The sight of scurrying looters and widespread rioting across multiple English cities may be an unusual one. But the disorder has a 21st-century precedent in another overheated August.
The television images will take many back to the 2011 riots, which engulfed London before spreading to other cities and were considered the worst week of public disorder to hit Britain for 200 years.
Then, like now, Keir Starmer was involved in quelling the disturbances. In 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions who kept the courts open for 24 hours a day to process offenders and allowed magistrates to pass longer and tougher sentences.
This time, as prime minister, he has accused far-right agitators of mercilessly exploiting the deaths of three girls to fuel attacks on asylum seekers and people of colour.
Below, we examine the parallels and differences between the riots which happened 13 years apart.
How widespread has the violent disorder been, and where?
The 2011 riots lasted for four days, centred on London, and saw some of the most intense civil unrest in recent English history.
It began as small-scale disorder in Tottenham, north London, on Saturday 6 August and spread two miles across north London to Wood Green, with hundreds of people looting shops.
By Monday 8 August, 22 of the 32 London boroughs were affected by disturbances the Metropolitan police described as “unprecedented in the capital’s history” including in Ealing, where Richard Bowes, 68, was critically injured after confronting looters.
On the fourth night, London was quieter, but the disorder had spread to Gloucester, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham, where three Muslim men were killed while protecting shops. The most widespread disturbances that day took place in Greater Manchester.
More than 3,000 arrests were made across England, with more than 2,000 people facing criminal charges for various offences related to the riots. The costs have been estimated to total more than £400m.
The 2024 violence began last Tuesday in the seaside town of Southport, but quickly spread to more than a dozen towns and cities across England. The next day, groups attacked the police in London, Manchester, Hartlepool and Aldershot. The disorder continued over the weekend with clashes on Saturday in Liverpool, Blackpool, Hull, Stoke-on-Trent, Leeds, Nottingham and Bristol, and also in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
On Sunday, rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. Later, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, a similar incident played out at a Holiday Inn Express hotel – where reports suggested asylum seekers were also being housed – with fires being lit, windows smashed and missiles thrown at officers. In the north-eastern town of Middlesbrough, rioters smashed the windows of houses and cars. This week, the violence has spread to more towns and small cities including Plymouth and Darlington.
Police are investigating a number of racist attacks connected to the riots including a video circulated online of a mob of rioters in Hull attacking an Asian man in his car. In Belfast, a man in his 50s was taken to hospital on Monday after he was seriously assaulted.
There have been more than 400 arrests with numbers expected to rise. The damage is not – so far – considered to be as extensive as that caused by the riots 13 years earlier.
What was the trigger?
Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old mixed -race British man, was shot dead by police on 4 August 2011. Police claimed that officers were attempting to arrest Duggan because they suspected he was planning an armed attack. An illegal firearm was found over a fence near where he was shot. His family maintained that he was unarmed and had been unlawfully killed by a police officer.
Two days later, fewer than 100 people, including Duggan’s family, gathered outside the police station in Tottenham at about 5pm, requesting to speak with a senior police officer about the Duggan case. Shortly before 9pm, Duggan’s family departed when bottles were thrown and two police cars were set on fire. The riots had begun.
The Guardian/LSE project Reading the Riots, which interviewed 270 people who took part in the 2011 disturbances, found that Duggan’s death sparked widespread anger and frustration at people’s everyday treatment at the hands of police with 85% saying policing was an contributory factor.
On 29 July 2024, Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were killed in a multiple stabbing at a Taylor Swift-inspired dance class in Southport. Eight other children suffered knife wounds, with five left in a critical condition. Two adults were also critically hurt.
Axel Rudakubana, 17, who was born in Cardiff and had been living in Banks, a village in Lancashire a few miles north of Southport, has been charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder.
This led to widespread mobilisation of protesters via social media to descend on Southport to protest at the circumstances surrounding the girls’ deaths.
What role has disinformation played?
Rumours fuelled the riots of 2011, but usually via the BBM network – a free mobile phone messaging service open to anyone with a BlackBerry phone. Claims that a 16-year-old girl was punched to the ground by police during a peaceful demonstration against the death of Duggan circulated on social media during the first days of disturbances.
In Lewisham, south London, 200 “nationalists” were falsely said to be marauding through the streets, according to the BBC, while in London’s Square Mile, there were unfounded rumours that Canary Wharf was on “amber alert”, and Portsmouth’s Gunwharf Quays shopping area was said to be ablaze – it was not.
From the start of the 2024 riots, false claims were used to mobilise protesters in Southport around claims that the three girls had been murdered by a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK by small boat.
Before the suspect’s identity was confirmed, a Muslim name was falsely attributed to the attacker on X, formerly known as Twitter, and on Telegram, with some claiming that it was a terrorist attack which had been suppressed by the government.
One claim that an asylum seeker or migrant was responsible for the Southport stabbing reached at least 15.7m accounts across social media platforms, Reuters reported. The misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, were among those repeating the claim.
Nigel Farage, MP and leader of the rightwing Reform party, said he wondered “whether the truth is being withheld from us” as he questioned why the incident was not being treated as terror-related, and asked whether the suspect had been monitored by security services.
Southport Mosque was attacked, suggesting that the rioters may have been influenced by the unfounded online accusations. Merseyside police said that disinformation online played a part in the violence.
