Riots that broke out in the city of Southport near Liverpool a week ago after three girls were killed at a children's dance club have spread to other cities in Britain and taken the country by surprise.
It all started after a serious crime when a young man entered a dance workshop named after the popular pop singer Taylor Swift and killed three girls with a knife, and injured several other children and adults.
Although at first few people participated in the protests, now the riots have spread throughout the country.
Many politicians called the events pogroms, and some asked the prime minister to send the army to certain cities because they believe that the police cannot deal with violence.
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What is actually happening in Britain and how will it affect the politics of the country, especially in relation to migrant problems?
From social networks to the outskirts of working-class towns
Over the past five days, in parts of the country from Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester and other English cities to Belfast in Northern Ireland, groups of people have destroyed migrant hostels, set fire to mosques, pelted police with bricks, bottles and stones and shouted anti-Muslim and anti-migrant slogans. .
On Sunday, a crowd of 500 people surrounded a hotel in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham where more than 100 migrants were temporarily staying.
The police lost control of the situation and the crowd pelted the hostel with oysters and Molotov cocktails.
In other cities, riots were followed by clashes between nationalists and anti-fascists, as well as looting of shops.
In Liverpool, rioters set fire to a library.
Dozens of police officers were injured, and by Monday evening almost 400 people were arrested.
The protests were triggered by false information that the crime was committed by a 17-year-old boy named Ali al-Shakati and that he was a Muslim immigrant.
In fact, the suspect is 17-year-old British Aksel Muganwa Rudakubana, whose parents are from Rwanda.
The family is Christian.
The police have not yet determined the motive of the crime, but have ruled out terrorism.
Some time passed before the police revealed the suspect's identity, as minors are protected by law.
Only when the court decided that it was in the public interest did the police announce who the suspect was.
Disinformation about the Muslim migrant was spreading all the time on social networks.
Social networks have also become a key way of coordinating unrest.
After the first riots in Southport, north of Liverpool, where children were killed, the police announced that supporters of the English Defense League were involved.
But the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic group has long disbanded, and a BBC analysis found there was no single mastermind behind the riots in the various cities.
The main hashtag of the riot, #Sadjestvarnodosta (#EnoughlsEnough), which is spreading on social networks, was marketed by a little-known neo-Nazi group.
X, formerly Twitter, is the main platform for spreading information (or misinformation), as well as photos and videos, but invitations to participate in protests are also spreading on other networks and platforms, from Facebook, through TikTok, Telegram and Vocap.
Watch a video about the riots in Britain:
A big test for the prime minister and the new government
Parliamentary elections were held in Britain a month ago.
The Labor Party returned to power after 14 years of Conservative rule.
The new Prime Minister, Kir Starmer, promised to restore decency and fairness to politics, and the country was willing to give him time to do so.
He was supposed to go on holiday to Cornwall this week, but he canceled it.
The riots interrupted the honeymoon of the new government and British voters.
Although Starmer has only been in power for a month, and even the opposition cannot blame him for these events, the reaction to what is happening raises many questions.
Starmer met with police chiefs across the country on Thursday and pledged his full support for the fight against "extremists who are trying to spread hate".
He also announced that he would establish a new unit to coordinate efforts in the prevention and fight against extremism throughout the country, as well as expand the powers of the police in the use of facial recognition technology from surveillance cameras.
Unlike many European countries, Britain does not have a single national police, such as the French Gendarmerie or the Italian Carabinieri.
In England and Wales, the police are divided into territorial departments, while Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own police services.
Starmer said that what is happening on the streets of the country is not a legitimate protest but "extreme right-wing thuggery" that cannot be justified.
But the country is not asking for statements and reforms from the government, but for immediate action to end the unrest.
And here, Starmer can be judged even more harshly than his predecessors.
Before he entered politics, he was the head of the Crown Prosecutor's Office, and for his success in that role, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, and with that he received the title "Sir".
In the election campaign, Starmer often highlighted his own record in the fight against crime, and now voters are looking to him to solve the crisis.
