number
* 400 people arrested after six days of riots in parts of England and Northern Ireland
* More than 6,000 police officers have been deployed across the country to deal with the expected further unrest.
Alex Whiteman
LONDON: Riots have engulfed England and Northern Ireland over the past week amid perceived misinformation and government mistakes, but critics are divided over the real cause beyond allegations of “far-right violence”.
Since 2011, when the police shooting of a black man sparked days of rioting across the country, the UK has not seen such violence, with mobs breaking into shops, burning cars, attacking mosques and even setting fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.
Everyone from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to the world's second-richest man Elon Musk, who has compared the events in the UK to a civil war, have spoken out about what caused the riots and how they might affect the country.
Starmer, responding to an attempted arson attack on the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, on Sunday, where asylum seekers are being held while they await a decision on their status, said the rioters would face “the full force of the law”.
“I assure you that you will regret participating in this chaos, either directly or by those who perpetrated it online and then fled,” he told a news conference. “This is not a protest, it is a systematic act of violence, and it has no place on the streets or online.”
The damage to communities and the number of police officers injured was so severe that Crown Prosecution Service Director Stephen Parkinson said some of those arrested could face terrorism charges.
Speaking to the BBC, Parkinson said: “If you organise a group to plan an event for the purpose of promoting an ideology and planning really serious acts of terrorism, then we would consider that to be a terrorist offence.”
“Yes, we are willing to consider cases involving terrorism, and I know of at least one case where that is happening,”
Sources interviewed by Arab News dismissed allegations that the violence was little more than “gang violence”, but warned that the need to examine the underlying social issues should not be overlooked.
A source who works in education and asked not to be identified said the commotion arose during an election campaign, where a rational issue was used to try to blame the country's problems on the expected negative impacts of massive international migration.
“When you add in the misinformation about the identity of the girl’s killer, who is the cause of the riots, what you see is a chicken coming back to its roost,” the source said.
An attack on a children's dance and yoga workshop at a community centre in Southport, north of Liverpool, on July 29 left three girls dead and 10 others injured, eight of them children, including one believed to be a 17-year-old.
Due to the suspect’s age, police were required by law to conceal his identity, creating an unintended loophole. False information quickly spread on social media claiming the suspect was a Muslim who had entered the country illegally.
The spread of misinformation is not helped by online influencers who regularly post anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messages to push their political agendas.
Zouhir Al-Shimale, head of research at Valent Projects, a UK company that uses artificial intelligence to combat disinformation, said pinpointing the root cause of the riots can be difficult, given the mix of deliberate manipulation by those advocating an anti-immigrant agenda and widespread bot activity.
“Since August 3, accounts and networks linked to Reform UK have been very active on X and Facebook, claiming to be enforcing a two-tiered law,” Al-Shimale told Arab News, referring to the right-wing political party that won the recent general election.
“They’ve poured a lot of resources into this to test out certain narratives and narratives and see what works, but they’re basically suggesting that the police are letting Muslim thugs riot while they target ‘white nationalists’ who are just angry about the ‘state of their country.’”
The proposals for a two-tiered police powers focus on the police’s “unfair handling” of “left-wing pro-Palestine” marches that have taken place weekly in London since October 7, and earlier Black Lives Matter rallies.
On the scale of the riots alone, the comparison is unfair. A recent pro-Palestine march that saw up to 10,000 people injured three police officers. In contrast, riots in Rotherham on Sunday, which saw around 750 people, left at least a dozen police officers injured.
YouGov polling data shows that opposition to the riots is widespread across all sectors, with the Reform UK Party the only group showing clear levels of support, at 21 per cent.
Even this group is still in a clear minority, with three-quarters (76 per cent) of Reform voters opposed to the riots, while supporters of other groups are much smaller, with just 9 per cent of Conservatives, 3 per cent of Labour and 1 per cent of Liberal Democrats approving of the riots.
However, there has been sympathy for the ideology that fuels the riots and for far-right groups such as the English Defence League, which are believed to be behind the violence.
