Immigration has always been an excuse or accelerant for far-right terrorism. In the 1940s, the right-wing Jewish terrorist group the Irgun engaged in terrorist acts not out of xenophobia, but to increase immigration rates. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had committed Britain to “facilitate” the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people”. The 1922 League of Nations mandate to Britain to govern Palestine explicitly enjoined it to “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and… encourage... close settlement of Jews on the land.”.
But on the eve of the Second World War Britain, fearing continued Arab rebellions as the Jewish population grew, reneged on that policy and prohibited Jews at their darkest hour from fleeing Europe for Palestine. The violent revolt launched by the Irgun in 1944 was specifically meant, in the words of the Irgun’s commander and future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, to pry open “the barred gates” amid the Nazis’ “campaign of extermination of the Jews”.
More recently, however, political extremism has sought to close countries to immigrants. In 1981, American far-right ideologue Louis Beam launched an assault on Vietnamese fishermen who had fled after the war there ended and settled in Texas. Beam hope to exploit the idea that so-called boat people were taking jobs from Americans to inspire a broader uprising against immigrants and minorities. The ideology of Britain’s far right in the 1980s and 1990s, meanwhile, could be summed up by the refrain from a song by the white power band White Noise: “Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps. Wogs out!”
The movement was disparate and uncoordinated, confined mostly to football hooliganism, the occasional march, and the pub. Not surprisingly, its impact and resonance was relatively limited. The only far-right terrorist incident of note in the UK during this period was in 1999, when the extremist David Copeland carried out a series of nail bombings in London that targeted the city’s black and Bengali populations.
Later, during the Brexit and Trump eras immigration policy became entrenched in party politics, as the mainstream ceded ground on this issue to the right. With opposition to immigration gaining currency as something more than naked xenophobia, the policy debate became the driving force for more extreme anti-immigrant sentiments that resulted in violence. Minority communities and liberal politicians were attacked by far-right extremists claiming to be motivated by the UK’s changing demographics. One of the deadliest anti-immigrant terrorists of this era, the white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019. Tarrant had called for the assassination of London mayor Sadiq Khan, who he described as an “open sign of the disenfranchisement and ethnic replacement of the british [sic] people in the british [sic] isles”.
Both in the US and the UK, illegal immigration is now seen as a marquee political issue, animated by public frustration over the inability of whichever party is in power to achieve meaningful reform. And opposition to immigration and a belief in so-called racial and religious purity is at the heart of the most fundamental and dangerous tenet of the far right in a variety of European countries, as well as in the US. The Great Replacement theory, from which Tarrant’s manifesto took its name, is a scurrilous explanation of a complex issue. It holds that Western white populations are being steadily replaced by non-white minorities in a deliberate attempt orchestrated by Jews and Marxists to remake the citizenship and governance of those countries experiencing an influx of migrants.
This month, the neo-Nazi former National Front member and British National Party leader Nick Griffin asserted that the anti-immigration rioting in Britain was part of “a massively funded and exclusively Zionist-run operation to use and try to capture white resistance to mass immigration... they’ve been doing this for years but over the last couple of years they’ve stepped it up...” Social media has abetted these ideologies in hitherto unimaginable ways.
The riots across the UK after the Southport stabbing were far from unprecedented in either their ideology or their modus operandi. Indeed, their roots can be traced deep into the history of extremism and terrorism. Following the terrible murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, conspiracy theories quickly emerged suggesting the perpetrator was a recent Syrian immigrant who had arrived illegally in Britain. The violence was sparked and accelerated by these theories spreading through the unmoderated wastelands of social media, and directly threatened minority communities. In Rotherham, rioters overwhelmed police lines and set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers. “We saw them trying to kill people yesterday,” one local resident said, a threshold of violence that conforms to most definitions of terrorism.
Given the apparent lack of coordination, the scale of the protests and violence was somewhat remarkable. Although many media reports linked Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League (EDL) to the unrest, the group has been inactive for several years. Instead, the British far right appears to be aligning more closely to the broader, longstanding strategy of the global far right to eschew organisation in order to avoid direct culpability. Arguably, in a digital era of social media and hyper-connectivity, an actual group like the EDL is no longer necessary to incite, organise and deploy seething mobs across a country. Groups may, in fact, hinder momentum by offering law enforcement an easier target for intelligence collection and eventual disruption.
