Riots and racism: why is the UK burning?

Claims of two-tier policing and uncontrolled immigration may not be borne out by the facts, but that has not stopped them being played up for political ends

As the people of Glengormley, on the northern edge of Belfast, tidied up and prepared for more violence in the midst of what has been described as a modern-day pogrom, a court 500 miles away in Southampton , on the south coast of England, started to deal with its own outbreak of thuggery.

The trigger for this week’s riots in the Northern Irish capital had been the image of a black assailant who appeared to be stabbing and slashing his supine white victim in the face and neck while shouting in Arabic. The suspect was later revealed to be a refugee from Sudan.

In Southampton, the courts were dealing with the aftermath of separate violent demonstrations. The prosecutor Siobhan Linsley told a hearing that 1,000 people had massed outside the city’s central police station on 2 June.

They had gathered after the release of police bodycam footage showing the last moments of Henry Nowak, a white 18-year-old student erroneously arrested and handcuffed over false racism claims while dying from stab wounds inflicted on him by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh. Digwa, 23, who had made the false racism allegations, had just been jailed for murder.

A quarter of those who gathered outside the police station in Southampton over the Nowak case appeared to be drinking alcohol, Linsley told the court, and masks were worn. One speaker had shouted out: “Do you want the house, the Digwa house?” the court heard. Hundreds of protesters then moved towards an incorrect address for the Digwa family in the St Denys area.

Protesters threw bricks, chairs and bins at police. People streamed through gardens and driveways. A trapped group of officers were “surrounded by a baying mob throwing projectiles” and a police car was attacked. The disorder lasted for about two and a half hours, with police “coming under almost constant assaults”.

The demonstrators were said to have come from near and far and included members of far-right groups calling themselves the Southampton Patriots, White Vanguard and the Portsmouth branch of the National Rebirth Party.

The fancy names struck a somewhat pitiful note as the court dealt with a number of those offering guilty pleas. Taylor Grundy, 22, who had pushed a commercial bin on fire at officers and thrown a plank of wood, cried throughout the hearing. He was sentenced to two and a half years. A second defendant, Dillon Crawford, 29, a father of two with another child on the way, was given a three-year jail sentence for throwing a bin and a metal chair at officers. He told the court he had been “angry in the moment” and lost himself.

Crawford, 29, had 19 convictions for 33 offences including battery, robbery, burglary and shoplifting. On one occasion, he had broken a partner’s front teeth and punched her unconscious, after which he had bleached her hair, the court heard.

Do these cases in Belfast and Southampton tell us anything about the United Kingdom today?

For Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, the anti-immigration party riding high in the polls, the decisions made by the police officers at the time of Nowak’s murder offered evidence that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than ethnic minorities”.

As for the violence in Belfast, in which homes were burned and women and children were forced to flee from masked men shouting “foreigners out”, Farage said it showed that while there were bad actors, the “vast majority are fearful … [they] want action, they actually want something done to make their streets safer”. He said: “I think the worry is, over the course of the summer … unless you give people hope, this stuff will get worse.”

For Farage’s critics, this sounded like a threat rather than a warning; another way for he and his party to stoke division for political ends. Establishment voices echoed the claim that these disturbances were either an ugly symptom of the failures of the state to secure the country’s borders or, in the case of Nowak, proof that equality policies within the UK’s public institutions had gone too far and warped the priorities of public servants.

An editorial in the Times, headlined “Burning resentment in Belfast fuelled by inaction on immigration”, argued that a “bemused and drifting government has done nothing to tackle the root cause” of the violence. That original seed, it claimed, was illegal immigration.

Yet, when these arguments are unpicked, the picture is more complex, and the facts arguably do not support the populist narratives.

Migration of any kind to Northern Ireland is low. In the 2021 census, almost 97% of people described their ethnicity as white. Just 2,248 asylum seekers, in a total population of 1.93 million people, were in receipt of government support in Northern Ireland as of 31 March 2024.

Just 200 people are estimated to have been involved in this week’s unrest.

