Terrorism is the use or threat of violence to achieve a political aim. The recent riots, in which participants attacked mosques, assaulted Muslims and people of colour, looted businesses and burned libraries, were terrorism. Yet not a single politician called them so. Why? Because for the mainstream right, far-right tropes are politically useful and for the left, which has long accepted the right’s framing of race issues, challenging them is now too risky.
The immediate triggers are well known. Far-right lies, that the Southport stabbing suspect was a Muslim immigrant or refugee were amplified by social media influencers” such as Andrew Tate. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known as “Tommy Robinson”) claimed “innocent English people are being hunted down”. Nigel Farage questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us”, based on Tate’s posts. Responding to Keir Starmer’s promise to protect Muslims from the violence, Laurence Fox posted “I cannot believe this traitor… For decades British girls have been raped by immigrant barbarians and now he’s finally come out. On their side. Fine. Then it’s war.” Many of the commentators who arguably helped instigated the violence then attacked the government for not doing enough to quell it.
In reality, the riots were decades in the making. Their roots lie in a network of politicians, think tanks, journalists and “public intellectuals”, all of whom stand to gain from legitimising and spreading far-right tropes.
The story begins with economics. Poverty and inequality don’t cause extremism, but they make people more likely to feel hopeless and alienated from mainstream politics—fertile conditions for radicalisation. Researchers have documented this link in Pakistan, the Sahel, Nigeria and the United States.
Since the 1980s UK governments have overseen the systematic economic disempowerment of what was once called the working class. During the Cameron and Osborne austerity era, the government cut benefits, legal aid, healthcare (in real terms) and police and community resources, causing a decade of economic stagnation. Governments also marginalised the unions, the primary engine of working-class empowerment, and union membership has nearly halved since the 1980s. In the same period real wage growth has fallen from 4.4 per cent a year, to nothing. Last year saw the largest drop in living standards on record.
The UK is one of the least socially mobile societies in the western world. More than a fifth of people live in poverty. Many working-class jobs, which once enabled a single earner to support a family, have been replaced with zero hours contracts, with one in eight workers now in precarious employment. Guy Standing, a professorial research associate at SOAS, University of London, has written of “the Precariat”: a socio-economic group defined by this insecurity. This group may be angry and looking for someone to blame, but the far right is not a Precariat movement.
Those with the most to gain from using far-right tropes are the powerful and privileged, including mainstream politicians and commentators. Their narratives focus people’s anger away from those who caused the real causes of their problems and towards those who share many of the same struggles. And so, while migrants tend to make a net positive contribution (paying more in taxes than they take out in services), in a context of scarcity it is easy to convince people that “foreigners” are competing with them for jobs and resources. Such “divide and rule” tactics have a long history. British voters have, at various points, been encouraged to fear the Irish, Jews, communists and black people.
Brexit demonstrates how ideas rooted in far-right discourses can influence people to vote against their interests to vote against their own interests. The Leave campaigns embraced conspiracy theory. On the eve of the referendum, Vote Leave “exposed” a “secret plan” to open Britain’s borders to “1.5m Turks”, while a centrepiece of Leave.EU’s campaign was a poster claiming Britain was at “breaking point” due to immigration. Brexiteers promised voters “British jobs for British workers”. In reality, Brexit caused as many as two million job losses nationwide.
The current migration hysteria wasn’t spontaneous. In the early 1990s, fewer than 5 per cent of voters considered immigration an important issue. By 2010, it was one of the public’s most pressing concerns. Between 2000 and 2006 the Sun, Daily Express and Daily Mail ran stories every day mentioning asylum seekers or immigration, generally portraying them in a negative light. The Conservative party adopted the “dangers” of immigration as a major talking point and the media increasingly gave a platform to anti-immigration “commentators” such as the former BNP leader Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage. Since then, the right-wing press has flooded readers with headlines such as “True Toll of Mass Immigration on UK Life”, “The ‘Swarm’ On Our Streets” and “Foreign Workers Get 3 in 4 New Jobs”.
A cottage industry has also developed around legitimising and promoting conspiracy theories. Chief among these is the Great Replacement, which postulates that a cabal of “globalist” elites is plotting to replace white Europeans with Muslim immigrants. The theory was referenced in the “manifestos” of terrorists Patrick Crusius (who murdered 23 people in El Paso, Texas in 2019), Brenton Tarrant (who killed 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019) and Anders Breivik (the murderer of 77 people in Oslo and Utoya, Norway in 2011).
Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator and a regular guest on the BBC and GB News, introduced what King’s College London professor Jonathan Portes has called “essentially an attenuated version of the great replacement theory for the Telegraph-reading classes”. In his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe Murray claimed Europe is “committing suicide”. “Any trip to thousands of locations… can spark the fear of… ‘Le Grand Remplacement’,” he wrote. In 2013 he said, “London has become a foreign country. In 23 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority.”
Elsewhere, Eric Kaufmann, a regular Daily Mail contributor, holds there is “truth to the white nationalists’ transformationist charge”.
The conspiracy theory industry also produces other allegations, that we might call “Great replacement-lite”. These eschew the theory’s genocidal overtones but adopt the accompanying myths: that white British people are oppressed by powerful (but ill-defined) elites who act in the interests of foreigners in the interests of non-whites and “foreigners”; universities are being “forced” to “drop white authors”, the National Trust is “erasing our history” by researching the colonial past of its properties; right wingers are “afraid” to voice their views for fear of the “woke mob” (an argument based on a report drawing on the evidence of just ten active academics). All feed into a public discourse based on fear of the other.
