Q&A: The Far Right in the UK and the recent riots

Hi guys, there has been a story in the news here in the UK that I really cannot ignore any longer and that is the riots instigated by the far right. So a quick summary of what has happened: on the 29th July, a black British teenager carried out a horrendous knife attack in a dance class for children in Southport, killing three young white girls and injuring many others. At first, the mainstream media was not allowed to name the attacker Axel Muganwa Rudakubana (I shall abbreviate his long name to AMR) because of his age at the time of the attack, as a minor at 17, the police didn't reveal his name and this has quickly led to the spread of fake news on social media that the attacker was actually a Muslim asylum seeker "Ali Al-Shakati". This is completely false of course, whilst AMR's parents were migrants from Rwanda, he was born in Wales, was living in England at the time of the attack and more importantly, neither him nor his parents are Muslims or have any ties at all to Islam. Despite the fact that AMR was quickly named by the police, the fake news had already sparked off a lot of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant riots all over the country - mosques and black/Asian owned businesses were targeted, hostels and hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked. as well. These riots were led by the far right and started on the 30th July, the day after the attack and as I have started writing this post on the 11th August (Sunday), these riots seem to have died down as counter-protests have overwhelmed the few rioters determined to cause trouble. I'm not here to tell you what has happened already as you can get all the news from a reliable website like the BBC. Instead, I'm here to answer some difficult questions that my readers outside the UK would ask about this issue. Allow me to state that it took a while for me to compile this post, so there has been a certain time lag between when I first started writing it and when I finally posted it. The riots have all but died down, by the time I posted this piece. 

Q: Why did this tragic event spark such violent and widespread riots? 

A: The far right have always been a part of the British politics scene, it's just that they usually are kept in the fringes of society. However, in this year's general election, the far right party Reform won 14.3% of the popular vote and now have five members of parliament. Other far right parties like the Brexit party and UKIP have participated in the past but this is the first time they have had a breakthrough in terms of winning this many votes. Ironically, the headline was the landslide victory for Labour which indicated a major swing to the left but if you look a bit more carefully, what happened was that the vote share for the Conservative party had all but totally collapsed - some Conservative voters drifted towards the left and centre (and voted for parties like Labour and the Liberal Democrats) whilst others drifted to the right and voted for Reform. That emboldened those on the far right, now they have a political party to support which now has to be taken seriously. We have always had sporadic episodes of violence and riots like that - the one that comes to mind is the 2011 riots which spread all over the country. These rioters don't need much of an excuse to start a riot and it was the fake news on social media played a huge role this time. My regular readers will know that I am quite left-wing and I support both Labour and the Liberal Democrats; I don't post on X (formerly known as Twitter) but I like to scroll through X and see the content from the people I follow there. However on X, unless you pay for premium subscription (which I don't), the algorithm will suggest tweets from people they think you would be interested in. Sometime the content is actually stuff that I am actually interested in (such as gymnastics or the Olympics), sometimes it is just jokes which I enjoy but increasingly there is a shocking amount of fake news by the far right as well and every time that happens, I have to block the person who sent that tweet to somehow try to convince the algorithm to only show me content that is left wing. If a left wing person like me finds it hard to avoid this kind of right wing fake news on social media, those who are less discerning would struggle to differentiate between what is just fake news and what is actually real. Thus those who are looking for any excuse to start a riot are easily mobilized on social media by those trying to push a certain brand of far right, anti-immigrant rhetoric. One key aim of the riots is looting: these people don't have that much of a political agenda, the rioters are poor people who see this as an opportunity to steal as much free stuff as possible when the police forces are taken by surprise and totally overwhelmed by the scale of the riot -: it was what happened both in 2011 and in 2024. 

Q: Who are the rioters? 

