Southport pier is rotten. Opened in 1860 during the town’s Victorian tourism goldrush, it is Britain’s second-longest, stretching into the Irish Sea off the north-west coast of England. But in 2022 its decking was found to be unsafe and was “temporarily” closed. The rest of the town was waking up on the weekday morning I visit. Workmen were arriving to unlock the town’s fairground Pleasureland (mini-golf, bowling, Splash World). Joggers in fluorescent cagoules circle the nearby parks, all named for kings and queens. The pedimented town hall proudly wears an umbrella-sized poppy for Remembrance Sunday. But the pier is still closed.
In the past few months, what was a quiet seaside town has become a byword for an English horror story. On 29 July three little girls – Bebe, Elsie and Alice – were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class they attended in Southport. Axel Rudakubana, who was 17 years old at the time of the attack, has been charged with their murder.
That sickening attack was followed by the worst civil unrest in England for 13 years. It was fuelled by lies about the identity of the killer circulating on social media. He was a Muslim, it was claimed, his name was Ali al-Shakati, he’d arrived illegally on a small boat. The raging discourse triggered riots across English towns and cities, with hotels containing asylum seekers and Islamic community centres coming under particular attack. Keir Starmer labelled the violence “far-right thuggery” and promised that the perpetrators would “feel the full force of the law”. It took the police a week to restore order, with some 1,280 people arrested and hundreds charged and imprisoned. Many cases are still making their way through the courts.
We still know nothing about the motive for the murders, and very little about the suspect (Rudakubana was born in Cardiff, to a Christian Rwandan family, and moved to Southport in 2013). But another wave of unrest threatened to emerge on Tuesday 29 October, after Rudakubana was further charged with production of a biological toxin and possession of a terrorist document titled “Military studies in the jihad against the tyrants – the Al-Qaeda training manual”. It has since been reported that the government delayed announcing these new charges through fear of further rioting.
Kampa Das lives across the road from the Southport Mosque on Sussex Road, where a vigil to remember the three murdered girls on 30 July turned into the first riot of the summer. She had to watch what happened from inside her house with her mother-in-law and daughter, “screaming and screaming”, as men in black masks and hoods hulked in her front garden and demolished the neighbours’ walls for bricks to throw at the local mosque. She was terrified they would break in and attack her, and for ten days afterwards she had to leave home and stay with family elsewhere. But the rioters came from outside Southport, she told me, and they all left around the time of the last train.
Soyful Alam was Southport’s imam until 2018, living in the mosque building with his family. “No one expected for that to happen,” he told me. He explained that the Muslim community in the area is “very scattered”, with the mosque serving a large part of Merseyside beyond the town. But he said that the small local Muslim population (Southport is around 1 per cent Muslim) always had a good relationship with the other religious communities and the “peaceful” town.
However, the riot hasn’t fundamentally changed his view of Southport, or of the position of British Muslims. He regarded that week as the work of troublemakers, an outbreak of “sheer violence” and “vandalism” rather than an attack on Muslims in particular. When asked whether he was worried about further attacks following Rudakubana’s new charges, he was phlegmatic, seeing the August riots as part of a predictable cycle in which minorities are blamed following terror incidents. He didn’t see it as part of a broader wave of discontent. “Had there been anything behind it,” he said, “it would have carried on.”
But the speed, simultaneity and venom of the unrest in Southport and elsewhere means that what happened cannot simply be shrugged off or blamed on external bad actors. Deeper causes marshalled an inchoate anger against migrants and Muslims into a rush of violence that spread like wildfire. On 2 August, an anti-immigrant march clashed with anti-fascist protesters in Liverpool, including outside the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque, which was first established in 1887 by a Liverpudlian convert to Islam. And on 3 August, anti-immigrant groups marched through the city centre, fighting police and looting. Later that night, in one of the most striking scenes of the riots, they torched a community library in Walton, in the north of Liverpool.
One local told me that the north and south of Liverpool are as different as the north and south of England. South Liverpool is a miracle of urban regeneration: home to the university and the museums quarter, to the gleaming harbour front, and to the new glass-and-steel towers that house corporate headquarters and luxury apartments. The north of the city, however, has undergone no such transformation. Instead of skyscrapers, the view from Anfield and Goodison Park is ladders of red-brick terrace, stretching on for miles like a Lowry painting. It was on one such nearby high street, County Road, that the library was attacked. Liverpool Walton, the parliamentary constituency it falls within, is the most deprived in England. It also has one of the highest Labour vote shares in the country, at 70.6 per cent.
Dan Carden is Liverpool Walton’s MP, first elected in 2017. But his vote share fell by 14 percentage points at the last election, thanks principally to a challenge from the Reform Party. “Reform came second in the election, and most of my conversations on the doorstep were about immigration,” he told me. He said this anxiety is intimately bound up with the economic hardship of the area. “The competition for housing is ridiculous,” Carden said, pointing to the 15,000 households currently on the waiting list for affordable housing across Liverpool.
This analysis understands the roots of the summer disorder to be socio-economic – what one might call the housing theory of the riots – and is shared by Sam East, the Labour councillor for Walton ward. When we met, he traced the anti-immigrant demonstrations to the competition for housing in north Liverpool, and the feeling that migrants and asylum seekers are given preferential treatment. “I wouldn’t in a million years want to sound like I’m excusing this behaviour by describing it as socio-economic anxiety,” he said. “But as with all propaganda historically, there is a kernel of truth to what was said [by those stirring up the riots].” He explained that the privately contracted housing of asylum seekers in north-west England has resulted in placing “a very high concentration of asylum seekers into Walton, comparably, because housing is cheaper”.
