Front Burner - How anti-migration riots swept the UK

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Online rumours and disinformation surrounding the identity of the suspect in a mass stabbing incident that left three little girls dead in a British seaside town led to an explosion of anti-immigrant and anti-migrant riots throughout the U.K. The unrest was led by mostly white far-right groups.As sudden as the riots came, the festering of resentment towards immigrants and anti-migrant rhetoric has been circulating online and throughout British politics for years. Freelance journalist and regular commentator on the politics podcast ‘Oh God, What Now?’, Zoë Grünewald, joins us to talk about the political context of this past week’s violence and what figures like Nigel Farage and Elon Musk have had to do with it. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So for much of this week, thousands of police officers in riot gear and swaths of counter-protesters have been trying to confront an eruption of far-right anti-immigrant protests that have swept across the UK. that have swept across the U.K. On Wednesday, the country braced for more violence after a list of targets circulated online.

MPs were told to stay home. Doctors ended their day early. Law firms that specialize in immigration work had police stationed outside. The large-scale disorder didn't manifest like people had feared, but the country is on a razor's edge. Mobs egged on by far-right extremists spreading misinformation and disinformation online have wreaked havoc from Birmingham to Sunderland. Faces hidden, intent clear. Bricks thrown at riot police outside a mosque, cars and buildings burned.

Plymouth to Rotherham. They smashed windows, set fires and caused other destruction. As they surrounded and forced their way into a hotel where asylum seekers are staying. And even in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Riot officers had stones and petrol bombs thrown at them close to a supermarket which was set alight at the weekend. The tragic event that lit the fuse, a stabbing at a Taylor Swift themed dance class in a quiet seaside town that left three little girls dead. To talk about the wave of riots, how they have been stoked, and the political context

that laid the groundwork for the worst unrest the country has seen in over a decade, I'm joined by Zoe Grunfeld, a freelance journalist and regular panelist on the Politics Podcast, Oh God, What Now? Hi Zoe, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. Hello, thank you very much for having me. It's really a pleasure. So let's start with the incredibly tragic incident that set all of this off. And what can you tell me about what happened at this dance class in Southport on July 29th? So at the end of July, we saw a mass stabbing in a seaside town in the northwest of England called Southport. It was children targeted in a dance studio at a Taylor Swift themed event. Yoga, dancing, bracelet making in what's usually

a safe space, a haven for pregnant women where baby and children's classes also take place. Three children, little girls were killed and 10 others, eight of whom were children, were injured, some of them severely. The perpetrator has now been named as Axel Rudakubana, The perpetrator has now been named as Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old British citizen born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda. He was arrested at the scene and he was charged with three counts of murder, 10 counts of attempted murder and possession of a bladed article. But the problem was, although reports were coming out of the incident at the time, we didn't know the motive for the attack and we still don't. incident at the time, we didn't know the motive for the attack and we still don't. And that led to disinformation and misinformation being spread really quickly on social media. Misinformation and false claims began to circulate that he was a rival on a small boat in 2023 and he was known to MI6. So this whipped up anger and frustration immediately. Right. And then I understand that

after a vigil for these little girls in Southport, violence erupted very soon after that. And tell me about what has happened on the ground in Southport and elsewhere since then? The next day, a riot began in the town of Southport. So there were supporters of the Islamophobic and now disbanded group called the English Defence League gathered together a group of protesters and they gathered outside Southport Mosque. A range of people took part in the disorder, from children to long-term far-right activists. One of those present in Southport was a convicted terrorist, neo-Nazi Matthew Hankinson, using the mayhem to promote a race war. This was despite the fact that there was no evidence that this crime was committed by somebody who was a Muslim.

There was no evidence it was was kind of terror related. In fact, the police had ruled that out. But protesters immediately began attacking the mosque, attacking police officers. They set a police vehicle on fire. The riot itself left over 50 officers injured, some of them really seriously. Police dogs were wounded and multiple arrests

were made. Shortly after, this unrest spread to other parts of England. So across the country, we saw copycat riots and in Belfast, Northern Ireland as well in the following days. The crowd should disperse immediately as force is about to be used against violent individuals. Disperse immediately as force is about to be used against violent individuals. No further warnings will be given. On the 31st of July, 100 protesters were arrested in London and demonstrations occurred in Manchester and Hartlepool in Aldershot. There's a particularly terrifying example of a hotel holding migrants. I think it was in Rotterham, right?

And can you tell me more about what happened there? A few days later, so this occurred across a few days. So this was on the 4th of August. Rioters smashed windows and set fire to a holiday inn, which is a hotel in Rotherham that was known to be housing migrants. They're in there. No windows! that it was known to be housing migrants. The same thing happened in a town called Tamworth.