Hamza Jusaf, the former Scottish Prime Minister, called on Starmer to deploy the army because he believes the police are failing to deal with the situation.
However, for now, the government has no plans to deploy the military to quell the unrest.
What does Russia have to do with this?
On Thursday, England's Daily Mail published a headline: "Russia linked to fake news site that sparked riots outside mosques."
It's a leaf wrote about the site Channel3now which contains fake news and texts generated by artificial intelligence, as well as news from other sites.
The site's Twitter account was an important source of spreading false information about a Muslim migrant who allegedly committed a crime at a dance workshop in Southampton.
The site's connection with Russia is that it was created on the basis of a YouTube channel that posted videos of street runners from Izhevsk eleven years ago.
The Daily Telegraph also wrote about Russia's involvement in the riots based on this information.
However, experts on disinformation and Russian intelligence operations interpret this data differently.
Skeptics point out that the original YouTube channel later practically reoriented itself towards the Pakistani audience, and the site based on it looks like an ordinary spam aggregator.
They believe that all this indicates that the site has changed owners several times.
Referring to Channel3now, the Russian channel Rasha Today, published information that the suspect in the murders of children is a Muslim migrant.
However, the text on RT's website was later corrected with a note that the previous version contained wrong information.
The future of (illegal) migration
If the initial cause of the riots was the killing of children in Southport, then the subsequent attacks on mosques and hotels where migrants were accommodated had nothing to do with it, because the right-wingers did not even mention that city in their chants.
They expressed dissatisfaction with immigration and multiculturalism in general.
The situation in Britain is very different from France, Italy, Germany and other European countries, where the rise of illegal migration has brought nationalist populist parties into parliament.
The island's position gives the British authorities the ability to better control the borders, but levels of legal immigration have remained extremely high for many years, a deliberate choice of every government, both Labor and Conservative.
Last year, around 29.000 people crossed the English Channel between France and England without visas or documents.
And more than 1,2 million people came to the country legally, on work, student and family visas.
However, this does not mean that the population has increased by this number.
Taking into account those who left, the net increase in population due to immigration was 685.000 people.
Some of the settlers arrived at the invitation of the authorities and with the approval of the majority of citizens.
Even the opponents of migration are not against the arrival of Ukrainian refugees, residents of Hong Kong, as well as doctors and nurses, without whom the National Health System (NHS) simply cannot exist in its current form.
Furthermore, not all of those who come will be able to stay in Britain legally - for example, visas for Ukrainian refugees are time-limited and do not currently provide a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship.
Yet these are record levels of migration - never before have so many foreigners come to Britain.
The Conservatives, under whose leadership this peak of migration occurred, repeatedly promised to reduce legal immigration, introduced new measures from time to time, but in the end achieved not a decline, but a rapid increase.
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As for Islamophobia, the majority of Muslims living in Britain were born there, and many communities - such as Pakistan - were just invited by the British authorities, who used immigrants from former colonies to fill labor shortages after the Second World War.
"I am proud to be English. But some people think I'm not," Sunderland taxi driver Zaf Iqbal told the BBC, reacting to the attack on a mosque in his hometown.
"I was born and raised in Sunderland. I've lived here all my life."
The composition of the British Parliament is significantly different from some other European countries, especially after the strengthening of right-wing populist forces whose election results reflect the mood of the population and the true extent of dissatisfaction with migration policy.
Until now, the British version of the majority electoral system ensured the dominance of the two main political parties.
It's still like that, but in the last elections the main supporter of Great Britain's exit from the EU (Brexit) Nigel Farage he managed to enter the parliament on the eighth attempt, together with four other allies from the new party Reformists UK.
Farage also criticizes traditional parties and positions himself as the voice of the common people, which the elites in Westminster do not want to hear.
The main point of his program is the radical reduction of migration.
Commenting on the events of the last few days, he condemned the violence and riots, but at the same time said that it is necessary for the parliament to return from the break and to seriously discuss the migration policy.
Many other MPs, including those from the ruling Labor Party, also called for the parliament to end its summer break.
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