Observer's view on UK riots: Political neglect is behind our divided communities | Observer editorial

Last Wednesday, businesses closed early and stores closed in some areas in anticipation of far-right violence. Six thousand trained police officers were on standby to respond. In the end, it didn’t happen on the scale feared. A relatively small number of agitators were overwhelmed by the huge crowds of anti-racist protesters who sent a message that the far-right is not welcome in their communities.

It was a huge relief, but as the Prime Minister warned on Friday, there is no room for complacency. In retrospect, social media posts claiming action in many areas looked more like attempts to incite it than a signal of networked organisation. Many rioters were promptly arrested the day before, some already serving lengthy prison sentences, and that was undoubtedly a deterrent. But anti-immigrant riots continued in Belfast on Thursday and Friday night, and police are on high alert this weekend.

What we have seen so far is on a much smaller scale than the 2011 UK riots. But now we must work to understand what drove these far-right kidnappings of three young girls, fuelled by misinformation about the identity of the attackers. While only 7% of the British public said they supported the 2024 riots, the targeting of mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers showed the extent of underlying prejudice, including extreme Islamophobia, among a small minority of the population, and heightened fears in minority communities. Misinformation about how the state is handling the riots, such as false claims that white perpetrators are being treated more harshly than those of other ethnicities, risks further escalating tensions.

Extremists of all stripes have become adept at using disinformation to engage and incite people online.

Most of the explanations offered so far have come from people who view the unrest through the prism of their own worldview. This does not help us understand why it happened and how to prevent future unrest. The government needs to commission a proper investigation into who instigated it, who participated, and the root causes.

The review should look at the role played by far-right ideologies and organisations in spreading misinformation online. The far-right has long exploited the issue of asylum hotels, as highlighted by Sarah Khan, the government’s social cohesion adviser, in her 2024 review. In 2023, protests outside a Merseyside hotel used to house asylum seekers led to violent clashes with police. Extremists of all stripes have become adept at using misinformation and conspiracy theories to attract and incite people online. This creates a much more challenging context for Prevent programmes aimed at preventing individuals from being radicalised to the far right, Islamists and other forms of extremism. Social media companies should do more to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation. Online safety laws, while not yet fully implemented, will help, but designing levers that work effectively without undermining legitimate free expression online is complex.

Given the evidence that most of the 2011 riots took place in areas in the bottom 10% of social cohesion measures, the government needs to develop an appropriate social cohesion strategy. Khan stresses that cohesion is a much broader concept than integration. The former is about supporting diverse but established citizens and communities to live together well and be resilient to the inevitable tensions that will sometimes arise. This includes tensions within minorities and within religions. The latter is about helping newcomers integrate into British life.

Too much recent commentary has loosely attributed the riots to low levels of integration. In fact, Britain does relatively well on certain measures of integration, with levels of prejudice falling steadily across generations, levels of residential segregation steadily declining, and second-generation immigrant children outperforming non-immigrant children in school. Despite multiple reports on community cohesion since 2000, the government has no framework for measuring it, and no evidence base for what works. There have been incidents where local authorities have handled it very poorly, such as the appalling treatment of a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who was forced into hiding after teaching a lesson on free speech and blasphemy that included images of the Prophet Muhammad.

Finally, community cohesion is inevitably undermined by economic hardship. Too many people have had bad experiences with dysfunctional housing markets, inadequate economic opportunities and lack of access to good public services. This is the product of years of political failure, and it creates fertile ground for right-wing populists to blame the country’s ills on immigrants. This populism has dominated conservative politics for the past decade and has recently enjoyed success in the guise of reform. There is a legitimate debate about how appropriate levels of immigration and asylum should work. The illegal one is to pretend that immigration is the cause of underfunding the NHS, lack of school places and high housing costs. This is largely the product of political choice.

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Hopefully the worst of the riots are over now. But what has happened over the past two weeks is a reminder that we cannot take for granted a healthy, pluralistic, tolerant society. Political leaders must learn how to foster such a society.

Do you have any comments on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words for publication, please email [email protected].

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