A masked protester throws a can of beer towards riot police in Bristol, southern England, on Aug. 3.JUSTIN TALLIS/Getty Images
Chris Michael is a London-based writer.
It’s all too familiar: Brits in hoodies on a hot August day, smashing windows, torching cars and throwing rocks at riot cops. Now, as then, the troublemakers yell loudly but vaguely about inequality and the lies of the police.
But the superficial comparisons between the 2011 riots, which swept London after the death of a Black man at the hands of police, and the current violence in England, which has followed the hideous killings of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport by a 17-year-old boy, don’t run as deep as they might seem – and reflect a country facing a very new threat than it did 13 years ago. Back then, in what now seems like the halcyon days before Britain left the EU, the country was reeling – first from the 2008 financial crash, then from the Conservative government’s austerity measures. Everybody, it was said, now had to tighten their belts. Municipal budgets were sliced in half like a magician’s assistant, severing that section of the population who relied most heavily on state help.
One of the first big things to go were youth centres. So, when white police shot and killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Black man, in north London after claiming he was armed, the peaceful protest about conflicting police accounts quickly pulled in younger people hanging around aimlessly. They masked up and kicked off, smashing glass and looting stores. By the time the chaos settled three days later, the riots had caught up as many as 30,000 people, all angry at a rapidly gentrifying London.
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But what’s been happening in Southport, Liverpool, Manchester and even Belfast this past week looks very different. Where Londoners looted shops and were racially mixed, the gangs now attacking mosques and hotels housing asylum-seekers are almost exclusively white. And where the 2011 protests were against police dishonesty, the lies are now being spread by the mobs: that the killer of those girls was Muslim (he wasn’t), that he was an asylum-seeker (he was born in Cardiff), and that the state is covering up his real identity (he’s 17, so he couldn’t be legally named until it emerged in court).
If the 2011 London riots were mostly about people feeling they weren’t getting a fair shake from the state, the 2024 incarnation is another thing entirely: a racist mob. Indeed, far from an uprising against the state, this violence is the child of the state, which has encouraged anti-immigrant sentiment for years. To make Brexit seem like it was working, the Conservatives had long promised to reduce annual immigration below 100,000, which had the side effect of reinforcing the message that immigration is inherently bad. After Liz Truss destroyed the Tories’ economic credibility, a desperate Rishi Sunak pulled out that old chestnut: stop the boats. Is it any wonder that some people now feel it’s acceptable to chant “Get them out”?
Social media, which has come a long way since 2011, hasn’t helped. A false name for the Southport killer appears to have been planted on X by a Russian-linked news aggregator, but it was the lack of controls on X, as well as Google and YouTube, that allowed the fake news to spread so quickly.
Certain politicians can smell advantage in the acrid smoke. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, has stoked the flames, “just asking questions” about whether the police are lying, when he knows full well why the killer’s name was protected. Nor has Labour rebutted the hate with the kind of denunciation it deserves: the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has clenched his fist against “violent thuggery” and promised law and order, but not denounced Islamophobia.
The far right are masters of the victimhood narrative. Mr. Farage, who pushed for Brexit and then claimed it wasn’t done right, will continue to just ask his questions: sure, the rioters might be overeager, but don’t they have legitimate concerns? But instead of urging poorer white families to question state funding cuts, which increased the proportion of children in larger families living in poverty from 36 per cent in 2011, to 46 per cent today, the wealthy Mr. Farage will redirect their anger toward people who can’t stand up for themselves.
In 2011, when the poverty of this class-riven island bubbled up organically in response to police violence, it felt like a popular, if inchoate, movement to redress inequality. What’s happening now is a double tragedy. It’s the same poverty, now being actively exploited by bad-faith actors. It’s easier to blame “migrant crime” than a political class that has cut both taxes and spending in order to enrich corporations and disenfranchise the poor. They may have been opportunistic, but at least the rioters in 2011 knew who the bad guys were.