Indeed, legal migration to the UK has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, while illegal arrivals across the English Channel have continued to persist, despite previous government pledges to “stop these boats”.
The latest estimates on migration from the Office for National Statistics show that around 1.2 million people will move to the UK in 2023, while 532,000 people will move, resulting in a net migration figure of 685,000.
In 2023, around 29,000 people were detected crossing the English Channel in small boats, down from 46,000 in 2022, although the overall number of people arriving in small boats has increased significantly since 2018.
According to the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory, the share of people born overseas in the UK has been rising steadily over the past two decades, rising from 9 per cent of the employed workforce in the first quarter of 2004 (2.6 million people) to 21 per cent in the first quarter of 2024 (6.8 million people).
Men who immigrate are found to be more likely to be in employment than men born in the UK, but among women, immigrants are less likely to be in employment.
While refugees are not allowed to work, and are not given a home or tangible benefits while their application is being considered, some people in the UK fear that the needs of newcomers are being prioritised over their own, while the ethnic makeup of their communities is changing around them.
Even so, voter behavior in the recent UK general election suggests that immigration is not a top issue for most people. “A much better (though still imperfect) indicator is national elections,” wrote sociologist and right-wing commentator Noah Carle in a recent article for Aporia magazine.
“The UK held its election just a few weeks ago, and the results offer little reason to conclude that ‘the British people’ are ‘fed up’ with mass immigration. Fifty-six per cent of white voters voted for left-wing or progressive parties, and 26 per cent voted for the Conservatives (the de facto pro-immigration party). Only 16 per cent supported the Reform Party.
“In fact, the percentage of whites who support left-wing or progressive parties has increased since 2019. I speak as someone who holds broadly limited rights views.”
“Now, you might say the situation has changed since the election, because of the Leeds riots, the Southport stabbing and other incidents, but it hasn’t really changed at all.
“Before the last election, white Britons were the victims of Islamist terrorism, swindlers, BLM riots, ‘decolonization’ movements, accusations of ‘white privilege’ and much more, yet they still overwhelmingly voted for pro-immigration parties.”
Although polls show that most Britons want to reduce immigration, they appear to be more concerned with issues such as the cost of living, housing and the NHS.
Many critics have blamed social media platforms for fueling the violence, while misinformed rioters have tried to replicate the unrest in other parts of the country and transmit the information to their smartphones.
However, part of the blame may also lie with the prevailing political rhetoric in the UK today.
Paul Reilly, a senior lecturer in communication, media and democracy at the University of Glasgow, said one reason behind this could be that social media platforms are not taking responsibility for allowing misinformation to spread, but he also pointed to other groups.
“I would argue that political commentators, influencers and politicians play a key role in this by creating a toxic political discourse on immigration,” Reilly told Arab News.
“Social media platforms can do a better job of removing hate speech and misinformation, but they are not treated as publishers and are not held accountable for the content they produce. I expect the debate about temporarily shutting down online platforms during political unrest to be an achievable policy.”
However, Reilly also challenged Southport MP Patrick Hurley's claim that the violence was just “lies and propaganda” spread on social media.
Instead, citing his research into the role of social media in political unrest in Northern Ireland, he said that while online platforms were used to share rumours and misinformation that fueled tensions, such online activity tended to “predate the riots”.
Writing in The Conversation, he said: “If political leaders are serious about avoiding further violence, they should start by adjusting their language.”
However, he added, “it is appropriate for politicians to blame online platforms, rather than acknowledge their role in stoking toxic political rhetoric about refugee status seekers and migration.”
A legal researcher, who asked not to be named, told Arab News that the riots were symptomatic of a failure to address growing wealth inequality, which has created a loophole for misinformation to spread.
“It’s just a replication of what we’ve seen time and time again with cuts to public services, amidst government irresponsibility. People will look for someone to blame,” the person said.
“If there is one bright spark, it is that those cleaning up after the rioters seem to represent a much larger proportion of the communities affected, indicating that for a government that cares, there is still a commitment to building a better tomorrow.”
