Analysis: What’s Behind the UK Riots?

A youth throws a fence post towards police during an anti-immigration demonstration near the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham, England on Aug. 4, 2024. Danny Lawson/PA Wire

Experts are attributing the unprecedented riots in the UK to a mix of deep-rooted immigration issues, online agitators, misinformation, extremists, police mismanagement—and the hot summer weather.

The UK is currently experiencing its seventh day of unrest, sparked by the stabbings in Southport where three little girls were killed in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club.

The suspect behind the Southport attack was later named as 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents.

However in the immediate aftermath of the attack a fake news site incorrectly posted that the perpetrator was a Muslim illegal immigrant on a terror watch list who came to the UK on a boat.

Rioters have since clashed with police so far in Rotherham, Tamworth, Manchester, Hull, Liverpool, Bristol, Blackpool, Plymouth, Birmingham, and Belfast.

As tensions continue to escalate, experts and former officials weigh in to explain the roots of the unrest and the broader implications for the country’s social fabric.

‘Far-Right Thuggery’

Sir Keir Starmer vowed to “ramp up criminal justice” toward what he called “far-right thuggery” after an emergency COBRA meeting on Monday, pledging to create a “standing army” of public order police to deal with the rioting.

Around 400 arrests have been made since the violence began last week, with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) warning that the total is expected to rise daily.

Rioters and anti-immigration protesters, predominantly white groups, have attacked two Holiday Inn Expresses housing asylum seekers and targeted mosques.

On Wednesday another centre, Asylum Link Merseyside, said it had closed its offices temporarily following “threats of far-right violence” made against it.

Other towns have seen “large masonry,” bricks and fireworks were launched towards police officers.

Groups are now clashing with Muslim groups, with gangs in Stoke and Birmingham reacting to the riots by arming themselves with knives and machetes and attacking pubs and cars.

Police officers walk past a burnt out vehicle as they are deployed on the streets following a protest in Hartlepool, England, on July 31, 2024. Owen Humphreys/PA

‘Divided Opinion’

There are different opinions on the nature, causes and solutions to the riots.

Former head of counter-terrorism policing Neil Basu told the BBC on Monday that some violence during the riots has “crossed the line into terrorism.”

“I think we have seen serious acts of violence designed to cause terror to a section of our community,” he said.

However, Donna Jones, a Conservative Party politician and the UK’s most senior police commissioner came under fire for saying that the protest groups had a “desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty” and “to uphold British values.”

While she urged for calm, she also said the “government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it.”

“Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration?” she added.

‘Tarnishing Anyone Who Protests’

“They haven’t addressed one of the major issues in the United Kingdom, which is obviously illegal immigration. One of the biggest challenges, and a massive misfire by Keir Starmer, is tarnishing anyone who protests, let alone those who have rioted, as far-right,” security expert Will Geddes told The Epoch Times.

“The nub of the issue is you have a wide scale populace in the United Kingdom who are feeling very disenchanted, very let down,” he added.

“One of the biggest mistakes that the police made was not to release clear information that would satisfy the general public. What it would do is, at least, defuse any of that vitriolic, potentially race-bating bile which has been stirred up as a result of this,” he said.

“Now the problem is, is that the train already had left the station by the time the police started turning around and saying, ‘actually, no, he’s not an illegal immigrant, he is a UK national, he’s not Muslim, he is not a terrorist,’” he added.

Geddes also believed that some of the social media accounts provoking these tensions could originate from foreign hostile states such as from Russia and China.

Authorities such as the National Crime Agency are currently investigating whether misinformation may be being amplified by foreign state actors

“What has happened, what is tapped into, is that you’ve got those that have legitimate protests that they want to obviously forward. You have far-right agitators, but they are a minority; they are not the majority, as Keir Starmer would have you think. And then there are obviously the criminals who are exploiting all of this, put together in a very volcanic sort of mix,” said Geddes, adding that by lumping them all together, the prime minister has created a crisis rather than defused one.