A: They are mostly poor people who really have nothing to lose. There's a simple reason why I don't join the riots and go looting: I don't want to break the law and end up in jail. I have a pretty good life: work is going very well and I risk jeopardizing all that if I do something stupid and illegal. Please, it's not like I have some incredible moral compass which keeps me from breaking the law - it is the threat of punishment that deters me from wanting to ever do anything illegal. But imagine if you are a teenager without any hope of a bright future: you come from a very poor, working class background and everyone in your community is either unemployed or stuck in some miserable, poorly paid job. You think that your he future is painfully bleak and you feel like you have little to lose by joining in the riot - even if you do get caught, so what? It is not like you have some bright future to sacrifice. If enough people in your community feel the same way, then there's a certain mob mentality that takes over and emboldens these young people to go out there and start a riot. The fact is the UK is a very divided country: it's not like there is no money but the money is very unevenly distributed: so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. By that token, there are plenty of very poor people in the UK. So if you're one of those poor people who have little hope in ever getting a better life, then this lack of hope completely changes their risk-reward evaluation when they consider whether or not they should take part in a riot. Of course, the racist dimension of these riots means that it is overwhelmingly poorer, white working class people rioting whilst those who are ethnic minorities would feel decidedly unsafe during these riots and would thus stay the hell away. So to put things in perspective, one of the purchases I have made this year is a sturdy pair of branded hiking boots since I thought it would be useful for my outdoor activities when I am on holiday. I simply went shopping and bought the nicest pair I liked as I could afford it. Not everyone has the luxury of walking into the shop and saying, "oh that pair looks  really nice, I like it that very much,  I'll buy it." Poor people simply can't do that and thus looting becomes a lot more tempting if that's the only way they can get their hands on items that they really like whereas I would simply just pay for the items I like. Being poor doesn't stop you from desiring the nicer things in life, it sucks to be poor - trust me, I grew up poor and I know what it is like to look at the rich people around you enjoying the things you just can't afford. Some of those convicted of rioting are children as young as 12 - that shows the full extent of this problem as these are children convicted of serious crimes. 

Q: Why did the rioters think they could get away with it? 

A: When rioters take the police by surprise, the police cannot contain the situation. Say if a riot attracts 500 people but the police can only send 50 policemen to try to contain the situation (because they have misjudged the scale of the riot or simply due to manpower shortages), that means that the police cannot arrest everyone involve or even stop the looting as they are simply outnumbered. Even if some rioters are arrested, the majority of them would be able to get away with it. This has happened before and it will happen again in the future. When it is a fast evolving situation and you have riots popping up simultaneously in various places, the police are sometimes unable to cope and things can get very ugly when the rioters realize that there isn't enough police to stop them from doing whatever they want. The rioters realize that in such a situation, there is a high enough chance that they can get away with it if the police can only arrest less than half the people rioting. Word can spread quickly on social media once the rioters get the upper hand in this kind of situation, others may not have planned on joining the riot but may take an impulsive decision to do so. It boils down to whether you believe it is a risk worth taking and what you have at stake if you get arrest. If you have too much to lose and you don't want to end up in jail for taking part in a riot and looting, then you would approach that decision making process very differently. I am not justifying the way these rioters have behaved, I am just trying to explain their mindset in this situation.

Q: Why is the British police so useless in dealing with such a situation? 

A:There is a logical explanation: such mass rioting events are rare, they may flare up every couple of years but otherwise they don't happen all that often. The last time there were such huge riots all over the country was back in 2011, that was a 13 years ago. So there simply isn't enough police numbers to deal with such mass rioting events, when things go back to normal, there is usually sufficient number of police around to deal with the normal levels of crime. If you recruited enough police to deal with a mass rioting event, then for most of the time, your staff would be sitting around with very little work to do and it wouldn't be a good use of money. Contrast that to a country with much higher levels of crime like El Salvador for example, the crime rate was one of the highest in the world when they elected president Nayib Bukele in 2019; Bukele is a controversial president who expanded the police force to crack down on gang violence in the country. Now that was money well spent as they managed to drastically reduce the crime rate in El Salvador by arresting thousands of gang members and putting them behind bars; today El Salvador is one of the safest countries in Latin America, thanks to all this money spent on the police force. But the situation in the UK is not the same, allow me to use an analogy to make my point: I am writing this on the hottest day of the year (12 August 2024) so far - temperatures hit 34.8 degrees today afternoon and my living room feels like a furnace. The only way to cool down is to take a cold shower and that relief is only temporary, within a few minutes you will start sweating again. Now in the tropics, you would simply turn on the air-conditioner to cope with this kind of heat but we don't have air-cons in the UK as our summers tend to be quite mild and such heatwaves are rare. Looking at the weather forecast, I can expect a far more comfortable 11 degrees by the end of the week. That's why British people just grin and bear it when we get heatwaves like that, if we spent the money on expensive air-conditioning, we would only use it a few times a year and it wouldn't be good value for money unlike say in a city like Bangkok or Singapore, where you would need it all through the year. This is why the British government doesn't spend that much on the police force, as it usually isn't necessary most of the time, until we have a very major crisis, like the current one. For now the government is using other methods to try to deter people from rioting. 

