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“British police remained on alert [last] Thursday after a heavy security presence, rapid arrests and displays of unity by people across Britain on Wednesday prevented a repeat of widespread rioting involving racist attacks targeting Muslims and migrants…
“The government said it was still cautious after days of riots triggered by false online posts wrongly identifying the suspected killer of three young girls in a July 29 knife attack in Southport, northwest England, as an Islamist migrant… More than 480 people have been arrested across the country so far, with nearly 150 charged.” Reuters
The left condemns the violence, arguing that migrants are not to blame for Britain’s problems.
“For academic Matthew Goodwin, his description of the alleged killer of the three girls in Southport was simply ‘the son of immigrants from Rwanda’. Even with the tiny amount of information we have, there are many ways one could describe Rudakubana. As British. As born in Cardiff. Of Christian heritage. A child actor. As diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder… For Goodwin, though, only one aspect of Rudakubana’s being matters…
“Working-class grievances in towns such as Sunderland or Stoke are real, from a lack of housing to an Uberised labour market, from an inability to find NHS dentists to a broken public transport system. But attacking mosques and migrant hotels, assaulting people possessing the wrong colour of skin or professing the wrong god, is straightforward bigotry…
“Or rather, it reveals how grievances can become warped within a national conversation obsessed with blaming social problems on immigrants.”
Kenan Malik, The Guardian
“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…
“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… A more focused policy would reform the U.K.’s chaotic asylum system and maybe even its approach to assimilating new arrivals.”
Robert F. Worth, The Atlantic
“Politicians and commentators on the right claim that we are seeing a wider backlash against liberalism… But if we pay attention to the data, not GB News, we see that Britain is, across almost all issues, becoming a more liberal and tolerant country… The proportion of us accepting homosexuality, abortion and divorce as ‘justified’ doubled between 2009 and 2022…
“In 2013, just 25% of us said being born in Britain wasn’t important to being ‘truly British’; that has more than doubled to 54%. These days, only 3% of us think you need to be white to be ‘truly British’. Burning a car takes yobs minutes, we know building strong, cohesive communities is the work of years. But we mustn’t let thugs on our streets, or pundits claiming those thugs somehow represent a silent majority, rewrite our national story. We have work to do, but Britain is a more liberal country than it has ever been.”
Torsten Bell, The Guardian
The right condemns the violence and also the British government’s response.
The right condemns the violence and also the British government’s response.
“These riots were years in the making. England’s poor whites are less ‘far right’ than left behind. The ex-working class is three generations deep in postindustrial decay and welfare dependency. Labour, once the workers’ party, has abandoned the English poor for lifestyle liberalism and the Muslim vote. The most alarming incident in these riots—an attempt to torch a hotel housing asylum seekers—happened in Rotherham…
“A rundown northern town, Rotherham was the epicenter of the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal. Between 1997 and 2013, an estimated 1,400 children were serially raped and trafficked in Rotherham by men of mostly Pakistani extraction. Police and local authorities were regularly alerted but looked the other way for decades to maintain community relations…
“Police deny they practice two-tier justice. But plentiful evidence suggests otherwise—and shows whom they favor. ‘We will work with you guys for the best solution,’ a police officer advised a Muslim counter-mob at Stoke-on-Trent on Aug. 3. ‘If there are any weapons or anything like that, what I would do is discard them in the mosque… We are not going to arrest anybody.’”
Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal
“[The knife] attack was incorrectly used to justify deplorable violence. But it’s also important to understand that it is one of many attacks across many days, months, and years, forming a pattern of violence linked with open immigration policies that are being ignored or downplayed…
“Last month, a British army officer was stabbed 12 times in an attack that sparked memories of Fusilier Lee Rigby, who was stabbed to death by two Islamic terrorists in 2013. The police initially describe the apparently Nigerian-born attacker as a ‘local.’…
“Days ago, a Kurdish migrant was charged with attempted murder after pushing a postman onto the tracks of a London subway. And in March, four Syrian and Kuwaiti ‘refugees’ were charged after the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in Newcastle. One of the attackers, guilty of multiple sexual assaults, received a suspended sentence and 180 hours of community service. In today’s U.K., you’ll spend more time in prison for racist tweets than for raping a child. And politicians are surprised people are upset?”
Ian Haworth, Washington Examiner
“It was Starmer’s first big test, and he flunked it… Instead of pushing disinterestedly for the restoration of order, he slotted events into the comfortable narrative of ‘Right-wingers Attack Innocent Minorities.’ While some perpetrators fit that description, their motives ought to have been irrelevant. The point is that all acts of violence, intimidation, and vandalism should be treated equally, whether they are carried out by racist dunderheads or by pro-Hamas thugs.”
Dan Hannan, Washington Examiner
