The past week has seen some of the worst and largest-scale racist violence in recent British history. In towns and cities across England, as well as in Belfast, far-right mobs have set fire to accommodation housing asylum seekers, laid siege to mosques, fought with police, looted shops, and damaged public buildings and private homes alike. Scores of people – mostly from Muslim and British-Asian backgrounds – have been assaulted in the street, including a man in Hull who was dragged from his car and beaten. These attacks have been so targeted, organised and vicious that describing them as “pogroms” might be more accurate than as “riots” (or “protests”, as the media has been characterising them).

While these events might be shocking, they haven’t appeared out of nowhere. Islamophobia, racism and far-right ideology are hardly new to Britain, but they have been intensifying in recent years, and the rate of hate crimes has been incrementally increasing as a result. It was only a matter of time before mass violence erupted. Here are some of the most important factors which got us here.

THE INTERNET

It seems like at one point, not very long ago, if you wanted to see people posting adulatory memes about Adolf Hitler or debating the respective skull sizes of various ethnic minorities, you would have to seek this out in some dark corner of the internet. But no longer. Twitter, in particular, has become a cesspit – every time you log in you’re guaranteed to see an opinion that would make the most hardcore poster in the Daily Mail comments section blush. It’s unfortunate that two of the most powerful, famous people on the planet are now among the worst offenders, regularly amplifying far-right talking points and whipping up harassment campaigns against beleaguered minorities (one of them is the platform’s owner, Elon Musk; the other is famously litigious, so I’ll leave you to guess…).

Whether it’s Twitter or closed-door apps like Telegram, it’s clear that social media played a role in both inciting and coordinating the riots. But it’s not the whole picture. Online misinformation is most effective on people who are actively seeking it out or already susceptible. While the initial unrest last week was provoked by the false claim that the perpetrator of the Stockport stabbings was a Muslim man, this was really just a pretext – fact-checking it did nothing to prevent the violence. And while we shouldn’t discount it altogether, focusing on online radicalisation risks obscuring the fact that racism and Islamophobia are not particularly “radical” in the context of Britain. In terms of ideology, if not behaviour, there is no clear line between the mainstream on one hand and an extremist fringe on the other.

THE MEDIA

Even if its influence has waned, the media in Britain still wields a lot of power in shaping national discourse. According to a 2024 report by the Runnymede Trust, the media has used dubious data and disproportionate coverage to manufacture “exaggerated support” for anti-immigration views. 

Almost everyone with a platform will agree that trying to burn down a migrant accommodation is taking things too far, and you won’t see any broadsheet journalists looting a ShoeZone in Hull. But the right-wing press objects to the “thuggery”, rather than the underlying motives, which they consider legitimate. Several conservative pundits have argued that, having spent years warning of the grave consequences of mass immigration, the riots have actually proven them right. But there is no unmediated relationship between reality and perception. The rioters are not reacting against the rates of immigration, but the far more galvanising idea that Britain’s culture, way of life and long-term survival are under threat. This narrative – along with the perception that everything wrong with the country, from the housing crisis to the decimation of our public services, is down to immigration – has been constructed and promoted within the mainstream media.

POLITICIANS

Acting in lockstep with the media, Britain’s two major political parties have spent the last few years competing to sound tougher on migration. Instead of rejecting the Conservatives’ failed approach, Labour has endorsed their underlying logic at every turn and used the same language of “stopping small boats”. This approach has had a material impact on both migrants in Britain and anyone who could be perceived as such. Several studies have found a link between politicians indulging in anti-migrant rhetoric and the rate of hate crimes and far-right activity. Five days before a mob tried to burn down a holiday inn in Tamworth, which was housing asylum seekers, the constituency’s Labour MP Sarah Edwards made a speech in parliament demanding that the hotel be returned to the community, thus legitimising the grievance which inspired the arsonists.

Britain’s political establishment has also helped to create a climate where British Muslims are viewed as an internal enemy. The Prevent strategy – a counter-terrorism programme with a track record of disproportionately targeting Muslims and their human rights – enjoys bipartisan support. Both major parties have a rampant Islamophobia problem within their own ranks; both have demonised pro-Palestine protesters and Muslim voters as a threat to democracy. By legitimising Israel’s actions in Gaza – whether through defending its violations of international law or endorsing its justifications – Keir Starmer has further contributed to the dehumanisation of Muslims.

‘ECONOMIC ANXIETY’

In the wake of the riots, some commentators have rushed to portray them as a howl of discontent by the working classes, impoverished and disenfranchised after years of austerity. There are some good reasons for taking this line: there is a correlation between economic inequality and the popularity of the far-right, and making greater efforts to tackle the former, instead of expanding police powers, would be one of the better available outcomes (I wouldn’t hold your breath). It’s also not necessarily the case that everyone on the streets is a committed far-right partisan – taking part in looting might just be chaotic opportunism rather than sincere ideology affinity. 

But the relationship between class status and the far-right isn’t so straightforward. While some of the people involved are working class, and there’s clearly an element of ambient dissatisfaction, it would be a mistake to position the far-right as a working-class movement (mainly because so many of the people targeted are themselves working class.) Perceived cultural threat is generally a bigger motive for the politics of racism, and where economic anxieties do come into play, some studies suggest this is also more about perception – people who are actually economically insecure, rather than worried about the possibility, are more likely to vote for the left. Fascism has always been a cross-class movement, and today there’s no shortage of landlords, golf enthusiasts, people who holiday in Madeira and broadsheet journalists with double-barrelled surnames. As was the case in Nazi Germany, small business owners continue to play an outsize role in far-right politics.

‘IMMIGRATION’

If you asked the people rioting to explain their own motives, they would tell you it’s about high immigration. But we don’t have to take this at face value. While politicians will no doubt continue pandering to them, there’s no reason to believe that reducing immigration would shut them up. The British far-right was at the height of its popularity in the mid-1970s, after the government had introduced strict new controls and immigration was at a relatively low and stable rate. Research also shows that white people who live in multicultural, high-immigration areas are less likely to hold racist or anti-migrant views, which complicates the idea there is a straightforward relationship between immigration and anti-migrant backlash. Tamworth – where people tried to burn down a Holiday Inn housing asylum seekers – is 96 per cent white. What percentage do you think these people would be happy with? We don’t have to accept any attempt to portray these riots, or the motives behind them, as legitimate.