Police were forced to put out statements over the weekend correcting false claims that had been amplified by Robinson, including that two protesters in Stoke had been stabbed “by Muslims” and that an “alleged Muslim stabbed at least three women in Stirling”.
What do we know about the rioters?
The disorder appears to have been directed on some occasions by members of the far right, with some participants shouting racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigration slogans. The anti-fascism organisation Hope Not Hate described the unrest as possibly “the worst wave of far-right violence in the UK postwar”. It said social media clips of the violence showed, in some cases, “gangs of men set upon people on the basis of their skin colour, or else smashed, graffitied or set fire to their vehicles and shops”.
Tell Mama, a monitoring group that tracks Islamophobic hate crimes, said the extreme rightwing activity in the past week had led to a fivefold increase in threats to Muslims since the same time last year. The charity said 10 mosques had faced attacks or threats, including Islamic places of worship in Southport, Liverpool and Hartlepool. It added that people had been left too scared to leave their homes, with women wearing head coverings such as the hijab being threatened in the street.
Counter-demonstrations have also grown, including the mobilisation of young Muslim men in Bolton and Birmingham.
Most rioters in 2011 were young and male. Ministry of Justice data from 2011 revealed that where ethnicity was recorded, 37% of those appearing in the courts on riot-related charges were white, 40% were black and 6% Asian. Their ethnic profile largely mirrored their local communities.
Reading the Riots found they came from a cross-section of local communities. Just under half of those interviewed in the study were students. Of those who were not in education, 59% were unemployed. Although half of those interviewed were black, those involved did not consider these “race riots”.
The report suggested rioters were generally poorer than the general population. Analysis of more than 1,000 court records suggests 59% of the England rioters come from the most deprived 20% of areas in the UK.
Ministry of Justice analysis found that while the majority of defendants had previous convictions, more than a fifth did not.
How many police officers were available?
Police chiefs have announced that an extra 2,200 riot-trained officers will be deployed to combat the violence that has erupted across England and Northern Ireland since last week.
Almost 4,000 riot officers have already been deployed. Some faced violence in their own area, and some assisted other forces that were under strain over the weekend.
As of 31 March 2024, there were 147,746 full-time equivalent officers in post across the 43 police forces in England and Wales. This is the highest number of police officers since comparable records began in the year ending March 2003.
In contrast, the number of police officers in post in England and Wales on 30 September 2011 – a month after that year’s August riots – was the lowest number recorded since 2002. There were 136,261 full-time equivalent police officers in post, a reduction of 6,012 or 4.2% compared with September 2010.
How has the justice system dealt with the riots?
The riots come amid an overcrowding crisis in prisons. The government last month introduced measures to release thousands of inmates early to deal with the crisis. Prisons have been routinely operating at more than 99% capacity since the start of 2023, with only hundreds of places left in the adult male estate.
The justice minister Heidi Alexander said the government had introduced 567 additional prison places, which were due to come forward at the end of the month.
As of 2 August, the prison population in England and Wales was 87,362, according to government figures. The Ministry of Justice said the maximum number of prisoners that could be held was 88,832, meaning there were only 1,350 spare places.
In comparison, jails were less overcrowded in 2011 when the prison population was 86,131, with scope to hold an additional 3,341 inmates. The chief inspector of prisons report 2011-12 noted that despite the August riots, “the establishments we inspected this year were less overcrowded than the year before”. But it added that resources were “stretched very thinly”.
In the aftermath of the 2011 riots, inspectors concluded that, overall, adult prisons coped well with the influx of those convicted. But some youth jails were more adversely affected, with an increase in group fights as new inmates formed gangs.
Magistrates courts were asked to sit for 24 hours a day as the justice system worked to sentence more than 3,000 people arrested during the disorder. As of 10 August 2012, 2,138 people had been found guilty and sentenced – 69% of those brought before the courts, according to Ministry of Justice analysis.
After this year’s riots started, Alexander said courts in England could adopt a similar approach.
How have the incidents been dealt with by politicians?
Keir Starmer has rejected calls by MPs and 60 anti-racist and migrants’ rights organisations for parliament to be recalled to address the violence. However, the Northern Ireland assembly will be recalled later this week to discuss violent scenes after several businesses were attacked at an anti-immigration protest in Belfast on Saturday.
Starmer chaired an emergency meeting with police chiefs and ministers on Monday morning. He announced that a “standing army” of specialist police officers was being assembled to crack down on rioting. This followed his televised address to the nation on Sunday in which he vowed that rioters would “regret” engaging in “far-right thuggery”.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said urgent measures had been brought in to make sure mosques are offered extra protection.
The Reform leader, Nigel Farage, has been criticised for claiming that the violent protests were a reaction to fears about immigration. Sayeeda Warsi, a former co-chair of the Conservative party, criticised some politicians, the media and thinktanks of “poisoning of the public discourse on Muslims, migrants and refugees”.
After the outbreak of the 2011 riots, the prime minister, David Cameron, said there was “no justification for the aggression the police and the public faced”. The home secretary, Theresa May, added: “Such disregard for public safety and property will not be tolerated.”
The Conservative government subsequently established the riots, communities and victims panel to explore the causes of the disorder and how to avoid similar disturbances in future. It said a lack of confidence in the police response to the initial riots in London in August led to further disturbances across England.
