The trigger for the recent riots in the UK was a tragedy: one of those random distillations of pure horror that are the stuff of our worst nightmares. Imagine the scene. It is a late July morning in Southport, a small, somewhat down-at-heel northern English seaside town. With schools closed for the summer holidays, small girls are enjoying a Taylor Swift–themed dance and yoga workshop in a community studio. Suddenly a hooded teenager arrives, brandishing a kitchen knife. Before anybody can react, he plunges the blade into 11 children and 2 adults. By the time he is stopped, two girls are dead; a third will die in hospital. Ambulances and armed police racing to the scene are joined by panic-stricken parents in the grip of a terror beyond words.
In the aftermath, stunned residents reach out to one another. The street outside the studio is swiftly engulfed by an ocean of flowers, teddy bears, written tributes: tokens by which humans seek to express their grief and fellow feeling. A vigil is organised for the evening of July 30. The ceremony is already taking shape in their minds. A community will come together in candlelight; there will be unity in silence, solidarity, and love.
Then the far right arrives to hijack the town and its tragedy. At precisely the time Southport residents gathered for their vigil, an out-of-town mob mobilised by the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative attacks Southport’s mosque, just a few streets away. A foul chorus of racist chants defiles the night as bricks are hurled, windows smashed, garbage bins ignited, lager cans drained, and the police bloodied. A burning police vehicle amplifies the scene’s hellish, demonic energy. Slowly, reluctantly, the rioters are dispersed; they wander back to the cars that carried them to Southport. When the sun rises, residents will confront the destruction and detritus left behind.
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As if a signal has been sounded, race riots now erupt in scores of urban centres across England and into Northern Ireland. Their names read like a roll call of what politicians and the mainstream media are wont to call “left-behind Britain”: Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Rotherham, Hartlepool, Tamworth, Plymouth, Hull. Here, rioters target mosques; they assail ethnically mixed neighbourhoods; they launch military-style attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers. In Middlesbrough (once a great centre of steel production) in north-east England, they set up apartheid checkpoints to verify the “whiteness” of drivers before letting them pass. Further down the North Sea coast, at the historic port and fishing city of Hull, they loot shops and set fire to local businesses, trapping terrified families inside.
Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle on July 30 in Southport. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Racialised, far-right-driven street violence on this scale has not been seen in Britain for many years. For comparable scenes of organised, neo-fascist thuggery, one has to return to the 1970s, the decade when the avowedly pro-Nazi National Front (NF) made terrorising Asian and Caribbean minorities the centrepiece of its “stop immigration” crusade. Even if not always openly expressed, anti-Semitism was also central to far-right mobilisation at this time. “Among the NF’s inner core,” notes David Rosenberg, a London-based Jewish socialist with rich experience of anti-racist struggle, “the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain through black and Asian immigration was cast as a Jewish plot.”
Today, a similar narrative around the ostensible threat posed by “outside forces” forms the core of the “Great Replacement Theory”, currently the toast of right-wing circles across Europe and North America. This propagates the fiction that the immigrants and refugees, many of whom happen to be Muslim, arriving in Western countries in recent years constitute some form of invasive religio-cultural army bent on destroying Western Christian “civilisation”. A key ingredient of the Islamophobia that has now become a staple of mainstream political and media discourse, in Britain and elsewhere, this trope lends itself to particularly vicious racialised responses, underlining Islamophobia’s current status as the cutting edge of racism.
Islamophobia’s role
The central role played by Islamophobia in this summer’s riots is exemplified by events subsequent to the Southport stabbings. Investigations of online activity in the immediate aftermath of the killings have revealed the speed with which shadowy far-right Internet operators were able to cook up and propagate a fake “Muslim” identity for the killer, including a ludicrously improbable Islamic name. This appears to have played a key role in getting “troops” on the ground for the subsequent rioting.
As such, its credibility should have been shot to pieces by the official revelation, on August 1, of the killer’s actual name and ethnic background. Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, aged 17, was the British-born son of devout Christian parents, originally from Rwanda, who had lived in Cardiff before moving to Southport. In court, it was revealed that Rudakubana had been diagnosed with autism and had been “unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for a period of time”. In short: a non-Muslim, non–asylum seeking, British-born teenager with mental health issues.
“The media and political class is complicit in the far right, racist and Islamophobic violence we’re seeing across our country. ” Zarah SultanaMP
This information was clearly of zero interest to rioters already primed for action.
The far right’s growing targeting of Muslims, along with asylum seekers and “illegal” immigrants, needs to be seen in the context of the “War on Terror” and the West post-9/11. For Western governments, mainstream politicians, and dominant media groups, unquestioning support for the US’ systematic destruction of vast swathes of West Asia over the past two decades has been a sine qua non of “acceptable” practice. In the UK, the US’ number one surrogate and most dependable ally, this means unquestioning support for the US state and its Israeli proxy.
Within the British Establishment, and among those jostling for entry—journalists, TV commentators, politicians with an eye on the greasy pole—there is an agenda to follow, a particular framing of events that must be adhered to at all times. In the context of the current race riots, this includes blanket denial of the reality of Islamophobia and the uses to which it is being put by an assertive far right.
A young Muslim MP, Zarah Sultana, found herself subjected to a chorus of sneering put-downs when she referred to Islamophobia during an interview on a prime-time TV breakfast show in early August. Among those pouring scorn on her use of the term was Ed Balls, a former Labour Minister. Her subsequent social media post summed up the situation with admirable precision: “The media and political class is complicit in the far right, racist and Islamophobic violence we’re seeing across our country.”
Highlights
- A teenager with mental health issues attacks a children’s dance workshop, killing three young girls and shocking the seaside community.
- Out-of-town extremists hijack local grief, unleashing Islamophobic violence that spreads nationwide, powered by misinformation about the attacker’s identity.
- With the new Labour government sidelined, ordinary Britons rally to defend diversity and repudiate racism in their communities.
Normalising the far right
Israel’s systematic obliteration of Gaza has added a combustible new ingredient to this mix. For the British ruling class and its media wing, the mass protests that have brought countless thousands of Palestine supporters on to the streets, week after week for the past 10 months, represent a flouting of the rules, a departure from official narratives that demands delegitimisation and reining in. Hence the coordinated official and media efforts to characterise what are family-friendly, overwhelmingly peaceful, and thoroughly anti-racist events as “hate marches” fuelled by anti-Semitism.
For the far right, meanwhile, the highly visible, defiant presence of tens of thousands of British Muslims on the streets of London and other urban centres constitutes a provocation: an invitation to respond in time-honoured, thuggish fashion. A dress rehearsal of sorts took place in central London on November 11, 2023: Armistice Day. As a giant mobilisation for Palestine, comprising more than half a million protesters, was setting out from Hyde Park Corner, the far right was staging a show of faux patriotism at the Cenotaph, Britain’s pre-eminent war monument.
Flowers and balloons left in tribute to the children who were murdered, outside the community hall in Southport, north-west England, on August 11, 2024. | Photo Credit: Annabel Lee-Ellis/AFP
Leading the action was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a violent criminal who goes by the moniker “Tommy Robinson” in an effort to disguise his Irish origins while creating the illusion of working-class roots. Beyond the resulting violence, much of it directed against the police, and the mass arrests, the most egregious aspect of this event was the open support it received from Suella Braverman, a senior member of Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet, who used social media to incite people to take part.
Such active involvement by mainstream politicians in the propagation and normalisation of far-right views is not confined to the Conservative Party. Fresh in office, Britain’s new Labour government shows every sign of staying on message. In line with a succession of Labour leaders (Jeremy Corbyn was the exception), Keir Starmer, the country’s new Prime Minister, has positioned himself as a stalwart defender of Israel.
His purge of elements sympathetic to Palestine or showing any serious dissent, has been enacted with ruthless efficiency. Having successfully buried the Forde Report, an independent inquiry into Labour Party culture that uncovered the operation of a “hierarchy of racism” and found the party to be an “unwelcoming place for people of colour”, Starmer and team are refusing to use the word “Islamophobia” in any context, opting instead for terms such as “disorder” and “thuggery” to characterise recent scenes of Muslim-targeted violence.
Starmer’s status quo
When it comes to addressing the country’s entrenched poverty, decaying infrastructure, overwhelmed public services, homelessness, and misery following 14 years of austerity—the vast accumulation of human misery and despair that is the inevitable outcome of neoliberalism on steroids—Starmer and team are offering little other than more of the same.
People protesting against racism outside the headquarters of the right-wing Reform UK party in Westminster, London, on August 10. | Photo Credit: Belinda Jiao/Reuters
For Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s folksy Finance Minister given to likening the functioning of the national economy to household and credit card management, there is simply no money in the pot (other than for a surge in defence spending, naturally). This adds up to a new government in an exceptionally weak position to deal with fresh disorder. Starmer himself has placed his money on policing and the mass incarceration of perpetrators; Labour MPs have been directed to stay away from anti-racist mobilisations.
Meanwhile, in scores of former Labour strongholds across the country, the recently formed Reform UK party, led by the oleaginous Nigel Farage, a privately educated former city slicker who likes to cast himself as the “voice of the people”, is already beavering away. In the UK’s recent general election, it gained five parliamentary seats, took 14.3 per cent of the national vote, and ran Labour a close second in 89 “left-behind” constituencies. The future is staring Starmer in the face.
Given these realities, it has been left to ordinary British people to rise to the challenge of beating back the far right. On August 7, with ongoing riots and an Internet swirling with rumours of imminent attacks on fresh targets, including aid centres for asylum seekers and the offices of immigration lawyers, people in their tens of thousands came out to defend their communities, repudiate racism, and restate their commitment to a diverse, multi-ethnic, and harmonious British future. The makings of a new anti-racist movement geared to the specific features of the current situation are under way.
Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.
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