Starmer Must Address Immigration Concerns if he Hopes to Restore Peace - By Arthur Willoughby
“Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence.” – Hannah Arendt
Trending now, across social media platforms, are the hashtags #UKCivilWar, #UKRiots, #TwoTierKeir, and #EnoughIsEnough. They have formed the online backbone of the worst public disturbances the UK has seen since the 2011 London riots.
After three girls were killed in a mass stabbing at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport last week, misinformation and deep-seated grievances over immigration have fuelled a week of violence across England and Northern Ireland. Videos have shown mosques attacked, group chants of “who the f**k is Allah?”, and skinheads branded with Nazi tattoos. During one incident in Rotherham, a mob of over 700 people attacked a hotelhousing asylum seekers. The group then attempted to set it alight while people were still minside, injuring over 50 police officers in the process.
From a security perspective, numerous public failings can be called into account. Although the Southport stabbing sparked an immediate and impassioned public interest, the suspect’s age meant it took three days for him to be named as Axel Rudakubana. During that period, political accounts spread wild and unverified rumours about his identity online. One claimed he was an asylum seeker named “Ali Al-Shakati” who arrived in Britain by boat in 2023. More generally, there were at least 27 million impressions for posts stating or speculating that he was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner.
The power of online content in fuelling this crisis cannot be overstated. 37% of British citizens now use social media as their main news outlet, and the delay in releasing details around Rudakubana’s identity inspired many to bypass mainstream media sources. However, even after Reuters and other news agencies fact checked a series of viral posts and showed conclusively that the attacker had been born in the UK – the riots continued, and even amplified, highlighting the fact that the Southport incident was merely a trigger for long-standing resentments over immigration to become violent.
One of the key sources of this unrest – beyond fears over illegal boat crossings and unvetted migrants – is the idea of Two-Tier Policing. Since a statue of Winston Churchill was vandalised during the BLM protests in 2020, the notion of differential treatment by police of left and right-wing groups has become a huge talking point among the British political right.Recently, a high-profile exchange between Keir Starmer and Elon Musk brought this to a
climax as Musk accused the prime minister of only protecting minority groups, even after videos showed a mob of armed Muslim men surrounding a pub in Birmingham “looking for white right-wingers to attack”.
The official narrative around these riots is that they have been driven by the far-right. While this is certainly true, and there is countless evidence of reprehensible and racist attacks by white nationalists online, that narrative ignores the counter-protests that have done much to accelerate the violence.
In particular, videos showing the so-called “Muslim Defence League” (a group created to counter the far-right English Defence League) brandishing machetes and knives, or chanting “Allahu Akbar” have gone viral. The images are frankly disturbing, and indicate the genuine potential for ethno-religious clashes across the UK, but they also make obvious to the average person that the violence has not only been fuelled by the indigenous population. While misinformation and right-wing sentiment on social media has effectively incited the riots, videos of minority-led violence have assured its continuation – thereby increasing the distrust in an establishment seen as ignoring the crimes of the immigrant population.
So far, the response of the Starmer cabinet to the riots appears to have done little to address the root causes of tensions. Over 400 have been arrested (with some potentially liable to terrorism charges), 500 prison spaces have been opened up for protestors, and a “standing army” of specialist police officers has been assembled. Perhaps most significantly, the prime minister has pledged to increase the use of live facial recognition technology in policing. Already, it appears to have been effective in convicting a teenager who damaged two police cars while wearing a pink balaclava to hide his identity. Starmer has promised that rioters will “feel the full force of the law”, and he has now increased police powers in order to do so.
The tensions behind the unrest, however, like the viral hashtags suggest, will not be resolved by increased policing measures. One need only to look at the timing of the riots to understand that they have been driven by the sense of impotence of voters concerned by immigration.
The UK has just elected its first labour government in over a decade with a 63% seat share, despite them only receiving 34% of the vote. Reform UK – who made immigration their key campaign policy – holds just 1% of the seats despite being the third-largest party by vote share.The same voters that drove the Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson’s landslide victory, and the rise of Reform, once again feel side-lined and ignored. The violence is a direct reflection of their perceived inability to inspire change through democratic means, and as such, if Starmer does nothing to address concerns around immigration it is hard to see how their anger will be curtailed.
What is needed to confront these riots is thus a dual recognition of the concerns and wrongdoings of protestors along both sides of the aisle. There is no place in the UK for racially motivated attacks against minorities, but the occurrence of such incidents seems to have encouraged young Muslim men to feel justified in partaking in reprehensible violence against right-wingers in retaliation. All those who partake in such ethnic attacks must be punished to the full effect of the law. If Starmer is to restore peace to the UK, he must address the concerns encapsulated by #TwoTierKeir on at least some level.
At least for now, the riots look set to continue. The government must address its causes, however, if it hopes to do anything to address the long-term political landscape of the UK. As long as concerns around immigration are left untouched, the right-wing mob behind the riots will only grow stronger.
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