Following a horrific attack in Southport, Merseyside in which three young girls were murdered and many were injured, heightened emotions and grief were exploited. Rioting broke out across the UK in early August 2024, expedited by the rapid spread of mis- and disinformation about the attack.
High profile far-right figures and people engaging on social media were quick to create, amplify and spread uncorroborated claims about the attacker being a Muslim, ‘illegal’ migrant who had arrived on a small boat a year ago.
Tommy Robinson posted a seven minute long video onto X with the caption: “There’s more evidence to suggest Islam is a mental health issue rather than a religion of peace”. In this video he recklessly told his 800,000 followers: “They’re replacing the British nation with hostile, violent, aggressive migrants … Your children don’t matter to [the Labour government]”. Nigel Farage further stoked the flames by taking to X and asking “whether the truth is being withheld” about the identity of the attacker and terror-status of the incident.
These narratives were being spread to justify pre-existing hostility towards these groups and to continue and escalate the targeting of these communities across the UK. Even after the police released information about the identity of the attacker with the explicit aim to “remove some of the misreporting” around it, misinformation continued to spread, and riots continued to be organised.
In some locations protests took place peacefully, despite being fuelled by hateful attitudes. In other places vehicles were set alight, shops were opportunistically looted and people were harmed. In Southport, rioters attacked a mosque, pelting it with bricks. In Rotherham and Tamworth, they tried to barricade and set fire to hotels with people who had sought asylum still inside them. Individual hate crimes were perpetrated against Muslims, immigrants, people seeking asylum, and people of colour in towns and cities all over the country.
The 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana has since been charged with three counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder, and many more people have been charged and sentenced with crimes associated with taking part in the riots.
A challenge to resilience?
The Southport riots have exposed the sheer volume of people across the UK who not only hold racist, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim views, but are also willing to act on them, given the opportunity. People went beyond legitimate forms of legal protest and freedom expression to incite violence and even encourage acts of terror. For example, one message listed a number of immigration services and called for them to be attacked and even burned down.
The speed with which misinformation and disinformation was spread and how quickly people were willing to believe it is deeply concerning. It illustrates the volatility of community relations, and the high levels of vulnerability that many communities have to far-right agitation.
The scale of the riots is a confounding factor for those looking to explain community-based far-right activity in the UK as the result of economic, social and political marginalisation. To claim that people were encouraging or attempting to harm or kill others because they did not receive enough economic or educational opportunities feels simplistic and even insulting.
Rioters demonstrated the depth of their racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic convictions in a way that cannot be totally explained away by “legitimate concerns” about immigration, as many who took part in or incited violence have tried to do. But many working class people who are struggling with the cost of living not only refrained from taking part in violence, but even took part in counter demonstrations or community-based rebuilding activities to support those who were being targeted by hate.
How have public attitudes changed?
Although we are yet to see the full fallout from the riots and subsequent arrests, there are already indications that the rioting has affected people’s views towards Islam, immigration and multiculturalism.
Our polling was coincidentally in the field between the 25th July and 2nd August 2024, split across the first outbreak of violence in Southport on the 29th July. This created two sets of results: a pre-Southport set (25 July – 29 July 2024, 2213 people) and a post-Southport set (30 July to 2 August, 840 people). Significance testing was then undertaken to identify statistically significant differences. All results reported below achieved a 95% confidence rate of statistical significance.
We found that attitudes to Muslims and immigration got slightly worse after the 29th July, with a 5% decrease in those who think Islam is compatible with a British way of life, down from 33% to 28%. Similarly, the number of people who view Muslims as having ‘completely different’ values to them has increased by 6%, from 38% to 44%.
Those who agree that immigrants have added richness and variety to the culture of Britain and have made the country more prosperous decreased from 45% to 37%. Most strikingly, support for hostile immigration policy increased by 9%, with 73% in the post-Southport data set being in favour of ignoring or withdrawing from international laws or conventions so that the UK has more control of its borders.
Even in the period immediately after the violence first started, people appear to recognise the impact the riots were having on the UK in real time. Two thirds (65%) of the country now identify growing tensions between different groups of those living in Britain, a 6% increase from the pre-Southport set. Additionally, over half (58%) of the population see racial and ethnic divides as the biggest cause of division in the UK, an increase of 5% following the events in Southport.
Where do we go from here?
The riots must be a sobering wake up call for the Government regarding the state of community resilience today.
What should have been a period of mourning for the country became hijacked by violent displays of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant hatred. What is particularly worrying is the speed with which this shift occurred. Even after the police released the identity of the attacker with the explicit aim to “remove some of the misreporting” around it, misinformation continued to spread, and riots continued to be organised. This signals the sheer volatility around issues related to multiculturalism, and how depleted community resilience reserves are.
Crucially, the people who antagonised around the Southport murders were the same people who antagonised around the disorder in Harehill, Leeds in July 2024, around the conflict in Israel and Palestine since October 2023, and beyond. We see the same group of people exploiting trigger events to pursue their hateful agenda and increase division. Whilst the violence from this particular event has dissipated, it leaves the question of what the next trigger event will be that sparks the next bout of violence that further divides communities.
External events out of the Government’s control that increase tensions between different groups are inevitably going to occur, but the Government plays an important role in encouraging communities to reach towards each other during these times of strain, not push each other further away. Building up resilience through social connectedness, economic security and empowerment would hugely lower the likelihood of volatility around trigger events because communities will feel more confident rejecting far-right antagonism and hatred more broadly.
The Government’s tough law and order response to the riots does not address the full issue at hand. Communities are still vulnerable to far-right inflammation around the next trigger event. Intense restorative work to address the fallout on community relations is needed to build resilience to any future agitation, and the Community Recovery Fund announced by the MHLCG will help local authorities to do so.
However, this restorative work must go alongside deeper thinking about what led people not only to believe racist and Islamophobic misinformation and disinformation, but to then actually take this to the streets and participate in violent disorder. The social cost of participating in the far right has never been lower, with many engaging online unbeknownst to their loved ones or places of work. Many of those who left their homes to riot in August 2024 did so for the first time, identifying themselves as people willing to publicly represent those points of view. Understanding the relationship between street activism and the wider organised far right, online and offline, is crucial here.
Our latest report identifies the drivers of fear and hope and the triggers that push people from one to the other. This year, we look at 2024 as a pivotal point for the UK, with the General Election in July and riots in August. We look back at the archive of Fear and HOPE reports since 2011, seeing how public attitudes have changed under 14 years of Conservative governments. Download the full report today.
