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Britain is not in the midst of a civil war, whatever Elon Musk says. The violent riots that have rocked parts of England and Northern Ireland and prompted Nigeria, Australia and India to issue travel warnings are being countered by anti-racist protesters. But this is not a country that is comfortable with itself.
Every ten years or so, summer seems to bring senseless violence and wanton destruction to some of our streets. In 1990 it was the poll tax riots, in 2001 the Oldham riots, in 2011 the riots in London after the police shot a black man, Mark Duggan.
This time, the violence is explicitly about mass migration. Last year, a riot broke out in Dublin when an Algerian migrant stabbed three children and a woman in a primary school. In Southport, in north-west England, when three girls were murdered last month by a 17-year-old, rumours spread like wildfire that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker (in fact he was the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants). The scenes afterwards have been horrific: a police van set on fire and bricks thrown at the local mosque. The disorder has spread to other towns, with frightened shopkeepers boarding up shops and families keeping children at home.
The current scenes should serve as a reminder of what fascism really looks like. In recent years, the term “far right” has been applied nonchalantly to all manner of people, including those opposed to Covid lockdowns. But in the openly racist ideology of Tommy Robinson and his acolytes we see the real far right, the heirs to Oswald Mosley’s rhetoric from the 1930s.
How is it possible that England, supposedly a haven of multiculturalism, is seeing thugs with Nazi tattoos running riot and massing at immigration centres? Partly because social media has made it easier for opportunists like Robinson (and even Russian bots) to foment hatred, but also because our multicultural credentials are not as strong in some parts of the country as we like to believe.
In December 2016, Louise Casey’s one-year review of community cohesion warned that while segregation had been reduced across the population as a whole, ethnic groups in some areas were increasingly divided. Casey, now a Labour member of the House of Lords and close to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, issued a warning that now seems eerily prescient: “failing to talk about all this only leaves the field open for the far right on one side and Islamic extremists on the other” – both groups seeking to prove that Islam and modern Britain are incompatible. In the years since, non-EU immigration has soared.
For a new government, this has been a baptism of fire. Starmer was booed when he went to lay flowers for the victims in Southport. He has taken a hard line, promising swift justice through 24-hour courts – one man has already been jailed for three years. As director of public prosecutions in 2011, Starmer supported the then prime minister David Cameron in quelling the riots that shook London. His challenge today is even greater, with prisons overflowing and a justice system overwhelmed, but his resolve is clear. There is little the government can ban – both the British National Party and the English Defence League appear to be extinct. So he hopes deterrent sentences will work.
When anarchy strikes, it is essential to unequivocally support the police. Many of the riots occur in neglected places that have been in crisis for decades and where trust in the state is frayed. Communities that are not integrated tend to have little trust in public institutions. In Harehills in Leeds two months ago, a riot began when social workers took in Gypsy children. Similarly, white working classes are deeply sensitive to what they see as state prejudice. The shocking failure of police forces and local authorities to protect white girls from abuse by Asian prostitution gangs in places such as Rotherham and Rochdale (for fear of being accused of racism) has helped fuel accusations of “two-tier policing”. In July, the mayor of Greater Manchester had to call for calm after a video showed a police officer brutally attacking a man at Manchester Airport. Viewers were quick to judge him online before subsequent footage showed the man punching officers and knocking them to the ground, while resisting arrest.
So far, the tide seems to have turned. In scenes reminiscent of the great battle of Cable Street, when east Londoners blocked the advance of Mosley’s blackshirts in 1936, anti-racist protesters took to the streets in Bristol, London, Liverpool and Birmingham to counter far-right demonstrations, in some cases outnumbering them. This was a reminder that Britain remains one of the most tolerant societies in the world. But once the current crisis is over, there will be a need to rethink the situation: about desperate poverty in parts of the Midlands and the North; and about how to realise the dream of social cohesion and justice.