Q: So what other methods are the government using in response to this situation then? 

A: In two words, "swift justice". Those arrested for rioting have had their cases fast tracked through the justice system and have already been sentenced. This is to send a message to those rioters that they will face the consequences of their actions and the extensive coverage of those already sentenced does tantamount to a "name and shame" exercise, in order to warn others thinking of rioting not to even try it as they will face the same consequences. This is unusual in the UK as the justice system is notoriously slow; so if you get arrested today for a crime, you would be released on bail and be given a court date a few months from now. In the meantime, you are allowed to return to your normal life until your court date and if your case isn't that serious, that could be many months, even years away. Even in the most serious crimes like murder, the courts need months to go through all the evidence before a trial could be conducted. But in the case of the rioting, the evidence is usually pretty straightforward - this country is covered with CCTV and often the rioters are caught on video breaking the law (for example, looting or attacking a police officer) and that is why the judges are able to pass sentences very quickly. Thus these offenders are in jail within days of breaking the law and the government is hoping that enough of these stories in the media would have a deterrent effect on anyone else thinking of rioting. Of course, whilst the government have arrested and jailed a number of these rioters, they didn't manage to catch all of them and there will be a number of them out there who have managed to get away with it. If the objective was to stop the riots, then yeah it seems to have worked. This would break the momentum of the riots and when fewer people turn up to riot, then the chances of them getting arrested becomes a lot higher. Furthermore, the far right have been constantly outnumbered by the left wing counter protests standing up to the far right and the left wing have managed to galvanize their troops and outnumber the far right all over the country. However, if the aim of the government was to punish anyone who has broken the law by rioting and looting, then no - only a minority of those who have broken the law and committed criminal offences have been thrown in jail. The majority of the rioters managed to get away with it because they overwhelmed the police in the first few days of the riots. The police will continue to pursue more rioters by combing through the evidence collected and those who can be caught will be made an example of - they would receive very harsh sentences and be thrown in jail through this swift justice fast track system. For now, this tactic does seem to be working. 

Q: Do you feel safe in London as an Asian immigrant? 

A: Many countries have sent out travel advisory warnings to try to deter their citizens from visiting the UK as a result of the riots. As a Asian person in the UK, I felt disturbed by the news I was reading on the internet but really, I didn't change my everyday routines and at no point did I feel like I was in any kind of real danger. Just this week, I heard this story about how a bunch of youths beat up a random black woman on a train in East London and hurled racist insults at her as they attacked her. I am not going to pretend for a moment that the racism doesn't exist - I am simply acknowledging the fact that I am less likely to be affected by it than this black woman who got attacked because I am a scary looking bald guy who is quite well built. These riots eventually run out of momentum and life goes back to normal after that; if you want to stay safe in London, then you need to have some common sense. My friend Nick (not his real name) is a tall Scottish guy with ginger hair, you wouldn't think that he would be the kind of guy who would be vulnerable to crime - yet one night, he got hopelessly drunk in a bar, staggered out of the bar to try to get a taxi home but before he could make it to the main road, someone hit him on the head from behind, knocked him to the floor and took his phone and wallet. Nick's height and stature didn't save him from being robbed that night, he had clearly made himself an easy target by being so drunk - I was trying so hard not to shake my head and berate him for getting drunk like that, I knew I should have been a lot more sympathetic and supportive but all I wanted to do was tell him off for behaving in such an irresponsible manner. If you exercise some common sense and avoid putting yourself in dangerous situations the way Nick did, then you would be fine in London. But that black woman who got attacked on the train was just minding her own business on the train but trouble came to find her; so let's try to strike a fine balance here. I think those travel warnings are not warranted as London is perfectly safe for the vast majority of us who live here, but you should always exercise some common sense and be a lot more sensible than my friend Nick to prevent getting into trouble. I have lived in London since 1997, that's 27 years already. I wouldn't still be here if I thought I faced any real danger on the streets of London. But then again, I can only speak for myself: I have a nice home, I work from home most of the time. This is very different from say a south Asian migrant who runs a supermarket in a poorer neighbourhood of Southport and they would be a lot more vulnerable than me - everyone faces different levels to risk and danger, depending on their circumstances. 

