Keep calm and carry on: The UK far-right won't win the media war

We warned this could happen. After years of disinformation, demonisation, and the scapegoating of British minorities, migrants, and Muslims, Pandora’s Box has been opened in the UK, with terrifying consequences.

Last weekend, far-right rioters tried to kill asylum seekers living in hotels. Not once but twice – in two different English towns. 

The rioters claimed they had “legitimate concerns” about immigration policy that had gone unheard, and that a reasonable response was to set fire to their accommodation paid for by the state. Let’s be clear: it is not a “reasonable” response to anything, it is attempted murder. And parts of the UK’s divisive political and media establishment are complicit.

Towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland erupted – leaving the police to battle unprecedented violent disorder organised, promoted and perpetrated by racist agitators spreading misinformation. 

For well over a decade, bank bailouts, caps on public spending, the failures of Brexit, Covid and rocketing fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine have led to stagnating growth, deepening the economic divide between parts of the UK. London was responsible for 14 percent of GDP – a stark metric proving the engine room of growth runs out of steam well before arriving at an array of deprived Northern towns and fading seaside resorts.  

Instead of addressing the complex issues of poor housing, health and wealth disparities, far-right forces have played a far simpler tune to vulnerable communities: why bother metaphorically ‘punching up’ at those in power by demanding, say, a long-term sustainable industrial strategy that will ready us for the challenges of the technological revolution when you can literally ‘punch down’ the person of colour up the road and feel better for an adrenaline-fuelled week of burning and looting?

As the police cracked down on the rioters, accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ – the false claim that thugs were being harshly treated because they were white – began to take hold. In reality, it is ethnic minorities who are subject to racial disparities in the criminal justice system, some are victimised, and due to substantial cuts in legal aid, a number have no assurance of effective redress from authorities.

The uncomfortable truth, for journalists like me, is that parts of the media establishment have played their part in igniting the disturbances. That’s especially true of privately owned tabloid newspapers and broadcasters whose platforms legitimise voices that openly accuse Muslims of being unable to share British values and asylum seekers of ‘invading’ our shores.

The increasingly clickbait nature of the news industry means they along with politicians, previous Home Secretaries and even Prime Ministers who’ve adopted such rhetoric, are disproportionately amplified.

The UK's illiberal alliance wreaks havoc

The role played by a toxic huddle of alleged sex traffickers and anti-Islam misogynists in stirring communal tensions cannot be underestimated.

It was in the grief-stricken hours after three little girls — Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine — were fatally stabbed in Southport that false rumours began to circulate that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker. 

The boy accused of the girl’s murder is, in fact, a 17-year-old British teenager born in Cardiff.    

The likes of the English Defence League's Tommy Robinson, anti-BLM protagonist Lawrence Fox and the Manosphere's Andrew Tate spread the false Islamophobic claim via their huge social media accounts. The lie was, in turn, repeated by Nigel Farage MP, the leader of the anti-immigration political party, Reform.  

Within days the riots looked set to reach a devastating crescendo as far-right sympathisers on Telegram circulated a “hit list” of one hundred locations in England associated with asylum seekers, effectively inciting a call to arms for a long-promised race war.

Black, brown and Muslim Britons, immigrants and refugees felt a deep sense of foreboding on a scale I’ve not witnessed in my lifetime.

Though I was just a child in the late 1970s and 80s, I still remember the fear that accompanied past racist riots and murders. This time, however, feels different: the rapid and widespread sharing of misinformation, the claims of foreign state interference, and the normalising of Islamophobia and racism in mainstream media and politics made the consequences feel uncontrollable.

The impact of the “hit list” had an immediate chilling effect: without a single punch being thrown, the far-right managed to influence national life and, more importantly, its collective psyche.

Brown and black businesses were forced to shut down, nurseries asked parents to collect their children early, immigration lawyers were told to work from home, and hospital appointments were cancelled out of fear of potential unrest.

But unlike the far-right, extreme circumstances do not call for extreme action. Our communities remained calm: warnings were exchanged, plans were cancelled, the vulnerable were checked on, and anxieties were voiced on shared WhatsApp groups.

I too decided to post a video appeal on my social media platforms — which have large followings. I shared that, as an Asian woman, I understood the visceral fear felt by ethnic minorities.

However, with twenty years of experience as a broadcast journalist, I also recognised this: the far-right is determined to win what they perceive as a ‘media war’.

Their playbook is to provoke black and brown communities into violence, which would be captured on film and manipulated as propaganda to falsely suggest that multiculturalism is failing.

These images would inevitably make their way onto mainstream TV news, radio discussions, and newspaper columns, twisting the narrative to portray the aggressors as victims. Do not, I urged the viewers, give them that gift. 

Not only did black, brown, and Muslim communities heed this call, but we stood up, loud and proud, alongside our white-British allies in the spirit of No Pasarán — "They Shall Not Pass", the anti-fascist slogan made famous in the Spanish Civil War.

The streets were filled, not with the vicious mobs we’d watched for days on end, but thousands upon thousands of peaceful anti-racist protestors who had amassed in UK towns and cities in solidarity with asylum seekers and people of colour. 

In the places where small groups of troublemakers showed up, they found themselves in need of police protection; outnumbered by the ordinary, everyday people of these Isles waving colourful placards with the words “Stand Up to Racism” and “No Nazis welcome here!” 

As the dust settles, we must ask ourselves: will the far-right rioters return? Is this just the end of the beginning? How can we end the divisive political rhetoric that fuels intolerance, and how can we curb disinformation from major figures like Elon Musk who himself has fanned the flames by insinuating that the UK is on the verge of civil war? 

The answers won’t come quickly or easily, but for now, I find comfort and pride in the photos and videos circulating online, from Liverpool to London, showing thousands of British people — of various creeds, colours, all faiths and none — chanting “fascists not welcome here!” as they reclaim the streets and, with them, our nation’s soul.

Sangita Myska is an award-winning journalist, and familiar face on British television news. She has worked on a wide range of BBC output including News, Current Affairs, General Factual and Consumer Affairs programmes, and was previously a weekend presenter on LBC.

Follow her on X: @SangitaMyska

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