The terrorist attacks that have defined the rise of the violent far right over the past 15 years—lethal incidents in Oslo, Christchurch and El Paso, for instance—were perpetrated by lone actors. These individuals were radicalised online, becoming part of digital networks of likeminded extremists, before breaking out of online spaces with violent attacks. The perpetrators of the most notable recent far-right attacks in Britain, including the stabbing of MP Jo Cox in 2016, a vehicle ramming attack at Finsbury Park Mosque the following year, and the October 2022 firebombing at a Border Force location in Dover, conformed to this pattern: a deliberate strategy of far-right extremism first articulated over 40 years ago by the aforementioned Louis Beam as “leaderless resistance”.
In the recent riots, the sharp edge of the crowd’s violence was seemingly animated by rumour, half-truths, and their own innate prejudices. The disorganised mob approach is also not new, of course. One of the most notorious terrorist incidents in the US’s ugly history of white supremacy, the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, involved marauding bands of white residents setting upon their black fellow citizens and eventually burning large swathes of a prosperous area of the city once known as Black Wall Street.
At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, white supremacists gathered in force, chanting antisemitic slogans such as “Jews will not replace us” before a breakaway neo-Nazi conducted a car-ramming attack, killing a counter-protestor. Famously, President Trump responded to the attack by declaring that there had been “very fine people on both sides”. January 6, of course, involved a networked mob of groups and individuals gathering at the US Capitol in 2021 on behalf of a defeated US president; as did the January 2023 election riot in Brazil. Nor has Britain been immune to racially motivated mob violence—in Oldham in 2001 and Dewsbury in 1989, among other places.
In some ways, these crowds mimic the “Black Bloc” tactic deployed by some far left and anarchist actors, who arrive on the scene with force, momentum and anonymity, unleash serious property damage and quickly disperse. But unlike the anarchist violence that, for instance, occurred in Washington, DC when Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017 or in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, and elsewhere over the past several years, the violent far right is often supported by politicians and media influencers, who euphemistically celebrate the violence and call for more. What extremists have lost in the leadership provided by standing organisations, they have gained in the appearance of mainstream figureheads who promote their divisive ideology.
Andrew Tate, the male supremacist influencer with almost 10 million followers on X, drove much of the initial response to the Southport attack through a video, posted that day, which falsely alleged that the perpetrator was “an undocumented migrant [who] arrived in the UK on a boat”. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, helped spread those conspiracy theories with his own video, where he also mimicked almost perfectly Trump’s Charlottesville defence, declaring, “As with every major conflict in life, there is fault—serious fault—on both sides.”
On X, a social media platform under increasing scrutiny over its role in the violence, Elon Musk fanned the flames when he responded to reports of armed “Muslim patrols” by asking Keir Starmer, “Why aren’t all communities protected in Britain?” He even warned that “civil war is inevitable”.
None of these figures participate in the violence. Instead, they offer either public support or justification for it, which in turn provides a veneer of legitimacy, if not encouragement. The renowned Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen outlined this dynamic in his 2020 book, The Dragons and the Snakes, explaining that “leaders stay within the bounds of legality, while adherents conduct extralegal activities in the shadows”. The Australian journalist Jamie Seidel summarised this challenge in terms of the riots when he reflected that, “How UK law can be applied to a US citizen posting from the US is the crux of the whole social media accountability problem.”
These riots undermined the new Labour government barely a month into its administration. They led to renewed calls both in the UK and abroad to more seriously address the pernicious role social media plays in inciting and driving mob violence. Given these platforms’ unique ability to reinforce ideologies and generate momentum, moderating the most divisive and violent content is essential. The UK and European Union have taken important steps in this regard—including through the Online Safety Act (2023). However, the platforms themselves have been conspicuously reluctant to moderate content and remove particularly inflammatory interlocutors. These ungoverned spaces and networks are also uniquely fertile for those foreign governments—including the West’s most formidable enemies—seeking to spread disinformation and widen societal divides.
It is worth noting, too, that terrorism and violent extremism is often seen by its perpetrators as a last resort—the final option when political means have failed. One prominent right-wing writer who appeared to excuse the justifications for the riots said, “What did you expect? Seriously? What do you expect ordinary British people to do given the deeply alarming things that are now unfolding around them, in their country, on a daily basis?
The obvious answer in a democracy, of course, is to vote—engage in a democratic process in defence of your views, and if you lose, accept that your views represent the minority. It is imperative, then, that politicians across the British political spectrum speak out against this use of violence and force in the name of “legitimate concerns”. British democracy depends on it.
