With cars torched and mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers under attack, the unrest that has swept Britain over the past two weeks has posed the first direct challenge to new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
But even if the violence has subsided, at least for now, the shocking scenes of lawlessness have underlined the scale of the task facing his government.
That, analysts say, includes defusing tensions successfully stoked by far-right groups (over immigration and the deterioration of public services), particularly in parts of Britain that have long been in economic decline.
Although opinion polls show the public clearly supports Starmer’s crackdown on violent protesters, “a lot of people who see rioters as thugs want immigration curbed,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham.
Mr Starmer, who has promised to drive down immigration figures, “has to follow through and deliver what he says he is going to do”, Professor Fielding added, noting that it was “no accident” that violence broke out in several economically deprived regions.
Concern about immigration, which eased in Britain after Brexit, is rising again. And with jobs in short supply and health care and other services stretched, migrants become easy targets for the far right. The campaign leading up to last month’s general election sparked a bitter political row over the last government’s plans to send people arriving in Britain in small boats back to Rwanda.
But while about 30,000 people entered the country that way last year, that was just a fraction of those admitted legally minus those who left, a number that reached nearly 750,000 in 2022.
Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think tank, said Starmer must show he can revive neglected areas where right-wingers have found support by boosting jobs and public services.
“It has to meet,” Katwala said, “the needs of those towns and cities, whether it’s Southport or Hartlepool, where people’s main concerns are NHS waiting lists and ‘Can I get a job?’”
Those close to Mr Starmer say he is managing to rein in the disorder, drawing on his experience as chief prosecutor in 2011 when riots broke out in London and he pushed for those responsible to be tried, sentenced and jailed quickly to deter others.
“He has detailed knowledge of how to do this, and he understands how to prosecute and convict quickly, and he does it in a visible way that sends a message to anyone thinking about taking part in one of these riots,” said Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former policy director.
But ensuring that such violence does not happen again is more difficult, he said.
“We’ve had the far right with us in good economic times and bad economic times,” said Ainsley, who now works in Britain for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
“But it is much harder for them to have any kind of influence when the economy is improving,” he added. “That means people’s living standards are rising and people start to feel better off and part of a system that works, and that is not the case in Britain today.”
Ms Ainsley highlighted the role of social media in spreading misinformation and escalating tensions, and warned against directly linking the unrest to immigration. She noted that as well as extremists, some of the rioters may be looters and others opportunists.
He added that it is “wrong to assume that all people involved in these riots are politically motivated by immigration.”
But other analysts point to the context of the unrest, which comes after years of broken promises to reduce immigration and a contentious row over the last government’s failed attempt to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.
They were a particular target of recent anti-immigrant riots, including in Rotherham, England, where a hotel housing some asylum seekers was attacked on August 4, highlighting the severity of the unrest.
The Rwanda plan, launched in 2022 by former prime minister Boris Johnson, was adopted as a flagship policy by Rishi Sunak, who arrived in Downing Street that same year. The courts ruled against the proposal and, despite months of political manoeuvring, no asylum seekers were sent to Africa under the plan. After taking office, Starmer quickly scrapped the initiative.
But Katwala said that by promising to “stop the boats”, Sunak had drawn attention to the issue, sending “very strong messages” about the degree of control he would exert over national borders without delivering on any. The result, Katwala said, was to “fuel the level of concern about the issue and completely fail on all fronts”.
By global standards, the scale of small boat arrivals is relatively modest and “the apparent lack of control is a much bigger problem than the number of people arriving by that route,” Katwala said.
While Starmer may try to lower the political temperature, his practical options for curbing Channel crossings are limited. He plans to crack down on people-smuggling gangs, but unless Britain strikes a new migration deal with France, recent experience suggests that one measure alone is unlikely to solve the problem.
One measure the government is seeking to take is to speed up the process of processing asylum applications in order to reduce the number of potential refugees housed in publicly funded hotels, a source of grievance for anti-immigrant protesters (asylum seekers are often housed in less affluent areas where hotel costs are lower, making them a particular target of recent unrest).
The fact that many more people have been allowed into the country legally has created another problem that has been weaponised by the far right and presents Starmer with another major challenge.
Successive Conservative governments have promised but failed to reduce annual net legal immigration to less than 100,000, and control of the country’s borders was a key issue in a 2016 referendum in which Britons voted for Brexit.
Still, since Brexit, legal immigration has tripled, retreating only slightly from its 2022 peak, the highest on record.
Those numbers were inflated by programs to take in people from Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, which enjoyed broad public support. But Britain also relies heavily on foreign workers to fill jobs in health care and other sectors, and immigration is a driver of economic growth, so reducing it is difficult.
“There is broad support for all the immigration that is driving up such high numbers,” Katwala said, noting that most people welcomed the Ukrainians and were happy to see foreign workers filling vacancies in British hospitals, “but there is also concern about the scale of the numbers.”
Before losing last month’s general election, Sunak tightened immigration rules, restricting the right of some legal migrants to bring family members to Britain. Those changes are expected to reduce numbers over the next year.
It will be difficult to cut them further without damaging healthcare and other key sectors, or impeding Starmer’s central aim of reviving the economy to ease Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. The recent unrest suggests that boosting economic growth, revitalising abandoned towns and investing in crumbling public services have never been more important.
The riots “are not telling this government anything it didn’t already know,” Professor Fielding said. “They are just making their task more urgent.”
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