Is Britain struggling to cope with a world it created?

Race riots in the UK and Northern Ireland should worry us all

It’s been difficult to encapsulate the despair many of us - immigrants and children of immigrants - have felt watching scenes of far-right protestors take to the streets in the UK and Ireland last week, but the lyrics of a spoken word poem shared on social media by George the Poet, a celebrated Ugandan-British artist came close.

“So Britain’s descended into race riots,” it begins. “I don’t know how any journalist sees this and stays quiet/ We just had an election soaked in racism and most of the media wasn’t fazed by it.

The message is consistent/ And it’s coming from pundits, professors and politicians: ‘Your anger should never be directed at the system; only at these immigrants who threaten your position.’

Britain's struggling to cope with a world it created/ a world where colonies propelled it to greatness.”

The far-right riots saw mobs throw bricks into the homes of non-white Britons and smash car windscreens. A Syrian supermarket in Belfast was set alight. Hijabs of Muslim women were snatched. Hotels housing asylum seekers were surrounded by furious crowds, with one masked man making a slit-throat gesture on camera. Racist graffiti was sprayed on cemeteries and mosques: “Fu** P***s”, “Scum”, “Get out England”.

The riots were instigated by false rumours of a Muslim asylum seeker being responsible for the tragic stabbing deaths of three girls at a Taylor Swift-inspired dance camp in Southport on July 29, Briton’s far-right have been targeting immigrant populations and racialized people in towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland.

In reality, the stabbing suspect was born in Wales and moved to the Southport area in 2013. But facts don't matter to bigots. Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynist social media influencer and Tommy Robinson, the de facto leader of the far-right English Defense League (EDL), both published disinformation about the perpetrator.

That content was propped up by what Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, found to be the largest known anti-Muslim ad campaign targeting users in the UK and Europe. “Some of the content would be like a picture of a big wolf with a long tongue with loads of Muslims praying outside Big Ben, or a picture of what looked like visibly Muslim or Arab men engaging in riots… and saying: ‘2050. This is what immigration means - riots on the streets’,” he said on X/Twitter.

This content reached upwards of 41 million people over six months, he added, and Meta received money for them that likely cost more than hundreds of thousands of US dollars.

But it would be remiss to characterize these riots as a triumph for the alt-right movement, because many cities in which planned riots were scheduled saw not a single person show up. In their place stood thousands of counter-protesters - Britons of every colour and ethnicity - who showed up to send a message of inclusion and unity to press, politicians and the EDL alike.

“When I first heard the EDL wanted to come to Harrow, I was a bit scared,” Dr Muhammed Asaria told 500+ counter-protestors gathered in a north London borough last Wednesday. “But I was born in Harrow and lived here all my life. And never in that time have I been scared of leaving my house. It’s a privilege to be here with so many people who will not allow that to change… There are many more of us than there are of the hate-filled racists.” 

Without immigration, the UK economy would collapse, the physician adds. “Local restaurants would close, the National Health Service (NHS) would not run and we would not have enough teachers or other staff for schools to run. The international fees paid by students coming to study from abroad also helps fund our universities so that we get the best education and degrees for a subsidized fee.”

It’s a perspective that reflects the data. Like Canada, UK immigration patterns are a critical solution to aging populations and labour shortages and help to foster trade growth. According to the Office for National Statistics, migrants contribute approximately £83 billion to the UK's economic output annually. Research also shows that migrant workers play a crucial role in sectors like healthcare, STEM industries, and finance.

But every country has its own repugnant movement of bigots, and so it didn’t take long for Canada’s far-right to feel emboldened by their British counterparts. Nationalist 13, a neo-Nazi network of individuals based in Hamilton, proclaimed last week their “community stands in solidarity with all true British Nationalists who are engaged in the struggle for their Nation.” 

“The British people have suffered enough brutality and humiliation at the hands of both invaders and Anti-White thugs in police uniforms,” they wrote on the encrypted social media application Telegram. “Those who seek to create a better future will always be persecuted by those who benefit from an intolerable present.”

The colonialist overtone of their rhetoric reminds me of something profound my colleague Dan David told our students in a course titled Decolonizing Journalism that we developed this year to examine how Eurocentric models of newsgathering perpetuate racial biases and actively preserve systemic injustice. David is a widely acclaimed Mohawk journalist who launched the Aboriginal People Television Network (APTN) in 1999.

We have a collective responsibility to resist by being more critical thinkers, he said. “Individuals are too often passive receptors of what the media is telling us. We sit there and we just simply accept it. The very first step is to work on ourselves. We have to look at our own heads and start weeding out some of those ideas and assumptions that we have not just about other people, but about who we are.”