He also said that the warm weather of the past week contributed to the tinderbox conditions.

“And one thing I can tell you is having dealt with direct action groups, riots and all sorts, if it was raining out there, you wouldn’t see anything like the numbers of people out on the streets right now,” he added.

‘Ruling Class’

Professor Matt Goodwin, a pollster specialising in public attitudes, told The Epoch Times that these riots and immigration protests “are a lot more than just misinformation, disinformation and social media.”

“What these protests reflect, in my view, are much deeper grievances over mass uncontrolled immigration, the collapse of our borders and a broken model of multiculturalism that is not bringing people together, but rather pushing them apart,” he said.

He said that these are underlying resentment that have been building for 20 to 30 years.

“The big concern also is these riots appear to be reflecting ethnic conflict, which again reflects the failures of a policy of multiculturalism, which has essentially encouraged different groups to live separately, rather than pulling them together with a shared narrative,” he added.

He said that this partly has been exacerbated by an identity politics on the left, which encourages people to mobilise along racial, religious and ethnic lines.

“So it shouldn’t really be a surprise we’re seeing what we’re seeing on the streets today, with white British people mobilising along those lines, which have been encouraged by this obsession of identity politics,” he said.

He said that these protests are “much more significant.”

“I think because there is a much larger number of people, they’re more sporadic, they’re involving a much larger number of towns, I think they’re also more significant because the political class really looks lost in terms of what to do about them,” he added.

‘I Can See These Riots Continuing’

Emeritus research professor at the London School of Economics and adviser to NATO and the Ministry of Defence, Professor Gwythian Prins, told The Epoch Times that the sum total of the current UK disorder on the streets is “a witch’s brew.”

He said that a “long trend of moral disarmament” has continued and added that “serial breaches of trust by the administrative classes have fed fury” from those who failed to keep their word in office. This situation, he said, was also “compounded massively by lockdown.”

Prins noted that the above is specifically about the loss of control of all forms of immigration since 1997, coupled with the amplification of the “systematic denigration of our history.”

Retired London police officer and law and order campaigner Norman Brennan, who has 42 years of police experience told The Epoch Times that what has happened is at “the back of a lie.”

“But it highlights what I’ve been discussing for 10 or 15 years, if not longer, there’s been a bubbling resentment of the British people,” he said.

He noted that 2011 riots that started and spread after the country after Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black gang member, was shot dead by police in Tottenham.

“All of the riots in Britain have been on the back of an ethnic issue,” he said.

He said that if “you use or threaten violence or disorder on the streets of London or anywhere in Britain, should be rightly challenged.”

However, he was not surprised by the events and said he can see these riots continuing if illegal migration was not seriously addressed.

He was also cautious about the optics of the government’s plans to fast track punishing rioters while easing overcrowding in jails by letting out thousands of prisoners just 40 per cent through their sentence.

“They’re starting to empty the prisons, what message is that sent to a country beleaguered by crime, law and disorder,” he said.

“This perfect storm has turned into a tsunami,” he added.

‘Alternative Narratives’

Analysist of radical right extremism Professor Matthew Feldman identified three groups who had been protesting.

These included “far-right influencers” operating online, individual far-right extremists associated with groups like Patriotic Alternative and Britain First and a third group.

The said that the places that are targeted are places of worship, especially of Muslim places of worship or places that house asylum seekers are the “types of issues that have animated the far-right for decades.”

“But I am not yet ready to say the many thousands of people turning up are far-right,” he told PA Media.

“I think we need to peel off this group of sympathisers from people who are hardened racists. Just dismissing them all as far-right isn’t incorrect because they are involved in far-right thuggery,” he said.

“But I think we can do better in trying to understand the different dynamics in play—people who are whipping up hatred, people who are motivated by hatred and people who are maybe doing hateful things.

“Separate the sympathisers from the hardcore and start thinking in terms of ‘alternative narratives’ for how we might engage with this audience,” he said.