The Conservative government’s relentless focus on small boat crossings and delays processing asylum claims played a role in stoking August’s UK riots, the chair of the Commons equalities committee has said.
The Labour MP Sarah Owen, whose committee has launched an inquiry into improving community cohesion after the unrest, warned that Reform UK MPs were also making the task of strengthening communities more urgent.
“With a lot of the Reform MPs, their tone, their rhetoric, the language that they use – they know they’re whistling to that particular tune. They know that,” she told the Guardian.
Owen said multiple factors contributed to August’s disorder, which sprang up in more than two dozen places across the UK after the killing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport, Merseyside.
However, she said, it was notable that in a number of violent incidents not just mosques were attacked, but also hotels that housed asylum seekers waiting for their claims to be processed.
A backlog of asylum claims built up as Rishi Sunak’s government tried to push through its Rwanda plan, under which anyone arriving in the UK would have been deported without having their claim heard.
“I can’t help but think that the backlog was deliberate,” the Luton North MP said. “We’ve been able to clear quite a lot of that backlog. It was a political choice they made.
“That’s why a lot of people, including myself, were shocked but not surprised in August. It wouldn’t be one thing. But where did they expect that feeling of anger and hatred to go? It wasn’t going to just stay in a ballot box.”
One of the issues she hopes to look into is how some ethnically and religiously mixed towns and cities, including the town Owen represents, did not experience disorder in August.
Some of this, she said, could be down to experience of far-right agitation. The anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, comes from Luton and led mass marches there more than a decade ago. However, she added, a bigger factor locally appeared to be good cross-community ties and dialogue, something she hoped the inquiry could help replicate elsewhere.
One very obvious complicating factor is the way the social media platform X has allowed previously banned far-right voices to return, with Robinson’s voice in particular amplified by the likes of Elon Musk, the owner of X.
In November, Owen wrote what she called a “Dear John” letter to X, formerly known as Twitter. A month on she has no regrets about leaving the platform.
“It’s a nicer place to be without Twitter in your life, because what you are seeing there is an algorithm that is based on hate,” she said. “Whichever side of the fence you sit on, it is programmed so you will see something you dislike. And that’s not, that’s not the reality of society. That really isn’t how the world works.
“Actually, the real world is that when those mosques got damaged, you saw people coming together to build them back up again.”
The inquiry has already issued a call for evidence, with the first witnesses being heard in the new year.
Owen’s committee will hold a one-off session about the particular prejudice experienced by Muslim women, which Owen said appeared to be significantly under-reported, and she also hoped to look at stereotypes about older people.
What she does not want any of this to become is a forum for liberal hand-wringing and condemnation. While Owen is clear there was no excuse for the riots – “I’m not entirely sure how looting Lush and Greggs is standing up for the country” – she wants to avoid any sort of combative culture war narrative.
“If people genuinely feel a fear of something, it’s usually because there’s something else at the heart of it,” she said. “But we still need to listen to those fears, and I think we can do that without denigrating another part of our society.”
As the first female MP of east Asian origin, and the first at all from south-east Asian heritage – her mother is of Malaysian Chinese origin – as well as representing such a diverse seat, Owen said such work was necessarily personal to her.
She is politely scathing about the arguments made by Suella Braverman and the like that multiculturalism in the UK has somehow “failed”.
She said: “I‘m an embodiment of multiculturalism. The constituency I represent is a multicultural place. The whole of the UK is multicultural. Does she mean something different?
“We’ve always had people from different parts of the world come and be with us. It’s how we make the most of everyone, how we make it work. Because when it works, it is beautiful and it is something to be celebrated.”
