Understanding England’s anarchy

We must condemn these lawless riots – but we must also confront the anger behind them.

They came to fight, not mourn. That is the first thing to understand. The balaclava-clad, tanked-up, angry men who have marched the streets of Southport, Sunderland, Hull and so many other towns and cities over the past week did not come to pay their respects to Bebe, Elsie or Alice, or to share the pain of their heart-stricken families. They bought six-packs and boarded trains for a day out attacking an asylum hotel or a mosque, and then filmed the looting and arson as entertainment. This isn’t protest. It’s a form of anarchy.

No tragedy, no grievance can justify the torching of a police station or the organised assault of a place of worship. Those throwing bricks and bottles at police officers, racially abusing fellow citizens, or inciting violence online are criminals and must be unequivocally condemned. As during the 2011 riots, swift and certain justice is the only viable law enforcement response and the best immediate deterrent to further violence. Law and order, so visibly broken, must be restored as soon as possible.

But it is not enough to simply condemn. There is something in the speed at which the disturbances have spread and the sheer abandon of rioters that exposes how gossamer-thin our social fabric has become. The truth is many thousands of people chose to join gatherings that they must have known would become the smouldering scenes that the rest of us watched, horrified, on the News at Ten. This is not just the madness of crowds or the incitement of a blind mob. And it is a mistake to think it will simply burn itself out like some summer heatwave.

This is why the government’s response has so far fallen short. Ministers’ repeated use of the language of retribution – the Home Secretary threatened a “reckoning”, while the Prime Minister has spoken of the full force of the law being “visited” on those who took part – has increased the tension and manufactured the battle the instigators seek. It is the language of comic-book heroes not cabinet ministers, an atmosphere matched by the organising of copycat vigilante groups such as the Muslim Defence League. The repeated comparison to football hooliganism implies that ministers and the police think this is a hysteria they can arrest their way out of.

But the best the police can do is fairly enforce the law. They cannot forge norms of civility and respect or revive a sense of shared identity in communities where it has been lost. They can do nothing to assuage the anger over politicians’ broken promises to control immigration or their failure to manage its social consequences, which undeniably fuel these riots. A clampdown on hate is necessary, yes, but it is not an answer to a crisis of trust.

The difficulty for Labour is that it’s too easy for them to say, and believe, that this is just the fault of far-right antagonists, and no more. But what happens when most of the arrests turn out to be local people, not English Defence League outsiders? What happens if other groups riot? What happens when, as happened in Birmingham on Monday, non-white thugs there surround a Sky News crew and slash the tyres of its van? Tommy Robinson didn’t incite that from his sunbed.

Instead, the more difficult path involves confronting the fact that, in many poorer, suburban areas, the shift to a multi-ethnic, multicultural society has been abrupt and attention given to integration wanting. It means having uncomfortable conversations about the failures of Tony Blair-era multiculturalism to match the rights of new arrivals with responsibilities to learn English or participate in common aspects of British life. It means acknowledging that many communities in this country are divided to some degree along ethnic or religious lines.

But, just as importantly, it means recognising that immigration is not the whole cause either. And those on the right who present these riots as solely about migration or culture are as myopic as those on the left who dismiss them as the actions of a racist minority. Immigration – as ever throughout history – is the touch paper for a deeper sense of loss and nostalgia, a feeling that change is too quick and uneven, that communities are being hollowed out and fragmented, that the places people were once proud to call home are being left behind.

Anyone who has read local commentary or listened to focus groups in these places over recent years can see this clearly. The conversations often come back to the same roads and neighbourhoods. County Road in Liverpool, for example, or Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent, both of which have been sites of rioting. Neighbourhoods that have changed immeasurably over recent decades through economic decline and community loss, where shops are boarded up and homes are crumbling, and whose local politics is more febrile as a result.

It is into precisely these communities that Home Office contractors – encouraged by cheap property prices, cash-strapped councils and middle-class resistance elsewhere – have disproportionately placed asylum seekers in hotels and dispersal accommodation, often with no consultation and no end date. That they have become symbols of not just uncontrolled immigration but of neglect at the hands of the governing class is unsurprising. Demographic and cultural change is just the most visible proof of a deeper malaise, exploited by provocateurs and amplified online until it bursts on to the streets.

The point is this: until ministers try to address why people are angry enough to be moved to civil disorder, they will not contain it. And the worst thing is to pretend this anger doesn’t exist. Because while no community deserves to be subjected to the kind of division and destruction that some have witnessed in recent days, and nothing excuses it, no community can withstand the declining fortunes some have experienced in recent decades either. Ministers need to apply the same energy to the restoration of community – both local and national – as enforcement of the law.

This is partly what the Conservative levelling-up agenda – unfulfilled, derided, now discarded – was intended to achieve. It promised not just an economic revival but a social one too, giving communities more control over their neighbourhood and, with it, a greater sense of pride in their place. Coupled with stronger growth, manageable levels of migration and a stronger sense of nationhood, such changes could have doused the community tensions we have seen explode here in the past week. That it did not deliver does not mean it was the wrong prescription.

Labour, which so ruthlessly exploited people’s sense of decline a month ago, would do well to remember its salience now. Keir Starmer has the political capital, parliamentary majority, and mandate for change to confront the uncomfortable questions about how we got to this point – and answer them honestly, without platitudes or selective analysis. It is in all of our interests that he has the courage to do so, and that he succeeds.