The UK has been gripped over the last week by increasing unrest following the tragic murder of three children in Southport last week. Yet, as usually goes with civil disobedience and the far-right in the UK, the events that ‘stipulate’ the direct action are often so far removed. 

In that sense, even describing the increasing unrest over the last week as ‘following’ the event in Southport is disingenuous. Instead, to fully repudiate these actions and their underlying motivations we need to label these actions as what they are: racially motivated riots. These riots have moved far beyond the description of a ‘protest’; the participants are not ‘protestors’ but racially motivated and in some cases, even performing acts of blatant terrorism.

Social media initially helped foster misinformation about the initial incident in Southport, but it has also helped spread depictions of the violence – adding to a new meaning of doomscrolling. Whether this be the burning of a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham or teenagers in Middlesbrough filming themselves on TikTok; if you have access to social media in the UK, it is impossible to escape coverage of these actions. 

Unsurprisingly key figures on the political right in the UK have proved pivotal in spreading misinformation around the riots and the motivations that underline them. The usual suspects have attempted to situate the riots as acts of legitimate frustration around legal and illegal levels of immigration while downplaying the significance of the far-right in the riots. The plethora of riot apologism can be seen on Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage’s Twitter and journalist Isabel Oakeshott’s Twitter.

Attempting to posit the burning of libraries, the looting of shops or attacking minorities as expressions of legitimate concerns from the white working class in the UK is not only deeply offensive to the wider working class but also damaging. The idea that this is a natural repercussion from years of ‘mass immigration’ and ‘open borders’ legitimises deeply racist attitudes. Figures on the right are happy to condemn the violence against the police but not the attitudes that have informed such action. 

We need to be clear about what this is and what it encapsulates: this is racism; an attempt to define the UK’s political community based on ethnic lines. This is not the manifestation of the concerns of ordinary working people. We need to interrogate the grievance of the rioters on moral terms, rather than assuming that it is legitimate because people are rioting over it. Therefore, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement on 4 August, where he condemns the violence and ‘racist rhetoric’, should be welcomed. 

A 500-word piece is not going to debunk decades of systemic misinformation around immigration in the UK; after all, the deeply morally repugnant racist attitudes that have been informed the violence speaks to wider failures in how the UK has navigated its relationship with racial issues and immigration in a ‘post-colonial’ settlement. Nor it going to challenge years of ideological convergence between the UK’s main political parties and significant parts of the media on the position of asylum seekers and justifiability of free movement. Testament to this, the rioters were seen branding placards and flags with the Conservative’s 2024 General Election slogan: stop the boats. Moreover, in that election campaign, both major parties sought to outdo each other in their response to levels of legal and illegal immigration.

In this regard, ridding the UK of these attitudes is a massive challenge. However, if we are to shift the dial, this begins with political actors leading an open and clear repudiation of the values and attitudes that inform these far-right rioters, not just their violent action.