The violent protests in the aftermath of the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in the seaside English town of Southport are showing no signs of unwinding after social media posts spread disinformation that the killer was a Muslim migrant. Soon the far-right “thugs” attacked the mosque and police, burning down a police van with 27 officers taken to the hospital.
Since then, anti-immigrants rioters have been looting shops, targeting hotels housing asylum seekers, assaulting mosques and ethnic minority communities especially Muslims and their businesses, setting cars alight, vandalizing the properties and throwing petrol bombs at law enforcement forces.
Shocked by the worst strife in the UK in more than a decade, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to crush the violence against vulnerable groups with full force. “Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest, it is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities.”
While newly-elected Starmer makes efforts to quell violence, the Conservatives’ role in fueling the anti-Muslim sentiments couldn’t be ignored. In 2018, Boris Johnson’s derogatory characterization of Muslim women wearing burka, a loose enveloping garment, as “letter box” and “bank robbers” intensified hate crimes against Muslims, stoking Islamophobia in Britain.
Same year, the UK’s first female cabinet minister Syeda Warsi complained that Islamophobia had become “very widespread” in the country after several Conservatives were found to have made or shared offensive remarks about Muslims. In 2019, she again warned the Tories were becoming “institutionally Islamophobic.”
This time, the party suspended 14 Conservative members for posting anti-Islam posts but didn’t take measures to tackle the dangerous phenomenon, allowing extremism and radicalization to grow. Even Dame Sara Khan, former adviser to three UK prime ministers, recently singled out her own Conservative governments for triggering this unprecedented violence because they didn’t allocate enough resources to the areas struggling with extremism.
Since long, academics too have been warning the conservatives about growing far-right activism in the society and their ambivalence to control such far-right racist groups. But they ignored these caveats and let the UK tip into violence on their watch.
British media’s role has also been controversial in the recent violence against people of color for it portrayed the anti-Muslim riots as a clash between far-right and Muslims. Phraseologies such as “Allahu Akbar” and assertions like the rioters were “justified in their anger” by British far-right activist Tommy Robinson or putting forward a political justification for anti-immigration riots by the conservative Lord Davies, though he later on apologized, speaks of a strong buildup of Islamophobia in the UK.
Such instances align these media outlets and campaigners with those who once abysmally described Islamophobia as “an entirely rational response to an illiberal, vindictive and frankly fascistic creed.” The downplaying of the threat by representing the violence as “deep-rooted anger” and “festering resentment” do not augur well for the UK and the British society either given these attempts would till the ground for racial hatred and pit communities against each other, intensifying the country’s challenges.
As the situation subsides, the Labor government must also assess the circumstances such as “unmet primary needs” that have driven youth into conducting extreme racist activities, challenging social cohesion and forcing black and brown people to live in fear.
After the global financial crisis, the Conservative governments made austerity the part and parcel of their fiscal policy. Its successive prime ministers chose to sync themselves with the guiding principle set by their ancestors and constrained their financial resources through tax cuts, which led to curtailed public funding and real wage stagnation.
By the end of the Tory rule, stalled productivity, the biggest fall in spending power over the last 70 years, a sharp rise in poverty of 22%, deafening cost of living crisis and high inflation had added insult to the injury, exacerbating the UK economic challenges and providing a ripe ground for civil strife.
The newly-elected prime minister needs to quickly draw a lesson from the mistakes of his predecessors who ruined British society by turning a blind eye on Islamophobia and undermined the economy through tax cuts while humming the British values internationally without making any significant efforts to establish them domestically.
For more than a decade, the Conservatives ruled Britain yet rather than promoting interfaith harmony and addressing Britons’ economic concerns, they exploited the societal rifts to cling to power. As a result, Starmer has to contest a two-pronged challenge: rein in Islamophobia and racial prejudice to help the Muslim and other communities guard themselves against the grinding hatred and to bring back UK from the cusp of extremism as well as hike taxes, which may be a politically risky decision but is crucial to reinstate the UK economy and curb the growing sense of despair in British citizens.
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