By Alex Wickham and Siraj Datoo
London: Foreign states may be involved in fuelling a wave of riots that’s hit the UK in the past week, Keir Starmer’s government said, as the prime minister promised to crack down on perpetrators with the “full force of the law”.
The premier on Monday held a so-called Cobra meeting of senior ministers, police and prison chiefs to coordinate the response to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots that led to hundreds of arrests over the last week.
Afterward, he told broadcasters that authorities agreed to mobilise a “standing army” of police officers to deal with the disorder.
Riot police detain an anti-migration protester outside of the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, which is being used as an asylum hotel in Rotherham, United Kingdom.Credit: Getty Images
Starmer’s spokesman, Dave Pares, told reporters that social media firms must do more to respond to online hate, and also slammed a post on X by Elon Musk that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, saying there was “no justification” for the billionaire’s remark.
Musk made his post in response to a video showing footage of rioting and remarks from another poster that it was the result of “migration and open borders”.
In videos uploaded to social media many of the protesters can be heard chanting “stop the boats,” a reference to crossings made from the European continent by migrants attempting to get to Britain.
A car burns after it was set on fire during a demonstration in Middlesbrough by far right activists in Middlesbrough, England.Credit: Getty Images
The unrest poses a major early challenge for Starmer’s month-old government, threatening to plunge it into a polarising cultural debate. With further demonstrations planned this week, it’s also a test of British policing and the country’s judicial and prisons system, which were already creaking at the seams.
“We will have the officers we need, where we need them, to deal with this disorder,” Starmer said in a pooled clip to broadcasters after the Cobra meeting. “Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest, it is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities and so the full force of the law will be visited on all those who are identified as having taken part in these activities.”
Without naming countries, Pares said that the police and government had seen some evidence of foreign state involvement in online bot activity driving far-right sentiment and confirmed that Britain’s National Crime Agency is looking into the matter.
Violent scenes over the weekend in towns and cities including Rotherham, Blackpool and Bristol need an “immediate response” from social media firms, he said.
Riot police officers patrol as anti-migration protesters gather in Rotherham, United Kingdom. Credit: Getty Images
A message shared by far-right activists on the Telegram platform, seen by Bloomberg, called for demonstrations at the premises of some 30 refugee and immigration centres and law firms representing asylum seekers on Wednesday evening.
The campaign group Tell Mama, which documents anti-Muslim incidents, said it had alerted the police to the posts.
Jacob Davey, Director of Policy and Research at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), said the flood of online disinformation and the role of social media firms themselves had been key.
“I don’t think we can underestimate how central the spread of this information is to the horrific events of the weekend,” he told Reuters.
The recent disorder has been fuelled by online misinformation since an attack a week ago left three young girls dead in Southport, northwest England.
Far-right activists falsely claimed the suspect was a Muslim migrant in an effort to stoke anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment.
In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, protesters on Sunday attacked a hotel they believed was housing asylum seekers and started a fire, injuring around a dozen police officers. Another hotel used for immigrant accommodation was targeted in Tamworth, while in Hull, demonstrators gathered outside a third hotel, smashing windows and throwing bottles.
The violence at the weekend also hit the Walton area of Liverpool, Leicester, Stoke-on Trent, Nottingham, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Sunderland and Belfast.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood told Cobra she was confident prisons had the capacity to lock up rioters. But since 2010, when the Conservatives took office, funding cuts have left much of the court system struggling to process even their regular workload.
Those courts are now working with a backlog of around 387,000 cases as of April this year, a figure that has surged since the pandemic.
“We will ramp up criminal justice,” Starmer said. “There have already been hundreds of arrests. Some of them have appeared in court this morning. I have asked for early consideration of the earliest naming and identification of those involved.”
Some 70 extra prosecutors were on hand over the weekend to process charges for people arrested during the riots, and 60 remand courts had been made available to ensure the swift administration of criminal cases.
There had been no discussion of deploying the army to help contain the demonstrations, Starmer’s spokesman said. The government also announced additional measures to protect mosques on Sunday.
Authorities have yet to point the finger at specific named groups.
Far-right activists appear to have mobilised online, including using Twitter and Telegram to call for protests in towns and cities across the country. Far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has used Twitter posts to stoke tensions, while Reform UK Party Leader Nigel Farage has questioned whether police withheld the truth in the Southport attack.
Anti-migration protesters riot outside of the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, which is being used as an asylum hotel in Rotherham, United Kingdom.Credit: Getty Images
The violence is the worst in England since the summer of 2011, when rioting raged for five days following the police killing of a black man in north London.
That led to the prosecution of thousands of people and lengthy prison sentences. Starmer was the director of public prosecutions at the time and is expected to take a similarly tough approach to the latest unrest, according to the official.
Tensions have been rising since the stabbing attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport, near Liverpool, on July 29. Police have said the suspect, Axel Rudakubana, 17, was born in Britain in an attempt to counter false claims spread on social media that he was a Muslim migrant.
Bloomberg, Reuters
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