In recent days, violent unrest has erupted in a number of British towns and cities, and far-right protestors gathered in demonstrations all over the country on Saturday to cause even more trouble.
According to experts, extremist right-wing organizations and online propaganda have been to blame for the violence after a fatal knife assault on a children’s event in northwestern England.
A range of far-right parties and persons, including neo-Nazis, aggressive sports enthusiasts and anti-Muslim politicians, have promoted and taken element in the turmoil, which has also been stoked by online celebrities.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has vowed to use extra police forces to combat the illness. ” This is not a protest that has got out of hand”, he said Thursday. It is composed of “individuals who are unwaveringly violent.”
What we know about the turmoil and some of its perpetrators is as follows.
Where have protests taken position?
The second mob took position Tuesday night in Southport, a town in northern England, after a fatal stabbing attack the preceding day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three women died of their wounds, and eight other kids and two individuals were wounded.
The suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, propaganda about his identification— including the bogus claim that he was a immigrant living in the country improperly — spread fast online. To compel people to take to the roads, far-right protesters used messaging apps like X and Telegram.
More than 200 people descended on Southport Tuesday evening, several traveling by train from abroad in Britain, authorities said. Rioters attacked a dome, wounded more than 50 authorities officials and set cars arrive.
On Wednesday night, another far-right presentation brought conflicts with the authorities in northern London, leading to more than 100 detention. Smaller hands of illness broke out in Hartlepool, in northern England, in the town of Manchester, and in Aldershot, a village east of London.
On Friday nights, Northumbria Police said its soldiers had been” subjected to severe murder” as far-right protesters set flames and attacked officers in Sunderland, a city in the north.
On Saturday, protesters clashed authorities in the northern towns of Liverpool, Hull and Nottingham, among other sites.
Gavin Stephens, the federal police chiefs ‘ council chair, stated to BBC Radio on Friday that extra officers would be stationed on Britain’s streets and that they would apply lessons from the 2011 riots to plan their actions.
” We may have surge capacity in our brains, in our presentation and in the tools that are out in local areas”, he said.
Which parties are behind the turmoil?
There have been numerous far-right demonstrations in the past, and they have been promoted on social media. David Miles, a prominent part of Patriotic Alternative, a totalitarian group, shared photos of himself in Southport, according to Hope No Hate, a Britain-based advocacy team that researches fundamentalist companies.
Other far-right agitators spread information about the protest on social media, including British Movement, a neo-Nazi group. Some protesters had Nazi-themed tattoos, according to images taken by Hope Not Hate.
Police claimed English Defence League supporters had been involved in the disorder in Southport after the incident. The riots have also attracted people linked to soccer violence, or hooliganism, which has long overlapped with nationalist movements in Britain.
Not everyone at the demonstrations had far-right views, according to officials. David Hanson, a Cabinet minister, told LBC Radio on Friday:” Some might be caught up in the summer madness. Some might be people who’ve got genuine concerns”.
But, he warned,” If you are organizing this now, we will be watching you”.
What is the English Defence League?
Created in 2009, the English Defence League was a far-right street movement notorious for violent protests and an anti-Islam, anti-immigration stance.
After a few Islamic extremists chanted abuse at British soldiers returning from Iraq, the group made its way to Luton, England, where community tensions had risen. Luton was already associated with Islamist extremism, because it was home to a small number of adherents to Al Muhajiroun, an extremist group implicated in the 2005 London bombings.
Among the English Defence League founders was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. Born in Luton, he was at one time a member of the far-right British National Party. He was also implicated in a 2010 brawl in Luton that resulted in his conviction for leading soccer fans.
In the group’s early years, regional divisions carried out local demonstrations, including protests over planned mosques, and engaged in actions such as placing pig heads around Muslim sites.
According to Matthew Feldman, a specialist on right-wing extremism, the group represented a new stage in far-right British politics, because unlike the National Front or the British National Party, it did not contest elections.
” This is direct-action politics, disseminated and coordinated via the new media — ranging from Facebook to mobile phones, and digital film to YouTube”, Feldman wrote in a 2011 academic study of the English Defence League.
In 2013, Yaxley-Lennon said he had broken ties with the league. The organization no longer exists formally, and this is after internal disagreements and leadership conflicts. However, according to experts, many of its supporters continue to support it through other nationalist organizations with similar objectives and tactics.
In the later 2010s, Yaxley-Lennon rose to prominence in international circles that shared his anti-Muslim stance, including in Europe and the United States. He has used social media, including a previously barred X profile that Elon Musk reinstated, to spread false information about the identity of the Southport attacker in recent weeks.
According to experts, the English Defence League has evolved from being a sporadic idea that is mostly distributed online. According to Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a nonprofit that studies public attitudes on immigration and identity, its Islamophobic and xenophobic stance has turned into an “ideal that people self-radicalize themselves into.”
Why is it so difficult to treat the condition?
According to experts, many far-right organizations in Britain have purposefully abandoned formal hierarchies and organizational structures.
Joe Mulhall, Hope Not Hate’s director of research, called the movement “post organizational” in a 2018 analysis. Social media and other technologies, he wrote, offer “new ways for it to engage in activism outside the confines of traditional, organizational structures”.
According to Paul Jackson, a professor at the University of Northampton with a background in the history of radicalism and extremism, violent street rallies, which are a key component of the rise of the English Defence League, frequently serve as a recruiting tool for extremist groups.
” Social movements thrive on such demonstrations”, he wrote in a 2011 paper. They are “performances,” which can” contain” the perceptions of injustice and being ignored by mainstream voices in their wake.
Police may struggle to respond to mobs that private messaging apps can conjure up in a matter of hours. Police, in Feldman’s opinion, are still frequently considering 20th-century concepts, such as how something like this might take a few days to set up or need a march permit.
The Southport riot, he said, “was very nearly a flash demo”.