Q: Why were migrants and ethnic minorities targeted in these riots? 

A: The far right have used a simple message to convince their followers that the root of most of the problems we face in the UK is from too much immigration and they want to bring immigration not just down to zero, but start deporting immigrant families if they break the law. This is an overly simplistic solution to a very complex problem - take crime for example: the far right protestors were upset that the man who killed the three white girls in Southport was the son of immigrants from Africa - yet their response to that was to simply carry out even more crime by rioting and looting, proving the fact that white, English people are just as capable of committing criminal offences. These protestors are too stupid to see the irony of the whole situation. They want to demonize immigrants by proving that they are just as bad as the people they want to demonize? The fact is you simply can't treat all migrants as if they are a monolithic entity: some migrants are extremely valuable to British society (eg. an Indian doctor who comes to work for the NHS) whilst some migrants are criminals who are a menace to society - those are the two extremes, you also have everything in between of course. A far more rational approach to this issue would be to control immigration so you continue to allow useful migrants like doctors and nurses to come and work in the UK whilst turning away undesirable characters. That seems like just common sense, it has been the aim of both the current and previous governments, but the far right have delivered a completely distorted message that demonizes all migrants regardless of how much they contribute to British society. The far right use this rhetoric because it gives in to the racism that many of their supporters have and it provides them with a narrative that they like - that the problem with the country has nothing to do with them or the government, but it is the migrants from abroad and the simple solution would be to repatriate all of them and the problems would be solved. In reality of course, the root of the problem starts and ends with the local, white, British, indigenous population, from the bottom to the very top. Whilst I can understand the frustration of some of the people who want to riot as a sign of protest, doing a criminal act that will land you a long prison sentence is like cutting off your nose to spite your face, that is a hideously stupid act of protest. But if you only look at Boris Johnson's government during the pandemic and you will see plenty of white, English people being totally incompetent and messing up the country: his government wasted £9.9 billion of the taxpayers' money on PPE that couldn't be used as contracts were issued ro their cronies. But I don't see the far right complaining about that - oh, because Boris Johnson is white and English so he is allowed to get away with this kind of corruption? Stop scapegoating ethnic minorities for the problems of the UK, you are really looking in the wrong place.  

Q: Is there any validity to the claims of the protestors, that asylum seekers are treated better than locals?

A: This is a loaded question as it refers to a sense of entitlement. The UK has signed up to the UN treaty on refugees, you can read up on the details here: that means by law, the government of the UK has to provide a safe haven for those who can prove that they have a genuine cause to seek refuge in the UK and claim asylum here. Whilst the governments who have signed up to this treaty have to abide by this principle, how the asylum seekers are treated varies from country to country. So let's take a look at the situation in Europe, in poorer countries like Greece and Italy, the asylum seekers are treated very poorly - they are either stuck in an overcrowded refugee camp with appalling conditions, waiting months to be processed or simply given an appointment that can be many months away for their case to be heard and in the meantime, they receive virtually no help from the government and are reliant on local charities for their basic needs like food and shelter. The message by the Greek and Italian governments is simple: don't stay in Greece and Italy, life will be very hard for you here - you want to move onto a more generous country like Germany or Sweden if you want a future in Europe. So if the migrants then leave Greece and Italy and move to another country, then they become another country's burden and the problem is effectively solved. Are asylum seekers treated like VIP and put up in 5-star hotels here in the UK? No, they face very grim conditions but some locals here in the UK feel that those conditions are not grim enough to have the deterrent effect, where they are convinced that they would be better off somewhere like Germany or Sweden - that's why they keep coming to the UK. But look, this is a complete distraction from the real reasons migrants (illegal and legal alike) want to come to the UK, it has nothing to do with the benefits that the government gives out! It has got a lot more to do with the fact that English is the global lingua franca and if you go to Sweden, you'd need to learn Swedish and if you go to Germany, you'd need to learn German. Most of these migrants already speak some English (some better than others), so they don't have to spend years mastering a foreign language before they can get a job. There is also the impression that the streets of London are paved with gold and that it is very easy to get rich here. Finally, here's the most important reason: these migrants are completely oblivious of the laws here in the UK and they mistakenly believe that anyone from a poor country can  simply turn up here and just get a job when it is notoriously hard to get a work permit here. Due to the huge amount of misinformation out there, these illegal migrants just keep turning up - often taking very dangerous routes risking their lives when they have absolutely zero idea what they are dealing with when they get here.  