A cavalcade of right-wing politicians has appeared to embrace these theories, adopting language that’s hostile to immigrants. In recent years, Boris Johnson has repeated accusations that implied “lefty lawyers” were blocking the removal of “foreign criminals” (it’s notable that rioters targeted immigration lawyers). Suella Braverman claimed “almost all” grooming gangs are British-Pakistani and that “politically connected minority groups” enjoy special treatment from the police (police are more likely to use force against minorities). She warned of Islamic “mobs” attacking the Cenotaph last year. In response, far-right activists attacked police in London. Rishi Sunak built much of his 2024 election campaign around a “small boats crisis” largely created by government decisions to remove most safe and legal routes asylum. Of these, Farage is perhaps the pre-eminent political beneficiary of far-right tropes. The Reform leader has a history of making statements that arguably are racist and Islamophobic. But the more controversial his words, the more attention he’s given.
The mainstream right thus have an incentive to play down the threat from the far-right. In 2021 the Conservative government appointed William Shawcross to review the Prevent anti-extremism strategy. Shawcross once described an increase in the Muslim population of Europe—predicted to be just 11.2 per cent by 2050—as “one of the most terrifying problems of our future”. While Shawcross was working on his report, the UK suffered more far-right terror attacks than any other state in Europe. These included a fire-bombing in Dover and a riot in Knowsley, Merseyside, which eerily prefigured the 2024 riots. Just a few years earlier, in 2016, the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist, who shouted “Britain first” as he attacked her. Despite all this, Shawcross concluded that Prevent should focus less on the far right and more on Muslims. Amnesty International called his report “riddled with biased thinking, errors and plain anti-Muslim prejudice”. By 2023, the far right were responsible for more than a third of terror threats across the UK.
The mainstream left also bears some responsibility for the normalisation of far-right tropes. Gordon Brown called for “British jobs for British workers” (also a BNP slogan) in his first conference speech as Labour leader, in 2007. Under Ed Miliband, Labour caved in to the right’s framing of the immigration debate. Miliband and Ed Balls tried to compete with Cameron’s Conservatives to be “tougher” on refugees and immigrants. This, as I warned at the time, helped to move the Overton window, further legitimising hysterical anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
By the time that Jeremy Corbyn (who, for all his faults, was never scared take on the far right) became Labour leader, the die was cast. During the 2024 election Labour returned to “British jobs for British workers” and promises to cut immigration. On 5th August the Labour MP for Tamworth Sarah Edwards, apparently echoing the far-right demand for getting “our country back”, told the House of Commons that “In Tamworth, the Holiday Inn has been used for asylum purposes for years… residents want their hotel back”. Race rioters fire-bombed the hotel four days later.
Meanwhile, the far right has been left to spread online. Unverifiable and potentially fake clips flood far-right online channels, claiming to prove that white people are under attack. One story said postal votes for Sadiq Khan “were delivered in several carrier bags by Imams of London Mosques [sic]”.
And Islamophobia has taken hold in Britain. In 2018, almost a third of Britons believed that there were “no-go” areas in cities, governed by Sharia law, where non-Muslims could not enter. One poll in 2019 found that around 28 per cent thought there is widespread hostility towards Britain among Muslims.
Radicalisation on social media isn’t a bug; it’s the business model. Platforms make money by attracting and retaining users, and the algorithms are designed to identify users’ preferences and recommend content accordingly. As Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explains, people are more likely to engage with content that confirms their existing views. This is the perfect seeding ground for radicalisation. If someone engages with a piece of far-right content, the algorithm feeds them more of the same. A passing interest can lead to a user being bombarded with extremist material.
The Online SafetyAct 2023 is supposed to target hate on social media. When drafting the legislation, the last government rejected the EU’s approach, which targeted algorithms directly. Instead, the Act demands social media giants play “whack-a-mole”, removing extremist content as it appears. This relies on the fantasy that social media giants will enthusiastically undertake the incredibly difficult task of sifting through millions of daily interactions, when they have a powerful business incentive to do the opposite. Regulators hope that (potentially) high penalties will encourage compliance, but enforcement will be left to Ofcom—the same regulator which has presided over the normalisation of far-right tropes in traditional media for decades.
Many of us hoped the riots would force the political class to confront and remedy its embrace of extremism. Instead, politicians and commentators have doubled down and the conspiracy theory industry has stepped into overdrive. Many of the accounts that arguably helped instigate the riots are promoting claims of “two-tier policing”, alleging that police treat “Muslim rioters” more leniently than non-Muslims. It’s another spurious conspiracy theory that mainstream media such as the Spectator, the Telegraph, Sky, and GB News, all treated as legitimate. The Spectator has lionised Murray, describing those criticising his alleged promotion of far-right tropes as a “lynch mob”.
While prosecutions of rioters have been swift, they have been limited to relatively low-level public order offences (carrying limited sentences). No one has, so far, been prosecuted for terrorism. Sentences have been less severe than those of left-wing protestors prosecuted for disruptive but peaceful acts. The Royal United Services Institute has warned that the UK treats far-right violence as mere “thuggery” where it would treat equivalent actions as “terrorism’ if committed by Islamists. None of the high-profile individuals accused of instigating the riots have, thus far, been arrested.
Starmer’s government has been weak in its pushback against the conspiracy theories. It appears reluctant to criticise Elon Musk for spreading the two-tier policing conspiracy theory. Government talking points focus on “working with” social media giants to combat misinformation, ignoring that the owner of X is spreading misinformation himself.
Meanwhile, the frontrunners in the Conservative leadership race continue to embrace anti-immigration rhetoric. Kemi Badenoch responded to the riots by writing in the Times “if you keep bringing in lots of people from everywhere, how do we make sure that we are still the Britain that they wanted to come to?” Robert Jenrick has called for people to be arrested for saying “Allahu Akbhar” (“God is Greater”) in public.
The events of the last month could be mere prologue.
