Riots, arson, looting and physical attacks have been taking place since the end of July in about thirty English cities and the Northern Irish city of Belfast. After the wave of protests, the police curtly announced that "several dozen police officers" were injured and that a certain number of shops, cars and several people were injured. Footage on social networks and part of the media, however, shows a somewhat darker picture.
A large number of protesters randomly beat people of darker skin color and deliberately set fire to and loot shops owned by people of Asian or African descent. In numerous cities, mosques were attacked, foreign workers were stoned, and in Rotherham in the north of the country, several hundred attackers set fire to a hotel where refugees are temporarily housed. In three other cities, attacks were attempted on facilities where asylum seekers live.
Formally, it all started in Southport, near Liverpool, where on July 29, a minor broke into a children's dance studio and attacked the attendees with a knife, killing three children and injuring ten others. Although nothing was known about the shocking attack at the time, a large number of extreme right-wing social and other media spread the news that the murder was committed by a Muslim, and demonstrations were organized in front of the local mosque.
The news was fake - the perpetrator is a 17-year-old British citizen, born in Cardiff to a Rwandan family. It is now known that several neo-Nazi organizations were hiding behind the conscious spreading of lies and the organization of protests, above all the infamous English Defense League (EDL), which had previously been at the forefront of organizing anti-Muslim attacks. But this time a part of previously unorganized people, outside the fan-hooligan milieu to which EDL members dominantly belong, apparently joined the riots and racial attacks.
Judging by the statements of the participants themselves, the motive for participating in violence is a strong aversion to multiculturalism in general, and to people of a different skin color and Muslims in particular. The unrest seems to be particularly concentrated in the north of England, once the industrial and mining center of the country, and now an impoverished region with poor prospects in a territorially extremely unequal England. It is therefore not surprising that a good number of thugs articulated their hatred of diversity through economic demands: they hate Muslims and blacks because they "steal their jobs", but at the same time because they do nothing and live on social assistance to which white Englishmen would otherwise be entitled .
This narrative is not new, nor did it arise among fans and hooligans without permanent employment. He has been present in large parts of English politics and media for decades. Former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson particularly insisted on it, when he defeated the then Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, wresting mandates from him precisely in the impoverished north, the former "red wall" of Labor.
Instead of Corbyn's socialism, the Conservatives then offered chauvinism to the North, blaming "foreigners" for economic problems, which proved to be a successful strategy. Johnson's successor at the head of the Conservatives, Rishi Sunak - paradoxically himself of Indian origin - made the main slogan of his mandate "Let's stop the boats", referring to those by which migrants come to England. This slogan, along with racist insults and threats, was shouted by many participants in the recent riots.
Before they took power at the beginning of this July, Labor themselves engaged in similar rhetoric. Current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who kicked Corbyn out of the party and moved the party significantly to the right, criticized the Conservatives during the election campaign at a meeting with readers of the right-wing tabloid The Sun because "they don't expel enough people from countries like Bangladesh." Although somewhat belated, Starmer strongly condemned the recent riots, calling them far-right and promising severe punishment for any rioters who are subsequently identified in a police investigation. No punishment, we assume, can be expected for the politicians and the media who, with their rhetoric, have been preparing the ground for this violence for years.
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