UK Riots Have Their Roots In A History of Hate

The racism in the streets was seeded by the racism of the state.

Hotels housing asylum seekers set ablaze by mobs. Mosques attacked. Black and Brown people punched, stabbed, attacked in their homes, taunted with slurs, their businesses torched. Far-right Telegram channels circulating target lists of immigration lawyers and advocates, alongside calls for “genocide.”

Starting on July 30, England has been swept by a wave of racist and Islamophobic violence (which also affected Belfast in Northern Ireland). Occasioned by false rumors that the horrific murder of three children at a summer dance class in the town of Southport were committed by a Muslim migrant, these latter-day pogroms have spread terror across communities of color in more than 20 British cities and towns. As Daniel Trilling observed, they stand out both for their viciousness and “geographical reach” — stretching from Sunderland in the north to Plymouth in the south — but also because they drew “a far wider range of participants than the small groups of committed fascists who helped instigate the violence.”

buildings burn int he background as a man walks away

It’s hard to overstate the gravity of the situation. As long-time anti-fascist activist Balwinder Singh Rana, who organized with both the Indian Youth Federation and the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1960s and ‘70s, declared, in the 55 years he’s been fighting racism and fascism, “I’ve never ever seen this situation before … it’s never happened at this scale.”

While the authorities have acknowledged the far-right character of the riots, they have largely refrained from centering the Islamophobia, racism and anti-immigrant animus that have driven them. Instead, they’ve talked about criminal “thuggery,” called for new police powers and leaned into false equivalency — equating racist rallies that the BBC dubiously termed “pro-British” protests with anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations against them.

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