The News
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer held emergency talks on Monday after days of violent protests across the country that he described as “far-right thuggery.”
The demonstrations, sparked by the killing of three young girls last week, have included attacks on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers, in part because initial false reports blamed the murders on a Muslim immigrant. More than 150 people have been arrested.
The suspected murderer, a British 17-year-old of Rwandan heritage, is in custody. On Monday Starmer said that a ”standing army" of specialist police officers would be deployed to deal with the unrest, and indicated there were no plans to recall Parliament.
SIGNALS
The British far-right no longer relies on old organizational networks
The far-right can foment social unrest more easily than ever thanks to social media, The Observer noted, as many rioters traveled into towns to create trouble after absorbing online misinformation. The movement no longer needs formal leaders, and behaves more like a “school of fish,” head of research at the anti-racism group HOPE not hate told the BBC. That the violence has mostly taken place in northern towns rather than large metropolitan cities also represents a “dangerous shift” in the far-right’s strategy, a columnist argued in Hyphen: Successfully targeting smaller communities helps the movement appear bigger than it really is, which emboldens would-be supporters elsewhere.
Starmer’s difficult balancing act
Over the weekend, Starmer denounced “far-right thuggery” and vowed rioters would face the “full force of the law.” But while the prime minister is right to unequivocally condemn violence, he must also distinguish between far-right agitators and those “open to politics as usual” by displaying a willingness to engage with concerns about immigration, The Economist argued. Some Labour sources reportedly consider it “counterproductive” to directly confront Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the issue, lest the party’s anti-immigration sentiments be given too much “oxygen,” while others worry that failing to challenge such arguments head-on risks further mainstreaming them, wrote The Guardian.
Blaming external actors may risk obscuring domestic causes of violence
Several British media outlets suggested that Russian-linked disinformation was behind the first Southport riots, based on analysis that Channel 3 Now — which first published false claims that the stabbing suspect was an asylum seeker — began life as a Russian channel. But evidence for this is still “weak at best,” and obscures how domestic influencers capitalized on the long-standing scapegoating of migrants, both online and offline, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism argued. Labour politicians, too, may be partly to blame for implying that Muslims who voted for independent candidates at the recent election did so only out of concern for the situation in Gaza, further fueling the narrative of “split loyalties” seized on by the far-right, a columnist argued in Hyphen.