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Far-right activists protest in Sunderland, England, August 2, 2024.
© 2024 Drik/Getty Images
The UK has been rocked by far-right riots this week. Racist mobs have targeted mosques and asylum seeker accommodation, Muslims and people of color have been attacked, and police have been injured. In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, asylum seekers were trapped in their accommodation as rioters smashed windows and set the building on fire.
The riots are being fueled by racist and Islamophobic misinformation shared online, which should focus policymakers’ minds on how easily social media platforms can be harnessed to promote hate. The misguided and ignorant interventions of X, formerly known as Twitter, owner Elon Musk should also raise serious questions about how these platforms are managed, with parliamentarians suggesting Musk be called in to answer questions.
It is understandable many people in the UK are angry and frustrated that their living standards continue to decline and that they feel neglected or forgotten as local facilities close, benefits are cut, and funding to services is slashed. This disillusionment is being exploited by often racist extremists, who pretend there are simple “answers” to complex problems. Migrants, Muslims, and ethnic minorities have become scapegoats for all manner of policy failures, from the decline of the NHS to the availability of housing or jobs. In almost every instance, these claims are demonstrably false.
Politicians like Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage, and their dangerous anti-migrant and Islamophobic rhetoric, undoubtedly share some responsibility for laying the groundwork for the violence currently unfolding on Britain’s streets, and indeed Farage is accused of stoking the conspiracy theories that fueled this outbreak of violence. Even in the midst of this situation, Conservative leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick made Islamophobic comments that risk fanning the flames. By adopting the rhetoric of the far right, politicians have sanitized and mainstreamed Islamophobia and xenophobia, emboldening extremists. The willingness, indeed eagerness, of some media to vilify and demonize certain communities and groups has also made this possible. When the government conducts a postmortem of the riots, it should not ignore the role politicians and media played in stoking fear, mistrust, and hostility towards these groups.
The new Labour government inherits a country divided, in which the far right is a real and present danger. But to focus solely on the violent disorder is to treat the symptom of a much broader problem. To tackle the threat posed by the far right, the government needs not only to hold to account those spewing dehumanizing rhetoric and address ongoing structural racism and Islamophobia, but also begin to address the many and varied structural issues, including rising inequality and poverty, that are ripe for cynical exploitation to push a xenophobic agenda