“When you’re in an environment, as the vast majority of councils are, where you have a huge number of people on social housing waiting lists, an acute housing shortage, a growing density of HMOs [houses in multiple occupation], and subdivision of existing houses, it’s a ripe atmosphere to tell a certain type of psychology that the reason their children can’t get a house, or the reason that half their road’s turned into HMOs, is because of new arrivals from small-boat crossings. It’s only a fraction of the story, but it is part of the story.”
But even this depersonalised narrative of scarce resources becomes tangled up with ethnicity and religion. As East told me: “You get a large building go vacant in and around north Liverpool, it goes around all the Facebook groups and then it’s, ‘Anyone know what this is going to be used for?’ And someone will pop up and say, sarcastically or cynically, ‘Oh, I bet it’ll be a mosque.’ And then, seven days later, it’s received wisdom in the whole community that it’s going to be a mosque. And there’s no basis for that in the overwhelming majority of cases… It’s an indictment of social media disinformation, and a question for the regulators of social media.”
On the streets of north Liverpool, you could see the tensions at play. Walking down County Road, just beyond the library, which is almost ready to reopen, I met a South Asian man working in a corner shop. He told me how he had been attacked on the street before, surrounded by groups of young people on bikes, and how he is taunted, told that all immigrants are terrorists. He seemed afraid of his customers. Asked if he’d reported any of this, he shook his head. “Police cause trouble.”
[See also: Tommy Robinson is no working-class hero]
The violence of August reached its vicious apogee, and its moral nadir, in Wath-upon-Dearne, a small town outside Rotherham, on 4 August. Wath, as it is locally known, is a former mining community. The main pit head wind wheel from the colliery, a totem of its past, is preserved and displayed next to Manvers Lake on the northern edge of the town. It was here that the rioting approached something like a pogrom, when migrants housed in a Holiday Inn Express were besieged by thugs who attempted to set fire to the building.
One of those involved, Peter Lynch, local to Wath, was imprisoned for violent disorder after shouting “racist and provocative” remarks. He died in prison on 19 October, and has been featured in videos by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who referred to him as a “political prisoner”. (Robinson himself has now been jailed for 18 months for contempt of court in relation to his repeating libellous claims about a Syrian refugee.) Messages reading “I am Peter Lynch” have since become popular among far-right activists. An inquest on 31 October revealed that Lynch had hanged himself in his cell.
When I visited Wath, the hotel on the outskirts of town was still. But the curtains were drawn around the ground floor. And several of the windows were still damaged or sealed with wooden panels. This is still the site of a trauma, one that has left its scars on this community as well as the victims inside. Glyn was at school with Peter Lynch. He was a normal guy, Glyn said, with “kids, grandkids”. It was a “shock” when he heard the news of his death. On the day of the riot, he had stayed at the pub, before heading home as soon as he heard helicopters flying over. Even so, he said that the main question around here is: “Who’s paying for it all? The taxpayer.”
Pete, whom I met in a local pub, was outside the hotel himself – to film the police, he told me. “It were disgusting,” he said. “It went too far.” But: “They did it for a reason,” and he too mentioned the sums of money spent to house the migrants. He blamed the police for the violence, saying they attacked first, and claimed that the migrants were mocking the protesters through the windows, holding a lighter up to an England flag – an allegation that has not been corroborated. He told me that in “two or three years” there’s “going to be a civil war, 100 per cent”.
He wasn’t the only person in Wath who talked of “civil war”. Andy told me that his nephew was jailed for two years and eight months for participating in the riot, along with several of his friends. Andy doesn’t believe they did anything wrong – “it weren’t a riot, it were a protest” – and also claimed that the police started the violence. He said he’d heard stories of migrants in the hotel spending the money they’re given on drink, and speculated that they have weapons – “machetes” – with them. Similar claims circulated at the time of the riots, but remain unverified. He said that paying for the migrants in the hotel was like having “leeches on your ass”.
How can we make sense of what happened in August? Many rioters have felt the full force of the law, and dozens are in prison, removed from civic life. But the “far-right thuggery” condemned by Keir Starmer is still active, with thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters taking to the streets of London on 26 October. The actors that drove the unrest have not disappeared.
And though most of the revolts took place in left-behind England, long marginalised and ravaged by austerity, we cannot put this down to economic anxiety alone. The insertion of asylum seekers into these withered communities, dependent on the state until their migration status is assessed, has transfigured a sense of mere deprivation into new impulses, racialised and fatalistic. After all, the same state has neglected places like Wath and Walton for generations, in much the way that in the early 1980s Geoffrey Howe sentenced the whole of Liverpool to “managed decline”. A heavy pall of spite and aggression has set in across England’s suburbs and satellite towns, the perfect oxygen for racism and ethnic-sectarian conflict.
High politics has already moved beyond a wave of violence that our Prime Minister never seemed comfortable analysing let alone confronting. It might be tempting to hope that these places can be lulled back into what Orwell called the “deep sleep of England” – the sleep that Victorian Southport seems like it enjoys on quiet mornings. But the rage of the summer is still at large, ready to burst forth once again.
[See also: Jason Cowley: England in pieces]
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America