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The United Kingdom is experiencing its worst racist rioting since 1919, when white workers angered by high unemployment and housing shortages directed their outrage against minorities in a wave of street violence and property destruction that saw five people killed in Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, London, Hull, Newport, Barry, Liverpool, and Cardiff. Similar scenes are being witnessed in the country today. Over the past week, a pogrom was started in Middlesbrough, hotels housing refugees were set alight in Rotherham and Tamworth by rioting mobs. Anti-migrant riots, in which racist attacks have become common, have broken out across the country. Nearly 500 people have been arrested.
James Poulter is an investigate journalist who covers the British far right.
The incident that sparked the riots was a horrific attack on a children’s dance event in Southport that left three girls dead and several others critically injured. The perpetrator was arrested at the scene, but was not publicly identified because he was under 18 years of age. The absence of an identity was exploited by the far right, who spread an untrue rumour that he was a Muslim on a terrorist watchlist — a claim they had no way of verifying.
Before the perpetrator’s identity was revealed, one prominent associate of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known to the wider world as Tommy Robinson), Daniel Thomas (aka Danny Tommo), released an incendiary, since-deleted video in which he said “every city needs to go up everywhere” and told supporters to “get prepared” and “be ready”, as “it has to go off in different cities”.
Yaxley-Lennon is the former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), an organization that has not existed for more than five years, which some police and politicians have inaccurately blamed for the riots. Yaxley-Lennon is once again the key influencer on the British far right following a period in which he struggled to mobilize supporters. In November last year, Elon Musk restored his Twitter account and Yaxley-Lennon now has over 900,000 followers on the platform. Just days before the Southport attack, he held a protest in London against “two-tier policing”, which his supporters claim was attended by over 20,000 people.
On the day of the attack, a Telegram group chat called Southport Wake Up was created. This group was one of the sources for a call for a protest in Southport the following evening. The protest was also called by a local Instagram page which was linked to the Knowsley anti-migrant riot in February 2023. Once the initial callout was made, fascist group Patriotic Alternative (PA)’s Wales regional organizer Joe Butler (aka Joe Marsh) made his own graphic using the PA font and shared it on his Telegram channel. The Southport Wake Up Telegram channel suggested targeting the mosque ahead of the protest.
The causes are quite clear: both major parties and the media have taken turns to draft racist immigration legislation since the 1960s, have stoked moral panics about refugees and asylum seekers, about ‘Black crime’, ‘Asian grooming gangs’, and ‘Muslim terrorists’.
The riot in Southport lasted for over two hours and saw 27 police officers hospitalized, a mosque attacked, and a police van set alight. In the crowd were PA activist David Miles from Birmingham and convicted neo-Nazi terrorist Matthew Hankinson, who was involved in the far-right group National Action after it was banned, as well as far-right football hooligans and local racists.
Miles could be seen facing down riot police, wearing a t-shirt featuring the slogan “Free Sam Melia”. Melia, PA’s Yorkshire regional organizer, is currently serving a prison sentence for producing racist stickers. Also among the protesters was Rikki Doolan, who had appeared on stage at the Yaxley-Lennon protest in central London just days before. Doolan was criticized by other demonstrators as an “anti-white scumbag” for arguing against ethno-nationalism in a debate with Laura Melia, the deputy leader of PA.
The Riots Spread
The following day, 31 July, saw disorder start to spread across the country. At a protest in London called by Thomas, there were over 100 arrests after fights with the police. Attendees included Nicholas Tenconi, interim leader of the UK Independence Party and chief operating officer of Turning Point UK. Anti-migrant hotel protests happened in Manchester and Aldershot, both places where PA have stoked anti-migrant tensions and helped to organize protests in the past. In Manchester, two protesters were arrested for violent disorder. In Hartlepool, an anti-migrant protest turned into a riot.
Allan Jones, a spokesperson for anti-fascist investigators Red Flare, says:
There is no single group behind the riots, although several far-right groups have been involved. Yaxley-Lennon and Thomas’s supporters are part of the post-organizational far right, where people who watch far-right content online form networks around figures like Yaxley-Lennon and other anti-migrant influencers. The EDL doesn’t exist. What we have now is a series of overlapping networks where messages like Thomas’s can spread virally.
Jones adds: “In Hartlepool, we think these same overlapping networks of organized and post-organizational far-right activists have mixed with local racists to spark anti-migrant disorder. We have seen protests being organized and promoted on existing anti-migrant and far-right hooligan Facebook groups and on large WhatsApp groups. This pattern of people producing graphics calling for protests, then sharing them online through these various networks, is what allowed the riots to spread organically across the country.”
Two days later, on Friday night (2 August), rioting spread to Sunderland, where a police station was set alight, an Uber taxi was burnt, and shops were looted. Four police officers were hospitalized and 12 people were arrested. This set the tone for the weekend. In Liverpool, around 200 anti-fascists gathered in front of a mosque, outnumbering the small far-right protest taking place on the other side of the road.
