The UK's far-right riots: How anti-Muslim hate became normalised

Everyone has seen the footage. Attacks on mosques. The burning of asylum seeker hotels. Gangs of men throwing rocks at homes in Muslim communities. Thugs in Middlesbrough checkpointing to see if drivers are white (or not). A child in Belfast singing racial slurs as she walked down the street holding her mother’s hand.

From Liverpool to Leicester, Belfast to Bolton (and beyond), for six days in late July and early August the UK witnessed its worst far-right violence in 50 years.

While there is overwhelming evidence that the rioters targeted a specific type of British citizen and immigrant - Muslims and people of colour – the UK media and political class have been unable to condemn the violence for what it is: Islamophobia and racism.

One can safely say that, had the rioters focused their violence on other religious groups (Christian, Jewish or Hindu), the establishment would have immediately (and correctly) decried the violence as anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and anti-Hindu, respectively.

There would have been an outpouring of condemnation from across the UK political spectrum, as well as from international leaders. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer would have rushed to the scene to stand with the victims.

Muslims, on the other hand, are not afforded such dignity and support. Starmer was not moved to visit the Southport mosque that was attacked by the far-right (triggered by false and racist misinformation that the Southport stabbings were undertaken by a Muslim asylum seeker). It took the PM over a week to meet with Muslim community leaders, while pleas from the Muslim Council of Britain were ignored.

Meanwhile, on national TV, Starmer publicly denounced the riots as “far-right thuggery” but was unable to levy the words “Islamophobia” and “racism”, so part of daily life have they become. One can only imagine how much worse a Conservative government’s response and language would have been, avoiding, most likely, even the use of terms like “far-right”.

In short, it has never been clearer just how normalised anti-Muslim sentiment and hate speech have become across the UK. Islamophobia is so rife that a recent YouGov poll revealed that a quarter of British people think Muslims are to blame for the recent anti-Muslim violence, not the far-right. The perpetrators and the victims.

An age-old problem

Racism is a centuries-old part of British colonial history, the slave trade being one major example. In more recent decades, however, racism in the form of anti-immigration rhetoric has seen many twists and turns.

“After World War II you had lots of rhetoric about hard-working Caribbean workers helping to rebuild Britain. And then in the 1960s, it was hard-working family-oriented Asian workers,” says Ashok Kumar, a political economist at Birkbeck University. “Then, following Enoch Powell and the economic crisis of the 1970s, the rhetoric turned sour and the borders tightened. Suddenly there was an ‘underclass' of ‘parasitic’ black and brown who were ‘feckless and violent’”.

Hooliganism, especially in the 1980s, made this picture even worse (and violent), meaning that it was not until the mid-1990s and 2000s that the landscape somewhat improved, at least on the surface.

“Fast forward to the early 2010s, however, and anti-immigrant rhetoric had ramped up, focusing on Eastern Europeans. But this trend ran out of steam post-Brexit, so a new bogeyman was needed and things shifted back to the anti-Muslim and anti-POC focus that had been building after 9/11 and 7/7, and accelerating after the Syrian civil war, ISIS, and the Mediterranean migrant crisis,” adds Kumar.

“Today we are seeing pogroms on our streets, the burning of hotels with the intent to kill asylum seekers, because for decades the British state and media have normalised racialised violence and far-right talking points,” says Kai Heron, lecturer in political ecology at Lancaster University.

“Our choice has been between governments and media outlets that agree with far-right ideas wholesale, or that fail to locate the underlying structural reasons for racist discontent and in failing to do so, perpetuate it.”

Immigration is economically advantageous to Britain’s economy, but it has the potential to become politically disadvantageous to elites unless racism is used to obscure the underlying reasons for social deprivation among Britain’s working classes, explains Heron.

In short, the concentration of immigrant communities in underserved big cities or de-industrialising towns highlights and exacerbates existing deprivations, adds Heron.

Rather than recognise this deprivation as a result of economic exploitation, or Westminster’s neglect of underserved communities, the media and political classes accuse racialised immigrant labour and asylum seekers of placing a ‘burden’ on the state and punching a hole in Britain's otherwise untarnished social fabric.

