Perhaps unhelpfully, we use the term “race riot” to describe two very different phenomena, each with its own dismal history. In the 1980s, it was the term attached to the uprisings that erupted among Black communities in Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, London and elsewhere. Outbreaks of lawlessness and violence that were in large part a response to racial targeting by the police: harassment that aggravated existing disadvantages and intensified deep disillusionment, especially among the younger generation who had been born in Britain.
However, a very different set of events with a far longer history has also been defined as race riots. The deadly disturbances of 1919 in Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Salford, Newport, Barry, Hull and South Shields, like the riots that came again to Liverpool in 1948, and those that broke out in 1958 in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill.
In each of the latter cases, the rioters were mobs of white men. The grievance that brought them on to the streets was the presence in their cities of non-white people. We must now add the summer of 2024 to the list of riots that were in essence organised violence against minority communities. My generation, brought up amid the endemic racism of the 1980s, had in recent years started to believe that our memories of being assaulted on the streets or besieged in our homes belonged firmly to a 20th-century Britain that we had long ago left behind. Now members of another generation of Britons from minority communities have traumatic memories that they too will have to process later in life.
An understanding of the long and ugly history of the second type of British “race riot” might have helped some of the journalists and commentators who last week attempted to explain the causes of the wave of violence and looting we have just witnessed. The initial category error, made by much of the media, was to describe riots as protests. That misstep led to later difficulties. It convinced editors of the need to adopt the increasingly unviable stance of “bothsidesism” and to go in search of deeper social causes behind the violence. Race riots of the sort Britain experienced in 1919, 1948 and 1958 have always had the same motivations – racism and nativism.
As brave reportage gave way to fumbling analysis, one fundamental reality was repeatedly overlooked. While there were horrific attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers, most of those targeted by the rioters were British citizens: members of communities with histories that go back three generations or more. When the mobs in Rotherham launched their sickening assault on a hotel, the racial slur spray-painted on to that hotel’s walls was the P-word, aimed not at asylum seekers but squarely at the established British Muslim community.
Riots are not protests and there is a difference between motivations and excuses. Despite much that has been said, the riots of 2024 were not born of “legitimate grievances” about poverty, underinvestment and the breakdown of basic services, all supposedly deepened by mass immigration. The people attacked on the streets, those who had to defend their places of worship or their homes, are the neighbours of the rioters. They live in the same towns and suffer the consequences of the exact same poverty and underinvestment.
Those who live in Britain’s long list of neglected towns – such as Gateshead, where I grew up, which ranks as the 47th poorest of England’s 317 local authorities – have no shortage of entirely legitimate grievances. But that is true irrespective of their race or religion. The Britain of 2024 is by some measures the most unequal society in Europe. Real wages have not increased since 2008 and the lowest-income British households are 20% poorer than the lowest-income families in France. But those bleak realities are the result of long-term political choices, not asylum seekers huddled terrified in hotels.
The ideological fanaticism of the Thatcher government that limited the ability of local authorities to use income generated from the sale of council houses to build new properties, the ideologically driven impoverishment of local government by the Cameron-Osborne government and the self-inflicted wound of Brexit: these and other factors are what lie behind the shocking lack of access to basic resources – social housing, doctor’s appointments and dental surgeries. Immigration, rather than worsening that situation, is one of the few levers we have to increase access to medical care. Skilled immigration will also be needed if we are to build the millions of homes needed.
To put the violence directed at British Muslims, Black Britons and asylum seeking down to “legitimate grievances” is to fall for one of the most toxic and intentionally divisive falsehoods in the populist handbook: the myth that class and race are diametrically opposed, the assertion that non-white people have no class identity. In this distorted world view, the true working class are the “white working class”, and the difficulties they face are not a consequences of political choices that affect everyone, irrespective of ethnicity, skin colour or faith, but of “elites” putting the needs of minority communities first. As if those minorities are not themselves working class. Boris Johnson’s disastrous government pushed that falsehood whenever it got the chance.
However, a defining characteristic of the populist right – both politicians and their enablers at the tabloids and online – is an absolute, ironclad, unwavering refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions. They scuttled away from the wreckage of Brexit – always built on an economic fairytale – pointing accusatory fingers at others as their most cherished political project decimated Britain’s trade, shrank the economy and trashed our international reputation – as had been both predicted and forewarned. Now, eight years later, they are equally determined to sidestep responsibility for the long-term consequences of their short-term electoral strategies.
A nation that was led for three years by a prime minister who used ethnic and racial slurs against Muslim women and African children, in which newspaper columnists were allowed to describe asylum seekers as “vermin” and in which those same papers constantly and deliberately conflated the separate issues of immigration and asylum: such a nation, sooner or later, was always going to face consequences.
Just as with Brexit, the consequences of populism and culture wars were both foreseen and forewarned. Among the Cassandras whose prophecies went unheeded was the Conservative party’s former co-chairwoman Baroness Sayeeda Warsi. Three years ago she warned that “dog whistles win votes but destroy nations”. Last week, Warsi was even more robust in her criticism of former colleagues. As was the former counter-extremism tsar Dame Sara Khan. They and others have denounced the ways in which the last government poisoned political debate and normalised Islamophobia, while at the same time dismissing warnings of the growing dangers of far-right extremism.
While the rioters and those willing to assign coherent political meanings to their criminality have spoken loudly, others have fallen deathly silent. As figures like Warsi took to the TV and podcast studios the politicians who are normally most vocal when there are divisions to be fomented and culture wars to be fought went awol. Kemi Badenoch’s retreat from the airwaves was so complete that even other Tories dubbed her disappearing act a “submarine” strategy.
The profound injustices and stark regional disparities that have been wrongly ascribed as the motivations of the rioters urgently and obviously need to be addressed. But that reality has nothing directly to do with the actions of people who burned down a library and an advice centre, looted booze from a smashed-up Sainsbury’s and hurled rocks at Filipino nurses on their way to their shifts in NHS hospitals.
Far-right groups, organising online, increasingly inspired by and connected to similar groups in the US and Europe, are not motivated by such concerns. They are, however, always eager to exploit them. The far-right already have an agenda; they always have. Disconnected from reason, it changes little over time. Behind the curtain of the dark web, in their grim chatrooms and Telegram forums, their true motivations are on display. They are not looking to address inequalities but to target those whom they will never accept as fellow Britons.
In doing so, they, and those swept up in the chaos they foment, are willing to tear apart the nation to which they preposterously claim to be patriots.
• David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster
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