British media has been dominated for the past 10 days by coverage of violent disorder.
Across the country, groups of young men have gathered to take on the police. The scale of the violence has been shocking — the worst public unrest since London was plagued by riots in the summer of 2011. But equally shocking has been the suddenness of the eruption.
In a strictly chronological sense, it began in Southport, a seaside town near Liverpool, on July 29. Just before noon, a 17-year-old armed with a knife attacked a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Two young girls, aged six and seven, died at the scene, and a third, aged nine, died the following day. Police and emergency services arrived quickly. The suspect was tasered, disarmed and arrested.
Because the suspect was 17 years old, he came under the reporting restrictions in section 49 of the Children and Young Persons Act, and very few details about him were released at first. The police disclosed only that he was from a village a few miles from Southport, and that he had been born in the Welsh capital, Cardiff.
Misinformation and disinformation rapidly filled that void, and it was soon being reported (incorrectly) on social media that the suspect was a recently arrived Muslim asylum seeker who was known to MI5, the Security Service.
That was enough for some far-right agitators. The following day, a crowd gathered outside Southport Mosque, many of them members of the racist and anti-Muslim English Defence League. Chanting “No surrender!” and “English till I die!”, they quickly clashed violently with police, setting a police van on fire. Whether they believed that the perpetrator of the stabbing was indeed a Muslim or not, it was the opportunity they needed to revive long-standing animosity towards Muslim communities and anger about immigration and its effects in general.
Nigel Farage, leader of the populist, anti-immigration Reform UK party, posted an inflammatory video to social media in which he posed “questions” about the identity and motive of the Southport attacker. He implied strongly that there was an official cover-up and that the stabbings were symptomatic of wider disorder caused by Muslim immigration.
“Was this guy being monitored by the security services…the police say it’s a non-terror incident… I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it is a fair and legitimate question…something is going horribly wrong in our once-beautiful country.”
On July 31, the disorder spread nationally, in some cases coordinated and fueled by social media. There was far-right violence in London, Manchester, Hartlepool, Aldershot and Middlesbrough, in several instances targeting hotels being used to house asylum seekers and would-be immigrants.
Given the extent of the lawlessness, and its obvious trigger in false information about the young man arrested in Southport, a judge decided it was in the public interest for him to be identified, rather than “allowing others who are up to mischief to continue to spread misinformation in a vacuum.”
He was named as Axel Rudakubana. He has an autistic spectrum diagnosis disorder, which had prevented him from leaving his house or communicating with his family, and he was born in Cardiff to parents who had come to the U.K. from Rwanda in 2002. Like 92 percent of Rwandans, they are Christians, and described as heavily involved with their local church.
So it transpired that Rudakubana was not Muslim, not an asylum seeker, nor, so far as anyone can tell, under observation by the security services. While his motive remains unknown, there is no reason to think it is terror-related. But that no longer mattered.
On Aug. 2, there was more rioting in Sunderland, where again a mosque was targeted, and in Liverpool. Over the weekend, there were more clashes in more towns and cities; in South Yorkshire and Staffordshire, hotels that were housing asylum seekers were set on fire.
It is now obvious that the tragic murder of three young girls in Southport, combined with initial inaccurate information about the perpetrator, was merely an excuse seized upon by far-right, racist, anti-Muslim groups to provoke and carry out violent disorder.
Migration has been an issue of considerable public concern for some years now, especially after it leapt from 93,000 in 2020 to 466,000 in 2021, 745,000 in 2022 and 685,000 in 2023. However, the chain of events since July 29 makes it clear that the far-right groups organizing the riots draw a straightforward line from immigration, especially Muslim immigration, to violent crime. Rudakubana’s supposed identity was never more than a useful prompt, so his actual identity has been no brake on their activities.
The government’s response has been somewhat slow but relatively clear. Prime Minister Keir Starmer made public statements on Aug. 1 and Aug. 4. He has supported the police wholeheartedly, and, as a former public prosecutor, vowed to bring the rioters to justice.
Condemnation has been the dominant theme from other political parties. But some have professed perfunctory denunciation and moved quickly to arguing that the violence indicates a broader public unhappiness about immigration, multiculturalism and integration (or its absence).
Farage and others are playing with fire. They may enjoy some public support in raising questions about immigration, but there is little evidence that their ambivalence toward far-right rioters is widely shared.
The police hope that the worst of the disorder is now over. Moving forward, U.K. politicians across the spectrum must be careful that they give no solace to racists and sectarians on the far-right who simply do not like a non-white presence in Britain and equate it without evidence with violent crime and economic decline. The public is watching carefully, and will see clearly those who reveal themselves plainly to be xenophobes, racists and bigots, ready to resort to violence to achieve their ends.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.