There was also marvelment in some quarters at the claim that the UK has “two-tier”” policing that discriminates against white people. For decades, Britain has grappled with how to deal with racism in policing. Official report after official report has demanded that forces across the UK need to do more, much more, to tackle the problem.

The police officers’ response to Nowak is under investigation, but that single case has been used by Farage and the even more extreme party Restore Britain to flip on its head widespread concerns about the disproportionate criminalisation of minority ethnic people.

The analysis offered by Farage and others about what the recent riots say about the UK in 2026 is, then, keenly contested.

Prof Tim Newburn, who was behind a landmark study into the August 2011 England riots – at the time, the largest wave of civil unrest in a generation – said such outbreaks of mass violence were “quite unusual” in the UK.

“It actually takes something quite special to make them go and that is maybe some combination of, on the one hand, the degree of whatever stress or anger that people feel, and on the other, a lack of control by the police,” he said.

There were signs in both riots that the police found themselves understaffed. The National Police Chiefs’ Council, which represents senior officers, has repeatedly said law enforcement in the UK is chronically underfunded.

Jon Boutcher, the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which is well acquainted with violent outbreaks between loyalist and nationalist communities, was forced to activate a “mutual aid” mechanism this week, asking other forces in the UK to provide officers. Twelve of his officers were injured on Wednesday night.

The police and crime commissioner for the Hampshire police force, which serves Southampton, complained recently that it was one of the lowest-funded forces in England and Wales. Eleven police officers and a police dog were injured in Southampton when they were overrun.

That does not mean such riots do not say something important about the “zeitgeist” of the country, said Newburn, a professor of criminology and social policy at the London School of Economics.

The UK has endured a cost of living crisis, with prices rising in the shops and energy costs being some of the highest in Europe. Yet the riots of recent years have predominantly been attached to issues relating to race and migration rather than those more traditionally linked to leftwing causes.

“It tells us a lot about the current preoccupations of our politics at the moment,” Newburn said. “Notwithstanding that a lot of people are hurting in all sorts of different ways, the most obvious kind of points of contest at the moment seem to be around nationhood, race, borders and so forth.”

John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex, was a co-author of an analysis of the 2024 riots that followed the murder of three girls in Southport, Merseyside, by a perpetrator who was falsely claimed to be an asylum seeker in the immediate aftermath.

“These are collective racist attacks,” Drury said of the scenes in Belfast and Southampton. “White victimhood is a massively powerful mobilising grievance. It’s an empirical question how many of those participants, you know, really believe there is this white victimhood. Some of them are using that as an excuse, but some of them honestly do believe that it’s part of their ideology. It’s called modern racism.”

Drury said there had been a normalisation of toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent years, accelerated by people online who were able to initially push their ideas anonymously but now felt empowered, not just by voices on the periphery but by the established media and politicians.

“If you look at what happened with Brexit, there was a well-known association of meaning associated with the Brexit vote: that it was a xenophobic referendum,” Drury said. “We had an immediate spike, a spike in hate attacks around race and ethnicity immediately afterwards, because people felt they were not alone – ‘Many people in the country think like me’ – which is what these people are thinking now. So, yes, we’ve got a problem of racism, but it’s more than that. It’s the problem of racists becoming empowered.”

The disturbances in Belfast continued for two nights, ending with a peaceful protest on Thursday evening. They did not spread elsewhere, despite the best efforts of antagonists such as the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. While on a trip to Moscow, he called for all of the UK to rise up.

His posts on X were reshared and amplified by the tech trillionaire Elon Musk to his 240m followers, but to little effect. “It is difficult to predict a riot,” said Keith Flett, a historian and the editor of A History of Riots.

Meanwhile, in Southampton on Friday, Judge Mousley KC continued to sentence the perpetrators of the violence. It had been, he said, a “hate crime, born out of a hatred of the police and in some cases racist views”.

“The impact on the community was profound,” the judge said. “Local residents were subjected to fear, distress and a genuine sense of danger.”