Britain is being shaken by a wave of violence, images of right-wing mobs attacking mosques and migrants and hunting down anything “un-British” are going around the world. What is the situation like in the country?
Civil society and politicians are shocked. Britain has had a stressful few months with early elections, an election campaign and a change of government. Everyone really needed a break. This news burst in the middle of the long-awaited silly season. For a long time, many people had only listed migration as the third most important issue. The economy and the National Health Service seemed more important.
While there are legitimate questions about immigration, the general public agrees that it has now been abused in a perfidious way. What will happen next is difficult to predict. The BBC has identified at least 30 more demonstrations planned by far-right activists across the UK, but it is unclear how much support these will have.
There are numerous rumors and disinformation on the usual platforms on the Internet. There are indications that some of these are being spread from abroad. What is the truth behind this?
British terror experts agree: Analysis of social media shows a clear pattern of manipulation designed to get people not only to protest and gather, but also to resort to violence, arson and assassination. There have been repeated knife attacks on British streets in recent months. As recently as April, a 14-year-old black boy was killed. But never before has the legitimate protest against them reached this scale. In this case, an obscure fake news outlet linked to Russia described the Southport perpetrator as a 17-year-old alleged Muslim asylum seeker who arrived in one of the boats across the English Channel a year ago. Channel3 Now is a website that claims to be a reputable American news service but spreads claims based on speculation.
The alleged perpetrator’s name was picked up by thousands of Russia-linked accounts and then repeated by Russian state media. A post linked to the hooligan organization English Defence League An influencer connected to the group then called for nationwide protests. His video was viewed over a million times. The content is clearly inflammatory. The analysis of smaller public Telegram groups also showed that the false report reached a large audience, including ordinary people with no connection to right-wing extremist groups.
Since many of the right-wing extremist activists were blocked on the X platform until recently, users spontaneously called for protests in front of local mosques via local Telegram and Facebook pages. Graphics and memes migrated from there to TikTok, X and Facebook and were widely shared. Live videos are also particularly common. They describe a “police repression of peaceful protesters concerned about the murder of white children”, which was intended to create a solidarity effect. These live reporters were all directly connected to the English Defence League. The atmosphere was great on X, but the people pulling the strings were somewhere else entirely, for example on holiday in Cyprus.
Nigel Farage, whose party Reform UK now has five seats in the House of Commons, also added fuel to the fire. He attacked Prime Minister Keir Starmer and falsely claimed that Starmer had labelled all peacefully protesting citizens as far-right. This led to the hashtag “Starmer” dominating all platforms and the violence no longer being the focus. It almost seemed as if they were trying to normalise the term “far-right” and make it synonymous with the average Reform-voters. Most posts came from pro-Reformaccounts, two-thirds of which had content copied, pasted and shared very often, even though these accounts do not have many followers. Data analysts also found a large number of AI accounts pushing the disinformation campaign. A former employee of the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the organization used for the Brexit campaign, also appeared to be involved.
Where does the propensity for violence come from in parts of British society?
It has become clear that the actors behind the English Defence League and deliberately wanted to provoke and trigger violence. John Denham, Home Secretary under Blair, compared their tactics with the actions of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. The current structure of the hooligan scene is an ideal breeding ground for this form of mobilization. There is no longer any need for a formalized membership structure, but rather social media is controlled by a handful of influencers.
There are numerous studies on the social background of the predominantly white young men, their low level of education, the function of violence to boost self-esteem and the role of alcohol. However, whereas they used to be just gangs of thugs, today they plan their actions and are financially and internationally networked. The dangerous thing about this development is that they have now become paramilitary units that act strategically. The state can only counteract this with preventive policing, social programs for deradicalization and consistent prosecution. Instead, the last government’s years of austerity program have hampered social and police work. Decision-makers in the police say they are £3.2 billion short of being able to fight crime effectively.
The social situation in the country has deteriorated radically since 2010. More than one in five people in the UK, 14.4 million people, are affected by poverty. Almost three in ten children live in poverty. Single mothers, blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities are particularly affected by poverty. However, the riots did not involve single mothers or poor black people, but rather a large number of young white men.
The number of refugees crossing the English Channel is increasing despite the strict asylum policy of the Tories has risen dramatically in recent years. The country is repeatedly plagued by ethnically motivated conflicts and riots by migrants. Aside from right-wing extremist violence, is there not also legitimate dissatisfaction with migration policy among large parts of the population?
Among the Tories it was not possible to discuss the issue of immigration as a factual issue. The issue was instrumentalized in the Brexit campaign, among other things, and abused as an election issue. Hardly any other issue can be used so effectively to distract from problems, such as the decline in state funding for the construction of social housing or the lack of jobs due to a lack of an industrial strategy. The fact is that immigration numbers from Europe have fallen and those from the Commonwealth have increased. The reason for this is Brexit. However, the riots were not directed against white Swedes or French people, but were clearly racially motivated.
As in the textbook, the Tories and with it British democracy has undergone a steady development towards populism since 2010 and has made the question of identity a key issue. We have seen many years in which the culture war was cultivated. Former advisors to Boris Johnson accuse the Toriesof having used their language to stir up hatred. The hate speech was not only directed against migrants, but also against other minorities. As such, fear is growing on all sides.
The riots are the first major test for the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer. How does he intend to calm the situation?
Starmer is a former Attorney General and has experience of the 2011 riots. Right-wing television stations such as GB News tried to get him to comment on refugees or “political correctness,” but he said little about the cultural and identity politics struggles. That seems to be his strategy now. Instead of addressing the violent perpetrators’ pretexts, he focuses on their origins in the hooligan scene and names the people pulling the strings. He also attacked Elon Musk, among others. Starmer has set up a kind of task force, imposed holiday bans for police officers, and set up 130 additional units with over 2,000 police officers. “Take back our streets” was the focus of Labour in the election manifesto. But the real enemy seems to be in the social media.
Michèle Auga heads the Friedrich Ebert Foundation office in London. The text first appeared in the IPG Journal.