Q: So if that is the problematic situation, then what is the solution? 

A: You can't deter illegal migrants from coming by simply being so nasty to them and literally scaring them away. It doesn't work like that. The illegal migrants have grossly overestimated how good life will be for them in the UK, but you can't just bully or abuse them into changing that impression. The right solution would be to create a very effective immigration system to deal with all migrants. So to begin with, we need a super efficient system to process all illegal migrants who arrive in the UK. At the moment, the system is painfully slow - illegal migrants are stuck in limbo whilst waiting months, even years for their cases to be processed as the system is woefully underfunded and understaffed. This means that illegal migrants are housed by the state, fed by the state, receive free medical care and their kids are educated by the state whilst they wait a painfully long time for their case to be processed. On top of that, the adults have no legal right to work, so they receive benefit payments from the state as well and the longer they are kept in limbo, the more they cost the state. So the obvious solution would be to invest very heavily into the asylum processing system and slash waiting times: Sure it will cost a lot more to put in that initial investment to expand the entire system processing asylum seekers. but if you could slash waiting times in this process from a few months to a few weeks or even days, it will make such massive savings in the long run. Furthermore, if migrants don't want to be stuck in limbo facing so much uncertainty whilst waiting months for their cases to be processed - this would be a win-win solution for everyone involved. The government gets rid of the backlog of migrant cases, the migrants are not stuck in limbo for ages, more jobs are created as the government hires more people to work on these cases and it will cost the tax payer a lot less in the long run. Regardless of how these migrants turn up in the UK, let's process their cases efficiently and quickly: those who are deemed to have a legitimate right to claim asylum should be given the right to stay here but be expected to find a job, start working as soon as possible, pay their taxes and contribute to society. Those who don't have the right to stay here must be deported quickly. But of course, it needs to be made clear to these migrants that there are many legal routes that they can take if they have the right skills and are coming here to work: that's why we have a work permit system. But if these people don't have the skills to obtain a work permit legally, they shouldn't be taking very dangerous journeys to come here, only to exist on the very fringes of society as illegal immigrants with no right to access any of the better jobs.

Q: Would a more efficient processing system like that really appease the far right?

A: No you can never totally appease the far right - such is the nature of democracy but the aim of a government really shouldn't be to please everyone, rather it should try to find the best way to manage every difficult situation they encounter. Simply allowing the far right to determine government policy when it comes to illegal immigrants might please the far right, but it wouldn't solve the problem. In fact it would only make things a lot worse if you simply leave asylum seekers destitute in the streets with little or no support. So let's take the emotion out of this issue by looking at another example of how governments have to take difficult decisions: if you ask the public a question like, "do you like paying income tax? How much income tax would you like to pay?" The answer would almost certainly be, no I don't like to pay income tax and I really wish I don't have to pay any tax at all. But if a government then decides not to collect taxes based on that feedback, then they would not have money to run any public services and even the most basic services that define our modern society would grind to a halt without the funds from taxation to pay for them. Thus the government has to take unpopular, difficult decisions at times simply to do the right thing to run the country and the bottom line is that you cannot simply use public opinion to determine your policies on these issues - such decisions on policies should be taken by leading experts who know what they are talking about, not the angry mob of far right supporters who have started a riot (and are now in jail for their criminal actions). I'd like to think of the relationship between the government and the people as one that is similar to a parent-child relationship: there will be times when the parent has to say things like, "you can't watch the next TV programme, you have school tomorrow, turn off the TV and go to bed now." This is because some children cannot be trusted to make rational decisions for themselves, so the parents have to set some ground rules and boundaries. Can you imagine what would be on the menu if you let a bunch of 6 year old kids decide what they want to have for dinner? Broccoli and spinach would never make it onto the menu. This is why the government had to step in and jail the far right rioters to send a clear message that they have acted criminally - this is when the parents have to inflict some very harsh punishments, rather than reward bad behaviour. Whilst we do live in a democracy, we also need a government to lead the country and that means punishing those who have criminal intent by sending them to jail for a long time and not appeasing them in any way, shape or form. Whilst I am very glad to see the government doing the right thing in response to the riots, but they really must resolve the issue of the long processing times for the illegal migrants. 

That's it from me on this issue, please let me know what you think. Do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.