Saturday saw anti-migrant protests take place in Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Leicester, Blackpool, Blackburn, Preston, Bristol, Hull, and Belfast. Several of these were opposed by anti-fascist counter-protests: in Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, and Liverpool. In Blackpool, punks from the Rebellion festival attacked the anti-migrant protest. In Stoke-on-Trent, an anti-migrant protester was left covered in blood after clashes with Muslims defending a mosque. Clips of him went viral among the far right as an example of Muslim violence against white men. It was later revealed the bleeding man was a neo-Nazi and an attendee of Blood & Honour concerts.
On Saturday evening, there was a riot in Liverpool in which shops were looted, a library burnt down, and police attacked. In Hull, the rioting saw police attacked with bricks and fireworks, shops looted, and a hotel housing refugees attacked. In Bristol, several hundred anti-fascists were able to drive a small anti-migrant protest by the city’s right-wing football hooligans out of a central park. There were clashes outside a hotel housing refugees afterwards.
In Belfast, in the north of Ireland, Loyalist rioters attacked immigrant-owned businesses and burned cars. It appears they were rioting to show the world how British they are.
Sunday, 4 August, arguably saw the worst of the violence. In Middlesbrough, a pogrom took place with a mob of white rioters attacking houses and cars in an Asian area of town. Hotels housing refugees were set alight by rioting mobs in Rotherham and Tamworth. An anti-fascist counter-protest had to withdraw from the hotel in Rotherham under police protection after becoming outnumbered 10:1 by a rioting far-right mob throwing projectiles at anti-fascists and the police. There was also disorder in Solihull and Lancaster.
Anti-migrant protests took place in Bolton, Birmingham, Hull, Weymouth and Sheffield. In Bolton, several hundred men from the Muslim Defence League attended a counter-protest and had to be held back by police. There were small outbreaks of violence in Sheffield and Weymouth. In Cardiff, in Wales, there was a tiny anti-migrant protest which was significantly outnumbered by anti-fascists. There has been no rioting in Wales yet.
The Tide Begins to Turn
By the following Monday, the rioting in England seemed to be petering out, with a small riot in Darlington and relatively large anti-migrant protest and anti-fascist counter-protest happening in Plymouth. Riot police had to keep the two sides apart and there were clashes between the two sides. UKIP leader Tenconi was again in attendance, producing social media content from the protest. In Belfast, there was serious rioting and racist violence which police suggested Loyalist paramilitaries were involved in.
While the riots appeared to die down, a list was published in the Southport Wake Up group chat, which had grown to 13,000 members, of 39 immigration solicitors and charities spread across the country. The chat administrator who published the list encouraged anti-migrant rioters to conduct simultaneous arson attacks at the 39 locations at 20:00 on Wednesday evening. The threat was widely reported in the media and went viral on social media, sparking dozens of anti-fascist mobilizations at the threatened locations.
The rioting may have paused, but the hostility towards migrants and violent racism remains deeply entrenched in British society.
On Tuesday evening, there was continued rioting and racist violence in Belfast, but nothing in England. By this point, the wave of police repression was in full swing, with nearly 400 arrests made. Prime Minister Keir Starmer had promised rioters would “feel the full force of the law” as he sought to replicate the British state’s response to the August 2011 riots, when Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service. In 2011, the state responded to a wave of anti-police rioting after the killing of a young black father, by remanding anybody arrested and running 24-hour courts which issued lengthy jail sentences.
Wednesday, 7 August, saw thousands of anti-fascists take to the streets in 30 different locations. There were sizable protests in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Liverpool and only a handful of far-right protests took place at locations on the list for arson attacks. No arson attacks actually happened — Britain’s neo-Nazi terrorists, it appears, lack militancy.
In It for the Long Haul
The British Left was initially shocked by the riots, but quickly sprang into action. Discussions on the Left have largely been about how to respond, and a number of new projects and alliances have been formed. Anti-fascists are particularly buoyant after the size of the anti-racist protests on Wednesday evening, and protests are set to continue over the weekend.
It is vital that the Left’s response go deeper, however, as these riots are taking place in a context of rupture and instability following decades of stagnation, political turmoil, and the social catastrophe of the pandemic, according to Michael Richmond, co-author of Fractured: Race, Class, Gender & the Hatred of Identity Politics.
Richmond says:
The causes are quite clear: both major parties and the media have taken turns to draft racist immigration legislation since the 1960s, have stoked moral panics about refugees and asylum seekers, about “Black crime”, “Asian grooming gangs”, and “Muslim terrorists”. The racial violence we're seeing now is actually constant in British society. These pogroms are connected to the violence of British colonialism and have taken place not only in 1919, but in 1948/49, 1958, and 2001. After each of these waves of racial violence, the British state has responded in often similar ways — they have drafted tighter border laws and introduced new police powers that often end up repressing racial minorities and the left.
Richmond notes that the 1919 race riots began in January in Glasgow, and the national riot-wave did not subside until August. The rioting may have paused, but the hostility towards migrants and violent racism remains deeply entrenched in British society.