Basically, they smashed the windows and they set fire to the building. And there were scenes of the rioters trying to block the exits so that people inside weren't able to get out. Really frightening images where the police were standing off against these rioters trying to block the exits so that people inside weren't able to get out really frightening images where the police were standing off against these rioters but the groups were getting bigger and bigger um and you know lots and lots of unrest across the country people of color being targeted footage of people of color being attacked hit kicked Really just an explosion of violence on the streets of England and Northern Ireland. tell me more about who these rioters are and and what exactly you know they say that they're rioting against i know you mentioned the english defense league but i wonder if you could just

kind of elaborate on who these people are yeah sure so um this is the interesting thing about the far right in the uk it's a kind of mix of various people who have been brought together mostly through different online groups um one of the sort of key figures that we should really mention is a man called tommy robinson he co-founded the english defense league which is a far rightright and Islamophobic organisation that was active from about 2009 until the late 2010s, and then was then disbanded. And he is a prominent anti-Islam campaigner and one of the most prominent far-right activists. Stop the boats. Get them out of them hotels. Get them gone. Put them on boats and send them back. Okay. They shouldn't be here. They're endangering the safety of our families. Men will rise up. They're always going to rise up. He was stoking

up disinformation online. There were other figures such as Andrew Tate, who was stoking up disinformation. Somebody arrived in the UK on a boat. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knows where he's from. The media is, of course, hiding the fact that this is a 17-year-old male. They don't want to highlight how ridiculous it is that they allow military-age males, combatants, to flood our shores. I don't see any protests in the UK. I don't see anybody complaining. And there is a senior politician in the UK called Nigel Farage, who is leader of the right-wing Reform Party, who was also put out a video repeating some of these myths that were going around online about the perpetrator's identity and whether he was known previously to the police.

The police say it's a non-terror incident. Just as they said the stabbing of an army lieutenant colonel in uniform on the streets of Kent the other day was a non-terror incident. I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don't know the answer to that. So this mix of individuals and the way that this disinformation spread basically allowed lots of different people who previously would never have contacted each other from sort of differing degrees of the far right spectrum to come together and organize these riots in a way that I guess was kind of organic, but very much facilitated by social media and its various platforms. And, you know, I hear that I've read that like Telegram channels have played a really

big role in kind of the organizing of this. And then you talk about some of these platforms like Elon Musk, the head of X, formerly Twitter, has also weighed in on this. I'll just quote you what he said. Civil war is inevitable. what he said. Civil war is inevitable. That was the quote he used in response to a video reportedly showing people throwing fireworks at police. Now, Prime Minister Starmer... I mean, these are people with massive, massive followings. You mentioned Andrew Tate as well, right? Yeah, absolutely. So they have huge Twitter followings and have been able to kind of post things and they'll get, you know, millions of impressions.

And Elon Musk is this is particularly interesting because over the past few days, he's actually been really kind of goading the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. He's been retweeting images from the riots and sort of tagging kirstar marina um there is a a line going around on social media about two-tier policing it's called and this is because um on one of the nights um there was fears that there would be a far-right mob um Birmingham and a huge counter-protest appeared, mostly full of kind of Muslim protesters. And there was some unrest, some violence. And of course, that led to far more stoking from kind of far-right Twitter accounts about whether the police are acting in a similar way, you know, with the same sort of riot gear the same level of arrests as they did for the far-right protesters and Elon Musk was retweeting these

images and tagging Keir Starmer and asking what he was going to do about this whether he was keeping both communities safe and calling him two-tier Keir which really you know didn't help things at all when people with that prominent of platforms is also adding to this, this kind of narrative that there is a two tier policing system in the UK and that the prime minister doesn't care about far right English white people in the same way he does about Muslim communities. So lots of this was stoked online. And let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them, violent disorder clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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So in the context, it's important to get this in context before this all happened sakir became prime minister in early july and one of the first problems he faced was a huge overcrowding in our prison system some of them were running at kind of 99 capacity and one of the first things to do was um say he was going to clear some space in the prisons because they were too full. So he was planning to let out people, early nonviolent offenders, to clear some space. Now, then he has mass civil unrest. There were lots of concerns that the prison system wouldn't be able to accommodate all the people who had been arrested in the riots. accommodate all the people who had been arrested in the riots because one of the things Sakiya Starmer said he would do when the riots unfolded was arrest people very very quickly you know they

