Following the horrific murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport on 29 July, Britain endured its worst sequence of rioting since 2011. But while some of the violence – looting, arson, clashes with riot police – was reminiscent of that period of unrest, this summer has distinguished itself in morbid ways. Misinformation circulating freely on social media triggered far-right mayhem, and there were racist attacks on mosques and hotels offering shelter to asylum seekers. As Jason Cowley writes in our cover story on page 20, the riots “revealed something dark and shocking: an England atomised, an England in pieces”.
There is a reassuring symmetry that the man responsible for indicting the 2011 rioters as director of public prosecutions is now Prime Minister. Keir Starmer has conducted himself with the same peremptory legal authority he wielded 13 years ago. “You will regret taking part in this,” he told the far-right rioters and social media provocateurs, adding that those involved “will feel the full force of the law”, as indeed they have.
Mindful of the importance of a powerful legal deterrent, Mr Starmer was true to his word. As many as 1,000 arrests have been made and more than 500 charges brought. Sentences of up to three years for violent disorder have been issued. There is no doubt that rapid sentencing helped bring an end to the rolling unrest.
But it is one thing to smother the violence beneath the arm of the law. It is quite another to articulate why it erupted in the first place, and to ask why it attracted not just the far right but disaffected citizens in some of the country’s most desolate areas. Part of the explanation is economic. Analysis by the Financial Times showed that of the ten most deprived areas of England, seven featured far-right violence. These are parts of England – alternately labelled “regional”, “provincial” or “peripheral” – that were cast out of the neoliberal political economy long ago. The local industries that created and sustained them and offered purpose and meaning have long gone, replaced by unfulfilling and unreliable work. Their landscapes and geographies reflect this absence: grey, ghostly, run-down high streets.
If rioting is the sublimation of political rage, the events of recent weeks can partially be interpreted as the roar of a neglected England, demoralised not just by austerity but by a multigenerational pattern of neglect. History shows that the state does have regenerative powers. Michael Heseltine was one Conservative minister who saw the 1981 Toxteth riots as a symptom of urban deprivation. His renewal of Liverpool in the years that followed is justly celebrated, even if structural problems remain. Towns such as Rotherham have never received such concerted state attention. They deserve it now, as they have for decades.
In many respects, the United Kingdom remains a remarkably successful multiracial, multicultural and multi-faith society, plural and tolerant. But the riots in England and Belfast revealed smouldering discontent and showed how thin the line between order and anarchy can be.
John Hayes, the man who bravely tackled the Southport assailant and was himself stabbed, described the tragedy as a “catalyst” but not the “root cause” of the violence that erupted. He mentioned people’s frustration over the levels of immigration – an issue that Labour must address with fairness and decency. The deprived regions that endured violence are also home to disproportionately high numbers of asylum seekers, living in local hotels because of the last government’s botched Rwanda scheme.
But to achieve the national renewal to which it aspires, the new Labour government must do better than just delivering a more efficient immigration system. It must restore a sense of pride to communities ravaged first by the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and then by the austerity of the 2010s.
The question of what it means to be English and British in the age of market-driven globalisation has been as neglected as the local economies of the old northern mill towns. Mr Starmer has done his legal duty in restoring order to our streets. The political duty of his government now is to lead us on what he promised in front of N0 10 in his short, sombre victory speech of 5 July: “A rediscovery of who we are.”
[See also: A different kind of weather]
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This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone