Racist mobs continued their rampage across the UK this weekend, throwing bricks, setting fires, smashing windows, threatening mosques and attacking hotels housing asylum seekers.
The fascist street mobs, disproportionately made up of young, white men, have targeted black people and Muslims, chanting anti-immigrant slogans and adopting much of the same language used in the US by neo-Nazi protesters at the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The explosion of far-right violence against asylum seekers and Muslims came as fascists spread a frenzy of disinformation on social media following a mass stabbing by a teenager from Cardiff, Wales, who was neither Muslim nor an asylum seeker.
The stabbing occurred last Monday and was committed by a 17-year-old armed with a knife in the English city of Southport. When he was stopped by police, three girls in a yoga-dance and yoga class were fatally wounded, several other children were in critical condition and two adults who tried to intervene were also seriously injured. It was a truly horrific event, reminiscent of the waves of mass shootings that have plagued the US in recent years.
But then the already dire situation suddenly took a turn for the worse. Within minutes of the killings, rumours began circulating online that the attacker was a Muslim or an undocumented immigrant, or both. And in quick succession, far-right mobs descended first on the mourning town of Southport, and within days on central London and several other cities, including Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Hull, Nottingham and Belfast in Northern Ireland. Over the following week, they attacked mosques, hotels housing asylum seekers and then the police. The violent attacks have now spread to more than a dozen cities, with hundreds of people arrested and the government so concerned that Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, is reportedly considering introducing emergency legislation to try to reinstate public order in a rapidly metastasizing situation, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer, himself a former public prosecutor, has warned racist mobs that the full force of the law will be used against them. Earlier today, Starmer and Cooper attended a COBRA meeting – COBRA being the committee used to bring together key government and national security actors during national emergencies – and promised to unleash a “standing army” of specialist officers against the right-wing mob.
But it will take more than just riot police to defuse a situation that has spiraled out of control, in large part because of the extraordinary speed with which misinformation now circulates on social media. It will also take a concerted effort to hold social media companies accountable for the lies spread on their sites, and it will take a serious effort by the courts and other institutions to combat this misinformation in real time. Late last week, the judge presiding over the case of the 17-year-old who was arrested attempted to do just that: in an effort to defuse the social media hype surrounding the Southport killings, he allowed the media to reveal the teenager’s name and background. His name, it turns out, is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, to parents who were of Rwandan origin: he is not an undocumented immigrant, he is not an asylum seeker, he is not Muslim.
If Rudakubana were white, I suspect the discourse across the UK would certainly be more focused on providing better mental health and social service interventions for people who are at risk of harming themselves or others. I suspect more people would be talking and writing about how we are all interconnected, and how when we neglect the wellbeing of one person and the provision of vital early intervention services, we risk knock-on effects that can ultimately cause catastrophic harm – as has proven to be the case in Southport.
Instead, Britain’s homegrown fascists opportunistically used these deaths to rally support for their racist drive to bar immigrants from the UK and terrorise many of those already in the country. As a result, an unfathomable tragedy that should have united communities in mourning was exploited by violent protesters – heirs to the right-wing football hooligans of the 1980s and 1990s, who engaged in bloody battles for territory and reputation – attempting to burn down mosques and asylum hotels.
This fascist rhetoric did not emerge out of nowhere: for years, the Conservative government has employed inflammatory rhetoric against asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. They have made “stop the boats” a political rallying cry and spent enormous amounts of political capital trying to implement a deportation policy under which many asylum seekers would be summarily deported to Rwanda. Anti-immigrant bigotry fueled support for Brexit in 2016, and in the years since, anti-immigrant rhetoric has fueled a narrow-minded vision of English nationalism and a hardline version of Tory orthodoxy.
In last month’s parliamentary election, the headline story was Labour’s victory; the secondary story – which may, in the long run, prove more significant – was the rise of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party, which won almost half the Conservative vote with its support for an immigration freeze and its rhetoric about immigrants causing cultural decline. For the first time, the Reform Party ended up with elected members of Parliament – five of them. More significantly, it received 14% support, more than 4 million votes, and came second in almost 100 parliamentary constituencies, the vast majority of them in seats that Labour won.
The Labour Party’s victory masks the fact that, in much of the country, the 2024 election catapulted Reform into the mainstream. in fact opposition party, and this has triggered an internal reckoning within the Conservative Party that is seeing a significant portion of the party moving increasingly to the right and largely embracing the rhetoric of the Reform Party. (While most Conservatives did not support the protesters this week, at least one senior Conservative he did came out with a statement that seemed to at least give comfort to the far right, arguing that the riots were a “symptom” of mass opposition to migration and the government’s failure to reduce migration levels in the years following Brexit.)
Now a member of Parliament in the UK, Farage has used his new platform to continue to incite racial hatred, much as the infamous politician Enoch Powell did in the late 1960s when he warned of “rivers of blood” on British streets as a result of mass immigration. Meanwhile, online followers of the anti-immigration paramilitary organiser Tommy Robinson, whose English Defence League has engaged in violence against immigrants and people of colour for years, have used the horrors of Southport to bring far-right protesters onto the streets.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was deplatformed by Twitter in 2018 for promoting violence and spreading conspiracy theories. Last year, however, Elon Musk brought him back online. Since then, his ability to mobilize far-right crowds has only grown: In late July, he orchestrated a demonstration in central London that drew more than 20,000 flag-waving followers to Trafalgar Square.
Anti-racism organizers in the UK, as well as the British government, have argued that last week’s riots were facilitated by social media companies’ inability — or disinterest — to control Robinson and his followers. Hope Not Hate referred to a “blizzard of misinformation” in the hours after the Southport killings. The result was disastrous: violent far-right riots convulsed the British Isles. But it would be wrong to simply lay the blame for this unrest at the feet of Elon Musk. Yes, social media titans are extremely irresponsible for amplifying the toxic messages of people like Robinson. But the culture of intolerance towards migrants in the UK has been building for a long time, and many politicians have stoked anti-immigrant bigotry as a way to score cheap political points.
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