexit harbinger and chinless school prefect Nigel Farage – has embarked on his own inflammatory, morally lily-livered round of ‘Just Asking Questions’, while denying his own remarks on British Muslims having any bearing on race riots happening in constituencies he expected to win. Due to the British system of First Past the Post voting, despite the millions who voted, Reform came away with five Members of Parliament to Labour’s 422. Such a feeling of establishment contempt, or the system working against your supposed sacrosanct democratic right, can only make one madder, I presume. Some of the keener correspondents will no doubt wonder why, in a situation where the term “far-right” is brought up time and again, that I do not mention such outfits as the English Defence League, Patriotic Alternative or National Action, much less than hateful characters like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (I refuse to use his patronising nom de guerre). That’s because, as much as it would give one a target to aim at, the majority of those partaking in the disorder simply have no allegiance to any overarching cause of hate, so much as they possess generalised hatred and dissatisfaction. 

Anti-racism counter-protesters gather in Lancaster. Photo by LimeSpiked CC BY 2.0 

The disorder will also prove some fairly terrifying credentials about the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. Seen by many as a doddering bureaucrat – comedian Frankie Boyle remarking that “If he ran at a flock of pigeons, they would not move” – Starmer is easily one of the most ruthless characters in Parliament today. Not even a month ago, he suspended seven MPs for voting with legislation proposed by another party. 

How this relates to the riots is simple: he may be the face of a centre left party which can seem innocuous at best, but before his entry into politics, he was a lawyer who took on McDonald’s near single-handedly before becoming a prosecutor. He was the Director of Public Prosecutions in 2011, where he oversaw 24-hour courts after the riots, aiming to sentence as many of those involved as possible. When he appears on television and says that the rioters will “live to regret their actions”, then believe it. 

This has the added dimension of charges which attract controversy. Particularly, charges of online incitement can now be pursued, so that the rioters now have their free speech martyrs. Here, one must discuss the toxic figures of Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, the latter alleging that thousands of Britons are facing jail “for thought crime” and the former claiming England is on the brink “of civil war”. Manifestly ridiculous as it is for Musk to claim as such, he doubles down on this by asking why Starmer only made mention of protecting mosques and Sikh temples, asking why he didn’t wish to protect “all communities”. 

Such smug casualness reminds one of the “All Lives Matter” rhetoric, but frankly this is lightweight. If one remembers that Musk is an Apartheid-profiteering white Afrikaaner, then such hysterics are rather tame considering what his fellows continue to say and do. Such rants and raving also dispels any myths around why Threads saw an explosion in users over the past weekend, and calls grow for Twitter to be tightly regulated in the UK. Anyone who values freedom of speech ought to be appalled by such harsh measures, but the march to punish those involved seems unstoppable at this minute. 

It is a double edged sword to live in societies which value freedom of expression, of ideas, of press and speech. It means that ideas, however repugnant, never truly die. Like any disease, extreme ideologies can be contained and managed, rather than killed off completely. Our arsenal in our fight against such evil, such bigotry and such ignorance is plentiful – education, freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, the fight for rights at home and abroad, and community action. However, one should never become complacent. 

Hatred is a fungus, and if conditions are right, it will only spread.