Why aren’t far-right riots in the UK being labeled acts of terror?
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There is a strange irony to the violence taking place in the UK.
Groups of people are claiming on the one hand to be outraged by the July 29 killing of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport, while on the other are rampaging through the streets, attacking civilians, smashing up shop fronts, and setting vehicles on fire.
A friend recently said that what we are seeing in the UK’s cities is nothing short of acts of terrorism — and they might have a point.
Of course, no one has officially suggested that the mobs who attacked mosques, hotels housing migrants, and even set a bus on fire, are terrorists.
But look at the definition — terrorism is the “unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims” — and isn’t that precisely what these people are doing?
The thugs, with the St. George cross draped over their shoulders, claim they are responding to the deadly knife attack, which they initially said was the work of a Muslim foreign national.
The boy charged with the attack is Welsh, 17, and not a Muslim — not that it would matter if he was. The attack was horrific and shocked the nation, but the information shared on social media was simply wrong and risked prejudicing a future trial.
It is also worth noting that the suspect, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, has been arrested and charged with three counts of murder and 10 of attempted murder. He is already going through the judicial process, and nothing more can be done before the case goes to court.
In the immediate aftermath of the killings at the Taylor Swift dance party, Southport residents gathered to hold a peaceful vigil out of respect for the victims and their families.
But this show of community unity was hijacked, and violence broke out as extreme right-wing thugs took to the streets after misinformation about the alleged killer’s identity and religion were shared.
The residents came out the next day and helped clean up the debris left behind from the previous night’s violence.
In interviews all those asked said this was not in their name — the attacks on people, buildings and vehicles were not supported by the residents who wanted to mourn in peace.
But since July 29, illegal organized gatherings of right-wing extremists have descended into scenes of extreme violence across the country, with shop fronts smashed, vehicles set ablaze, and police hurt.
In Sunderland, north England, hotels housing migrants were targeted at the weekend in the latest pitched battles to hit the UK’s streets.
In Britain, children under 18 who are accused of a crime remain anonymous under the country’s child protection laws, but after misinformation wrongly identified the accused, the courts ruled his right to anonymity be waived and the defendant was identified as Rudakubana.
There simply is no evidence to suggest that migrants bring with them a wave of crime.
Peter Harrison
It is not the first time that ill-informed thugs have rampaged through the UK’s streets.
In 2000, the former British national Sunday newspaper News of the World launched a “name and shame” campaign in which it printed the photos and details of people it said were known sex offenders.
However, on several occasions it gave the wrong details and identified innocent people.
As a trainee reporter on a British local weekly newspaper, the South London Press, I was contacted by one such person whose photo was published against the details of someone else.
Despite the details being false, he was still targeted in malicious attacks. Hate-fueled messages were posted through his door, and even his elderly mother was targeted.
The violence was also directed against other innocent people, including a Bristol-based pediatrician whose practice was targeted, with graffiti daubed on the door and walls outside. Demonstrators believed the doctor was a pedophile — as opposed to a doctor who specializes in the treatment of children, which this person was.
The current unrest comes amid a rise in the far right’s standing in the political spectrum across the Western world: Marine Le Pen in France and the Reform Party in the UK. Austria is seeing it, too.
In the UK, they are all pointing the finger at migrants and making what appears to be unsubstantiated claims that these people are behind an increase in crime in the country.
Their claims were echoed by former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who cited unnamed, supposedly high-ranked police, as saying studies showed an increase in crime and criminal activity associated with the country’s migrant population.
However, the Oxford Migration Observatory, the academic institute that gathers data on the movement of people, was reported in the UK national daily The Guardian in February to have said that it was “not aware of any recent academic or official statistics examining criminality among refugees who had recently arrived in the UK.”
A spokesperson was quoted as saying: “There is little evidence that migrants are any more or less likely to commit crimes than any other members of the population.”
The Guardian article concluded by quoting senior British police as saying migrants were, in fact, more likely to fall victim to crime, either through exploitation or incidents directed at them.
Meanwhile, the UK government’s own statistics on ethnicity and the criminal justice system showed that between 2019/20 and 2021/22, a conclusive 68 percent of “principal suspects convicted of homicide were from the white ethnic group,” while members of the black ethnic group accounted for 14 percent, and 15 percent were from “other ethnic groups.”
There simply is no evidence to support the claim that migrants bring with them a wave of crime to the UK.
Of course, the irony is that in British cities that have been the scene of the latest riots, the figures will show an increase in violent crimes committed by white males. Will they be out on the streets condemning their own behavior when the numbers are released? Probably not.
But, as history has shown, the violence will probably stop when the hot summer days come to an end and it inevitably rains, which was the case in the Brixton riots of the 1980s and the widespread unrest in London in 2011.
As one interviewee told Sky News, any police officer in the UK will say the most effective way of preventing such violence is “PC Rain.”
But on the point of whether they are committing acts of terror, that seems unlikely given they are white and Western.
- Peter Harrison is a senior editor at Arab News in the Dubai office. He has covered the Middle East for more than a decade. X: @PhotoPJHarrison