and the courts would sit overnight there would be more police officers on the streets they would have a zero tolerance approach to this level of violence. That should send a very powerful message to anybody involved either directly online, that you are likely to be dealt with within a week and that nobody, but nobody, should be involving themselves in this disorder? It seems at the minute that the prison systems have coped fairly well. People have been arrested very, very quickly. Last time I checked, there were about 400 arrests that already happened. People have already gone through the court system and been convicted of various offences. So it feels like the justice system has been pretty punchy in this case. The police obviously have been under attack during these

riots. Many of them have been injured. There's been horrible footage of police being hit and kicked and all sorts. And it's been a real test for them. We know that they've been working at capacity. Many police have had holidays cancelled, have had to come back from various other commitments. And it has been a real challenge for the police force. But it seems that they have coped really quite well and that the justice system has done quite well to sort of deal with the issues that they've been facing

and to kind of really deter more people from joining in because they know that if they're out at 5 p.m. looting and smashing and burning communities, 5 a.m. the next day, there'll be a knock on their door. Right. And that they could be facing like severe punishments. that they could be facing like severe punishments. What has been the response from people who live and work in the places where a lot of this violence has taken place? How do they feel about the protests? Are the people who live there part of the protests? Of course, not all of them, but are some of them. So there's been lots of fear and upset, obviously. We saw on Wednesday, yesterday, that there were real fears that that was going to be the largest day of violence and unrest yet. There was claims out on social media that over 100

demonstrations, riots had been planned across the country in different locations. Many people, particularly people of colour, Muslims, were very, very afraid that they would be victims of violence. One of the bits of intelligence that people were getting was that immigration centres particularly were going to be targeted. So there were lots of lawyers who were very, very concerned, lots of various community leaders. And we saw, you know, vast parts of the country shut up shop, closed their businesses early. GP surgeries were telling people that appointments were cancelled.

Schools were closing early or telling parents to come and pick their children up early. Actually, what we saw was huge anti-racism protests on the streets. The presence of the far right yesterday was really diminished. There were very, very few people out and very, very little unrest. What we saw was sort of mass solidarity for people of colour and immigrants in this country. Wonderful images of, you know, huge vast crowds of people

standing up for the rights of immigrants and people of colour in this country. Thousands filled the streets in cities across the country after a week of some of the worst political violence in Britain for decades. Thousands of anti-racism protesters, trade unionists, members of the local black and Asian community, students, took over the streets. It wasn't the protest police were expecting. Thousands showing up across the UK to say they denounce racism. In terms of where the rioters came from and what communities they came from, it's really hard to tell. There was lots of suggestion that actually these groups were kind of touring up and down the country, splitting up into different locations and rioting there.

But it's quite clear when we were seeing some of the arrests come in and people being charged that some of these people were parts of these communities. So there are people from Liverpool and Sunderland, which is where some of the worst of the rioting happened, who have now been charged with various crimes. who have now been charged with various crimes. So it is a kind of mix of people who are local to the community and who are embedded in those communities and a mix of people who are clearly out looking for trouble. Outside agitators. Precisely. I want to spend a bit of time with you now talking a little bit more about the political context, you know, why and what role has he played in the debate around immigration and illegal migrants

and migrants? So immigration has been a really big issue for a lot of people for the last, you know, few decades here in the UK, but I would say particularly at the most recent election. And that is in part because legal migration has increased significantly over the past decade. So in 2023, net migration was about 685,000, which is well above the levels of around 200,000 to 300,000 that we saw in the 2010s. But one of the sort of bigger issues for people is the influx of what are being termed as illegal migrants. Now, many people would prefer the term asylum seekers or refugees. And these only account for about 7% of immigration to the UK. But what we have seen over the past couple of years is an influx of small boat arrivals. And this is people crossing

the English Channel from France to the UK and claiming asylum here. And the reason this has massively increased over the past couple of years is because of Brexit. So previously, if people arrived to the UK undocumented, because of the returns agreement that we had with the EU, because of these agreements we had, they would often be sent back to the first part, the first country in Europe that they had arrived in. Since leaving the EU, we no longer are part of that agreement. So when people come to the UK, there's nowhere that they can be sort of sent back to, so they are allowed to stay here and claim asylum. The Conservatives also stopped investing in clearing the asylum backlog. So there are lots and lots of undocumented migrants here, asylum seekers, refugees, who are stuck

in hotels across the country, in barges, waiting to have their asylum claim processed. This has caused all sorts of issues in the community. So lots of people feel aggrieved that there are people coming over, they're not known to the government, they're undocumented, you know, there are images we see every day of people kind of coming over on these really small, dangerous, inflatable dinghies. There's lots of accounts of people losing their lives when they're crossing the channel as well. So that has been a big problem for the government. when they're crossing the channel as well. So that has been a big problem for the government. This is all, of course, in the context of the fact that the UK has faced economic problems,

as many other parts of the world have. We've had a real cost of living crisis here. Prices have increased, wages have stagnated. We also have real issues with our health service, which has been running way over capacity for many years and been very, very underfunded by previous governments. And we have a housing shortage here in the UK as well. The consistent governments have failed to build enough houses for our population. And so there's lots and lots of pressures on our economy and lots of lots of pressures kind of socially as well. And people blame migration for this. Now really there are lots of questions about austerity and how that has impacted people, about failures to build, failures to properly fund public services but politicians like Nigel Farage

who is of the right has always used immigration as used immigration as the reason why people and communities are suffering. These are numbers the likes of which we've never, ever seen. The country is, many parts of it are becoming literally unrecognisable from what they were 10, 20 years ago. But also I think a feeling that perhaps something about our culture is directly under threat, that sense of who we are and that this is a problem. And just think about the numbers. Don't be surprised that they all stick together and actually, far from integrating, develop utterly separate communities.

And I think having this kind of presence of people sitting in hotels, you know, waiting for their claims to be processed has just really stoked community tensions. So in this kind of broader context, Nigel Farage has managed to kind of increase his public profile, talking about needing to get a grip on migration and using pretty xenophobic, hostile language to immigrants. And that's sort of spread across the political discourse. So Reform saw four million people vote for them this general election. That's Nigel Farage's presidency. They now have five MPs in the House of Commons. And that language has spread to other political parties as well. So the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, described asylum seekers coming across the Channel as an invasion. The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast and which party is not. We've had Rishi Sunak's Rwanda policy, so he was the previous prime minister. He had a policy of shipping asylum seekers off to Rwanda

to have their claims processed. We will get flights off the ground, we will deter illegal migrants from coming here, and we will finally stop the boats. So there's been lots of anti-migrant discourse in UK politics, and it has created an extremely hostile environment towards legal immigrants, but also asylum seekers. Right. So, I mean, in so many ways, this was just a fuse basically waiting to be lit, right? Given all that we've talked about, Keir Starmer, he's a relatively new prime minister. He was just elected, right? And so what kind of challenges do you think he faces in trying to calm this all down right now,

to try and put a lid on the violence and then to try and address some of these underlying systemic issues? address some of these underlying systemic issues? Keir Starmer has an interesting and pretty helpful background when it comes to dealing with this particular issue. He used to be Director for Public Prosecutions back in the 2010s, including in 2011, when we saw similar-ish, they didn't have the same kind of underlying reasons, but mass rioting across the country. Masked young men marauding the streets, hurling bricks, rocks, missiles at police officers. Riots have been sparked by the shooting of a 29-year-old man by police on Saturday. And when he was director for public prosecutions, he presided over this policy of really quick, harsh sentencing for people who had been involved in them. And that acted as a deterrent and managed to, was one of the reasons where the riots was kind of, they were, you know, people were able

to get a grip on them and they managed to settle down. And he was commended for doing that at the time. So in a way, he kind of already had the experience having had that job to deal with some of these issues we've seen. In terms of the sort of long term issues, you know, arguably, although there are things like disinformation spreading on social media, which is a really complex problem, and will definitely be a big issue for Keir Starmer, I'm sure it will feel quite personal as well now that Elon Musk is sort of directly been provoking. Yeah, big time. But, you know, aside from what you do about online safety,

the other kind of big issue is how we talk about migration in this country. Because clearly, for a lot of people, the immigration system feels broken. The asylum system feels broken. And that has allowed this sort of far right populist language to creep in where immigrants are being demonized, asylum seekers are being demonized. The challenge for Keir Starmer is how does he talk about immigration policy in a way that is compassionate, but also deals with people's concerns? The reality is in this country,

we're very, very dependent on high levels of immigration to keep our country going. We have a aging population and a health service that, you know, is absolutely crying out for more staff. Our hospitality sector has been wrecked since Brexit. There is many, many reasons why immigration is really positive for us economically, but also socially and culturally. And it's about trying to make the case for both having a sort of compassionate, but sustainable policy of migration, especially when you have some of those right wing agitators now in Parliament, who talk very kind of negatively about immigration. So that will be a real challenge. Okay.

Zoe, thank you so much for this. That was great. We really appreciate you coming by. Thank you. All right. That is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Derek Vanderwyk, Joytha Sengupta, Matt Muse, Ali Janes, Matt Alma, and Zoe Pearson.

Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron. Music is by Joseph Shabison. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos, and I'm Jamie Poisson. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.