The establishment

The political scapegoating of immigrants is commonplace. Last year, an email sent in the then-home secretary Suella Braverman’s name blamed ‘lefty lawyers’ for blocking her Rwanda policy. This month, rioters announced some 40 actions outside immigration centres and law firms. Political rhetoric has an impact.

"Starmer’s critique of the Rwanda policy, meanwhile, wasn’t that it was illegal and inhumane, but that it didn’t bring ‘value for money’. This, in turn, legitimates the common idea among far-right rioters that housing asylum seekers in hotels is expensive and unjustifiable when British citizens are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, or having their winter fuel payments rescinded by a newly elected Labour government,” explains Heron.

On top of this, both the Conservative Party and Labour have said that they will ‘stop the boats’ and ‘smash’ smuggler gangs in the English Channel, but they fail to mention that there are no legal, safe, routes to claim asylum in the UK. They also fail to make a connection between how those seeking asylum in the UK have had their lives torn apart by a system of capital accumulation and war that Britain itself has had no small part in perpetuating, explains Heron.

“The establishment’s lacklustre coverage of the fascist riots is not an unfortunate mistake, [but an act of self-interest],” says a spokesperson for the Palestinian Youth Movement. “It draws false equivalences between white supremacist rioters and anti-fascist counter-protestors, something that goes hand in hand with the UK’s ten-month-long unceasing attack and demonisation of the [peaceful] pro-Palestine [marches].”

Britain has also been centrally involved in “de-developing” the Arab region for decades, from Iraq and Iran to Afghanistan, says Heron. “Muslim lives, in other words, are systematically devalued by the British state’s foreign policy. Little wonder, then, that they are similarly devalued by aggrieved white British citizens. And little wonder that British politicians fail to challenge this particular feature of today’s riots.”

Musk and the new media

With the future of communications and news consumption changing drastically, social media is playing a far more important role, especially amongst the far-right who rally against mainstream journalism and uphold social media as the platform for credibility.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the recent riots is the extent to which Telegram and X were used by the far-right to spread misinformation and disinformation about the identity of the Southport stabber and then call for violence against Muslims and asylum-seekers.

This included Elon Musk, the owner of X, who made several provocative posts on the platform, including one saying “civil war is inevitable”, drawing sharp criticism from Starmer’s government.

“Musk is relishing fanning the flames of riots in the UK by promoting far-right narratives and Islamophobic hate speech on X,” says Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor at Northwestern University Qatar.

“As the most followed person on X, everything he likes or replies to gets a huge boost, algorithmically. He's acting like a digital Rupert Murdoch, curating and promoting right-wing hate speech in the UK.”

For example, Musk recently replied to Twitter account @europeinvasionn's tweet about the UK riots, an account that Jones describes as “an influence operation that exclusively deals in anti-migrant & anti-Muslim great replacement disinformation, and the most influential account spreading the false news that the attacker in Southport was a Muslim”.

The fact that Musk engages with fake accounts shows a level of feigned or real ignorance about how these platforms are manipulated, according to Jones. “There's no doubt that the existence of bots and fake accounts on X is huge, and many of these are contracted or created by state actors. I think Musk is turning a blind eye or even allowing that to happen.”

Actions like these, from Musk, are nothing new. Late last year, he re-platformed to X one of the UK’s most influential far-right figures, Tommy Robinson, who was in the digital wilderness just a year ago. On the 3rd and 4th of August (at the height of the riots), his posts were viewed on X over 126 million times.

“Just look at Musk's tweets from the last week, alone, and we can all see that he has very literally engaged in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hate speech,” says Jones. “This is how normalised Islamophobic rhetoric has become across politics and the media (old and new). The things one can say about Muslims are shocking, and if those very same things were said about other religions there would be total outrage.”

Today, 18% of Britons think that Muslim immigration is part of a plan to make Muslims the majority of the population, while 30% think the government is hiding the truth about the number of migrants who live in Britain (a number that rises to 47% among Reform voters), according to a recent YouGov poll.

Voices like those of Musk, Robinson, and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage have decades-old comparisons. But never have such opinions been so easily shared and disseminated.

Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman. 

Follow him on Twitter: @seblebanon