Why Britain is Rioting

A lie led to far-right violence. Then, years of grievances burst to the surface.

Riots outside of a Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, which is being used as an asylum hotel, on August 4, 2024. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.)

For the past seven days, the UK has witnessed its worst riots in over a decade. What started off last week as a wave of protests over the horrific murder of three young girls, fuelled by false claims about the identity of the attacker on social media, has metastasized into something far more profound: A deep fracturing of relations between communities that threatens to do lasting damage to Britain’s social fabric.

Last Monday, a knife-wielding teenager entered through an open fire door at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the seaside town of Southport and killed three participants, all girls under the age of 10. He also injured eight more young children and two adults. It was an evil crime, the horror made all the more acute by the youth of the victims and by the fact that someone would target for such an atrocity, of all things, a joyful summer dance party.

What came next should be considered a textbook example of how harmful lies can spread on social media. There are generally good reasons to be wary of finger-pointing when it comes to “fake news” and social media’s role in spreading it.¹ But in this instance, it’s hard to overstate the extent of the hysteria that was unleashed. Mere hours after the attack, the killer was seemingly identified as Ali al-Shakati, a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the United Kingdom by boat, and was known to the British security services as a potential threat. Within minutes of the first social media post identifying al-Shakati, the story was picked up by a dubious news organization calling itself “Channel 3 Now.” The al-Shakati story was then parroted by Russia Today, and began appearing in a raft of viral posts on social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Right-wing influencers with huge followings, like Andrew Tate, amplified the story, and various posts amassed thousands, often millions, of impressions.

Unrest broke out initially in Southport, Hartlepool and London. Rioters released smoke flares and set fire to a riot van; they threw trash cans and bottles at police officers. As the unrest spread, it was the far right—an ad hoc coalition of former members of the English Defense League, supporters of notorious far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, and ordinary people swept along on social media—fueling the violence. It was common to see English flags and chants of “English till I die.” Mosques and Islamic centers were targeted in a horrific wave of xenophobic thuggery. It was, in large part, a genuine race riot—not a phrase to use lightly.

In the first three days, it was well known that the suspect was only 17 years old, which means that by law they couldn’t be identified in the media. Still, in an attempt to head off the violence, the police released some limited information confirming that the alleged perpetrator of the atrocity was in fact born in the UK. Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist-right Reform UK party and a newly-minted member of parliament, echoed a widespread fear that the establishment was conspiring with the police forces to protect an illegal migrant for fear of fueling an anti-immigrant narrative, irresponsibly declaring: “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us.”

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, a judge took the unusual step of allowing the media to release the full identity of the alleged perpetrator despite his being a minor, noting that the suspect was only a few days away from turning 18. It turns out that Ali al-Shakati doesn’t exist. The real suspect, Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Wales to Rwandan parents, was not a refugee. We don’t know that he’s not Muslim, nor that his motives were unrelated to some sort of Islamist ideology—though, given that only 2% of Rwanda’s population is Muslim, it seems unlikely. Of course, it hardly matters. There’s no earthly justification for violently attacking mosques, harassing the public, and setting fire to police vans.

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Even after it was widely reported that the al-Shakati story was fake, the violence didn’t stop. This past weekend, unrest spread to Sunderland, Stoke, Sheffield, and many other towns and cities. That’s when it became clear that something far bigger is going on.

As violence spread across the UK, including Northern Ireland, I saw TikTok live streams in which hundreds of members of the public had gathered in online rooms to debate the state of race relations in the UK and organize rallies and demonstrations. Two hotels housing asylum seekers became targets; rioters successfully broke into one of them, in Rotherham in the north of England, lighting fires and smashing windows. In Middlesbrough, thugs yelling racial slurs (“smash the Pakis”) targeted the homes of migrants.

There has also been counter-violence from groups of mostly immigrant men. In Bolton, hundreds of Muslims, most of their faces covered with masks or balaclavas, threw eggs at the police, shouting “Allahu Akbar.” They then clashed with anti-immigrant protesters, with fireworks, bottles, and tiles being hurled by both sides.

This is now no longer a story about a horrifying triple murder and the misinformation spread about it. It’s a story about a serious failure of social cohesion, driven in large part by fears about immigration and the perceived failures of integration.

Some of these anxieties have real roots. While overall crime in the UK has steadily declined for the past two decades, knife crime—a major concern in a country in which gun homicides remain mercifully rare—has risen significantly in recent years. Similarly, the number of refugees seeking asylum in the UK has soared in recent years and now matches a previous peak reached in 2002—something hammered home by the last Conservative government with their ceaseless calls to “Stop the Boats.” Finally, there are real problems with the integration of parts of the UK’s Muslim population, as emphasized last year in a damning report written by the government’s social cohesion tsar Dame Sara Khan.

There are two things to say in response to this: two things that may at first glance appear to be mutually exclusive, but are nevertheless both true.

The first is that the right-wing polemicists have long been packaging these problems together into one overarching, catastrophist narrative of British decline. The problem is, there is no evidence that the knife crime wave has been directly fuelled by asylum seekers. As bad as knife crime and other problems may be, it is also simply incorrect to assert that the country has in recent years become, in the words of one representative commentator, “a lawless country where there is no justice at all.” What’s more, right-wing catastrophism is hypocritical insofar as it has often been fuelled by the very same politicians who were in government until last month, and spectacularly failed to tackle most of these problems. Indeed, it was the Conservative government that slashed the number of police officers and presided over the arrival of a record number of refugees, while failing to find a humane, durable solution for processing them.²

The second thing to say is that there are, nevertheless, real problems with Britain’s model of dealing with ethnic and religious diversity. Whenever there is social unrest or communal strife in France, for example, Brits and Americans like to put the blame squarely on the French model of laïcité—an imperfect approach to the separation of church and state that is often caricatured as consisting in naked animus against religious minorities. But Britain’s own highly communitarian approach—which often gives a free pass to the most radical elements within a religious community—does not seem to be faring much better, with the result that some immigrant communities in Britain’s major cities have failed to properly integrate, and, as the present riots show, longstanding resentments have been left to fester. To cap it all, politicians at a loss for how to respond to the recent surge in asylum applications have packed tens of thousands of asylum seekers into hotels for long periods of time, negatively impacting their wellbeing and stretching the patience of local communities.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power last month promising to end fourteen years of chaos under his predecessors. The recent wave of violence is about as bad as his first 100 days could possibly get. Nobody knows how this crisis will end. But any serious solution will need to accomplish two things: It needs to take the hardest possible approach against far-right extremism, with heavy penalties for rioters (in particular the ringleaders fomenting violence). And it also needs to propose serious remedies for the deep-seated problems—on crime, social cohesion, and refugee numbers—that successive Conservative governments have spectacularly failed to solve.

Luke Hallam is a senior editor at Persuasion.

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1. The numbers of people who actually read such posts are often small; they tend to already believe the “facts” being spread, and hence the fake news does little to break beyond bubbles of the conspiracy-minded; and only in extreme cases does fake information actually result in real-world harm.

2. In addition, it’s notable that even as one part of the country (Scotland) managed to successfully bring its knife crime problem under control by adopting a community-led agenda, Conservative politicians in Westminster made vacuous pronouncements about law and order that amounted to nothing for most of the country.