How Not to hand Populists a Weapon
6 min read
The ugly right-wing riots that broke out across the United Kingdom over the past week have put Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a difficult position: He and his new Labour government must address the widespread concern about immigration that helped drive the unrest—not because of what the rioters have done and said, but in spite of it.
The lawlessness on display in recent days doesn’t change the fact that the British government has been mishandling immigration for years. It allowed in record numbers of migrants entering legally and illegally, year after year, in the teeth of popular opposition, and then introduced flawed schemes, such as the aborted effort to fly them to Rwanda for processing. The number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats—some of them drowning in the attempt—continues to rise and is a source of shame and anguish across the political spectrum.
Starmer, who arrived at 10 Downing Street a month ago, can’t be blamed for any of this. But if he doesn’t find ways to manage Channel crossings and perceived failures of integration, populists waiting in the wings will offer cruder answers. Only last month, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party won 14 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections, based largely on his promises to “freeze” all immigration.
The trigger for the riots was an appalling mass stabbing of children in northern England in late July, in which the suspect is a second-generation Rwandan immigrant. Protests—fueled by false rumors about the alleged killer—quickly turned violent, with mobs rampaging through a dozen cities and towns in England and Northern Ireland, looting, setting fires, and waging street battles with counterprotesters. Hundreds of people were arrested, and televised images of violent mobs attacking mosques led Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries to warn their citizens to stay clear—a humiliating reversal, at least in the eyes of some Brits.
The protesters and their online proxies heralded their actions as a groundswell of popular anger at decades of unchecked immigration and its alleged consequences: jihadist attacks, stabbings, sexual abuse by Pakistani “grooming gangs.” One Conservative commentator invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s line—“A riot is the language of the unheard”—in a context the late reverend would probably not have endorsed.
In fact, much of the violence was opportunistic “far-right thuggery,” as Starmer put it. The government has rightly arrested some of those who spread false claims that the suspect in the stabbings was a Muslim asylum seeker; as in other violent outbreaks around the world, online misinformation has had an insidious ability to widen social fissures.
But the fissures were already there, and the riots were about more than the online provocations of a handful of thugs. Some of the videos posted in recent days showed bearded Muslims roaming the streets with weapons while chanting “Allahu Akbar” and engaging in clashes with protesters. In Birmingham, masked men waving Palestinian flags attacked a pub and beat a man standing outside it; Sky News cut its live feed after several other masked men surrounded a female reporter and shouted curses and pro-Palestine slogans at her and her camera crew.
The riots followed a long string of other clashes, including anti-immigrant protests in Ireland and violent confrontations involving Roma migrants in Leeds last month. If all of this were happening in another part of the world, it might be described—as some pundits have observed—as ethnic conflict.
Public anxiety over immigration was a prominent theme during the British parliamentary election in July. The Conservative Party was punished at the polls for promising and then failing to “stop the boats,” as former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak put it. Immigration consistently ranks among the top three concerns of the British public, along with the cost of living and the struggling National Health Service, according to Luke Tryl, the U.K. director of the think tank More in Common. Even after the riots, 58 percent of respondents to a YouGov poll said they sympathized with those who protested peacefully against British immigration policies over the past week (the majority expressed disapproval of the rioters).
A more focused policy would reform the U.K.’s chaotic asylum system and maybe even its approach to assimilating new arrivals. Labour officials have already made clear that they want to reduce immigration, saying that the recent net annual number of 600,000 migrants or more is unsustainable. Starmer has also promised to crack down on the smuggling rings that bring migrants across the Channel. Greater transparency about just what the government’s policies really are could help mitigate the power of conspiracy theories about plots to crowd out the native-born. Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future, told me that Britain could also do more to integrate newcomers into the country’s civic life, such as offering incentives to bring them into local clubs and networks and helping all new migrants achieve English fluency soon after arrival.
Britain’s official efforts to manage immigration in recent decades have been inconsistent. In 1968, the Tory politician Enoch Powell inveighed against the menace of mass migration in an oration that became known as his “Rivers of Blood” speech. A survey at the time found that 74 percent of Britons agreed with him. The government adopted more restrictive measures soon afterward.
But almost three decades later, the government of Tony Blair began admitting migrants in much greater numbers, partly for economic reasons and partly as a consequence of the European Union’s open-borders policy. Blair also helped introduce a more multicultural conception of Britain as a mosaic of ethnic and religious “communities.” In the same vein, there have been efforts to suggest that Britain’s new wave of immigrants was nothing new, just the latest chapter in “Our Migration Story,” as one government-sponsored website put it.
This narrative was sadly misaligned with the facts. In the early years of this century, more immigrants arrived in Britain in a single year than in the entire period from 1066 to 1950. The sudden demographic shift was enormous and consequential, not only in numbers but in kind: Many of the newcomers came from non-European cultures and religions. Some Britons understandably felt that their country was transforming at an unnerving pace.
Yet the British response was mostly to muddle through and hope for the best, even as some countries in Northern Europe—struggling with crime-ridden enclaves of recent migrants—began adopting a more rigorous approach. Curiously, Tony Blair himself took a stand against multiculturalism in 2019, declaring that migrants must be forced to better integrate into British society. Why? To forestall the same “far-right bigotry” that lately has been on display.
The rioters have done a disservice to their ostensible cause by associating it with violence, but that should not dissuade Starmer from confronting the issue. “If people think they’re being ignored, they will turn away from mainstream political parties, and you’ll end up with a much more draconian immigration policy,” Tryl told me.
That may sound like blackmail. But the riots should serve as a reminder that immigration has been the weapon of choice for populists everywhere, including Donald Trump, who is promising to deport millions of undocumented immigrants if he is reelected. Starmer now has a chance to take that weapon out of their hands.
