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Britain is not in the grip of civil war, no matter what Elon Musk says. The violent riots which have convulsed parts of England and Northern Ireland, and which led Nigeria, Australia and India to issue travel warnings, are now being countered by anti-racist demonstrators. But this is not a country at ease with itself.
About every ten years, summer seems to bring mindless violence and wanton destruction to some of our streets. In 1990 it was the poll tax riots, in 2001 the unrest in Oldham, in 2011 the riots in London after police shot a black man, Mark Duggan.
This time the violence is explicitly about mass migration. A riot was sparked in Dublin last year, after an Algerian migrant stabbed three young children and a woman at a primary school. In Southport in the north-west of England, when three young girls were murdered last month by a 17-year-old, a rumour that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker (he was actually the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants) spread like wildfire. The subsequent scenes have been horrific: a police van set alight and bricks thrown at the local mosque. The disorder has spread to other towns and cities, with frightened shopkeepers boarding up shops and families keeping children at home.
The current scenes should serve as a reminder of what fascism actually looks like. In recent years the term “far right” has been lazily applied to all sorts of people, including those who opposed Covid lockdowns. But in the overtly racist ideology of Tommy Robinson and his acolytes we see the real far right, the inheritors of Oswald Mosley’s rhetoric of the 1930s.
How can England — supposedly a haven of multiculturalism — be seeing Nazi-tattooed thugs on the rampage, massing outside immigration centres? Partly because social media has made it easier for opportunists like Robinson — and even Russian bots — to stoke up hatred. But also because our multicultural credentials are not as strong in some parts of the country as we want to believe.
In December 2016, Louise Casey’s year-long review of community cohesion warned that while segregation had reduced over the population as a whole, ethnic groups in some areas were becoming increasingly divided. Casey — now a Labour peer and close to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — issued a warning which now seems eerily prophetic: that “a failure to talk about all this only leaves the ground open for the far right on one side and Islamist extremists on the other” — both groups seeking to prove that Islam and modern Britain are incompatible. In the years since then, non-EU immigration has soared.
For a brand new government, this has been a baptism of fire. Starmer was heckled when he went to lay flowers for the victims in Southport. He has taken a tough line, promising swift justice through 24-hour courts: one man has already been jailed for three years. As director of public prosecutions in 2011, Starmer supported the then prime minister David Cameron in quelling the riots which shook London. His challenge today is even greater, with overflowing prisons and a backed-up court system, but his resolution is clear. There is little the government can ban: both the British National party and English Defence League seem to be defunct. So it is hoping deterrent sentencing will work.
When anarchy strikes, it is essential to unequivocally back the police. Many of the riots are happening in left-behind places which have been failed for decades, and where confidence in the state is threadbare. Communities who are not integrated tend to have little trust in public institutions. In Harehills in Leeds two months ago, a riot began when social workers took Roma children into care. Equally, the white working classes are deeply sensitive to what they see as state prejudice. The shocking failure of police forces and local authorities to protect white girls from abuse by Asian grooming gangs in places like Rotherham and Rochdale — for fear of being accused of racism — has helped to fuel allegations of “two-tier policing”. In July, the mayor of Greater Manchester had to call for calm after a video showed a police officer viciously attacking a man at Manchester airport. Viewers rushed to judgment online before subsequent footage showed the man had punched officers to the ground, while resisting arrest.
So far, it looks as though the tide may have turned. In scenes reminiscent of the great Battle of Cable Street, when East Londoners blocked the progress of Mosley’s blackshirts in 1936, anti-racist demonstrators came out in Bristol, London, Liverpool and Birmingham to counter far-right rallies, in some cases outnumbering them. This was a reminder that Britain is still one of the world’s most tolerant societies. But once the current crisis is over there will need to be a rethink: about the desperate poverty in parts of the Midlands and the North; and about how to make the dream of social cohesion and fairness a reality.
camilla.cavendish@ft.com
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