In recent weeks, Britain has experienced serious riots following the tragic murders of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside. Media reports pinned the blame on right-wing, racist thugs, but this, writes Paul Whiteley, is an oversimplistic analysis. The most important underlying cause is poverty and deprivation in the communities affected
According to their records, the police have arrested more than 1,000 people across Britain for rioting following the tragic murders of three young girls in Southport on 29 July 2024. The Labour government responded rapidly with a crackdown involving multiple arrests. Many rioters are now facing jail.
The generally accepted explanation for these unprecedented riots is that right-wing extremists, spurred on by others online, are the root cause. This simplistic analysis implies that locking up a few hundred people will solve the problem. Indeed, the fact that the riots subsided following the crackdown reinforces the idea that arrests and prison sentences are all that are needed to restore order.
There are significant weaknesses in this explanation. Firstly, Britain has experienced violent demonstrations in the past. In August 2011, looting, arson and violent conflict – some fatal – broke out in towns and cities across the country. The unrest was triggered by the shooting in London of a Black man, Mark Duggan, by the Metropolitan Police. At the time, David Lammy, the current Foreign Secretary and MP for the London constituency of Tottenham, strongly condemned the police for their heavy-handed approach. It would be a stretch to argue that right-wing extremists were responsible for this violence.
Similar unrest occurred in the St Pauls district of Bristol in 1986, which has a high concentration of ethnic minorities. Riots erupted after a raid by Avon and Somerset Police looking for illegal drugs and contraband. But the rioting, which took place in a relatively deprived community, was a backlash against heavy-handed policing rather than an expression of right-wing extremism.
Internet algorithms are often blamed for disseminating fake news and reinforcing extremism, but recent research challenges this narrative
Another problem with current assumptions is that recent research challenges the narrative that the internet incites violence. Online algorithms are often blamed for disseminating fake news and reinforcing extremism. In a recent book reviewing the literature on this topic, Ken Newton argues; 'widely publicised false information about Covid did not result in a widely misinformed population. On the contrary, social media seem to inform people and have little effect on their political attitudes'.
If the current narrative about the riots has weaknesses, what, then, explains the outbreak? Data from the UK Census of 2021 at the parliamentary constituency level reveals four alternative explanations for the sudden upsurge.
One possibility, which fits with the radical-right narrative, is that rioting in the streets – which has also occurred in other European countries – is the product of opposition to immigration. If this is true, it would follow that constituencies with many immigrants would be more likely to experience violence than those with few.
A second explanation, linked to the first, is that Islamophobia in the wider population causes riots. Indeed, rioters did target some mosques. But once again, this theory implies that we should see the most rioting in constituencies with the highest percentage of Muslims.
A third possibility is that violence would be most likely in constituencies in which the Reform party performed well in the recent general election. Reform is a radical-right party descending from the United Kingdom Independence party (UKIP), which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union. Its leader Nigel Farage was a former Member of the European Parliament and is a right-wing populist. Labour MP Andy Macdonald has criticised Farage for stirring up the riots with his rhetoric.
The broadest explanation for the riots is that they are a response to underlying poverty and deprivation
Finally, the fourth and broadest explanation for the riots is that they are a response to underlying poverty and deprivation. This is a theory that has gained credibility over time. Deprivation creates resentment and discontent: what the social psychologist William Runciman called ‘relative deprivation'. In some circumstances, such deprivation can foment violence. According to this theory, riots would be most likely to occur in the left-behind areas of Britain.
To test these hypotheses, we can identify communities at the constituency level which recently experienced rioting. Some, such as Tamworth in Staffordshire, are single parliamentary constituencies. Others, including the cities of Nottingham and Manchester, involve more than one constituency. We exclude London from this exercise because, as the capital city, it is the scene of many protests and demonstrations. London-based events often focus on Parliament, and attract not just locals, but people from all over the country.
The chart below shows the correlations between four indicators of the alternative explanations and the incidence of rioting. Potential explanations are the percentage of ethnic minorities, the percentage of Muslims, Reform party vote share in the 2024 general election, and a constituency's incidence of child poverty.
As always, a perfect correlation between the variables would score 1.0, and no correlation at all would score zero. The chart shows that rioting was unrelated to the Reform vote across the 632 constituencies in Britain. It also shows weak correlations between the percentage of ethnic minorities and the percentage of Muslims in constituencies. The correlation between rioting and poverty, however, is significantly stronger.
The radical-right explanation for the riots has some support, but the evidence for it is weak
This means that the radical-right explanation for the riots has some support, but the evidence for it is weak. No doubt racists and political extremists were involved in the riots, but the data does not support the idea that such people caused them. Indeed, the data suggests that the riots are a symptom rather than a cause. Deprivation in communities which feel left behind appears to be much more of a contributory factor in outbreaks of violent unrest. A similar exercise in other European countries would very likely reinforce this conclusion.
I mean, I don't disagree, the riots and unrest in Britain and all over the world are due to wealth inequality as well as unpunished corruption, but it's important to note that while underlying causes exist and need to be addressed, you also can't deny the fact the unrest and anger were intentionally directed by far-right groups into seeing immigrants as the problem. That's why it's labeled as a mostly far-right riot. Most people there were instigated by misinformation on the identity of the stabber, which sparked the riots from underlying anger towards immigrants that people view as the reason as to why these places are heavily deprived.
Like how left-wing union groups may protest, they protest due to unrest and anger towards poverty and rising living costs, and we all can see that their protests are instigated by left-wing groups or ideology.
The unrest and underlying causes are there, and they affect everyone, but people are usually instigated into doing something by someone or some message, if this makes sense.Â
Either way I hope the government focuses on helping deprived areas because even if I don't agree with the anti immigration sentiments that were spread, I also think communities should be given proper opportunities and support to live a good life.
One strong factor was stupid sentimentality. A few weeks before the Southport murders, the bodies of two gay men were found dumped on the Clifton suspension bridge. The suspect was an immigrant from Colombia, but there were no riots. The victims of the Southport stabbings were adorable little girls, one of them from an immigrant family. But gay men are not so adorable. Another factor was a long failure to develop a fair clear and consistant immigration policy. There should be tight resrictions on non Commonwealth immigration, and a referendum on whether to remain in the Commonwealth and allow free immigration from it, or to leave the Commonwealth and in future only allow immigration in exceptional circumstances, such as refugees.
We should distinguish between protests and riots. Protests against public policy occurred in highly visible places – mainly town centres as well as Whitehall in London – as well as outside hotels accommodating refugees / asylum seekers. Riots occurred in fewer places and involved only a minority (usually a very small minority) of the people who participated in or attended the protests.
Refugees / asylum seekers are generally housed in places where the costs of accommodation are lower, and these are disproportionately in or near areas where permanent residents experience poverty / relative deprivation. One does not have to be a right-wing extremist, a racist or anti-immigrant to understand why permanent residents who are themselves often poorly housed and chronically short of money are disconcerted when refugees / asylum seekers are moved into decent if modest hotels in their vicinity and provided with the means of subsistence. Especially where this entails the loss of a social amenity for the community (such as the only local wedding venue), some residents may be inclined to protest.
But few are moved to take violent action or to destroy, and most forthrightly condemn violent behaviour when it does occur. Riots occur when annoyance turns into anger or outrage, usually because allegations spread, often via social media, that asylum seekers are guilty of criminal actions, especially against local women or girls, as in the case of the false rumour that the person who murdered three young girls in Southport was a recently-arrived Muslim asylum-seeker.
Such violent actions do not spring directly from poverty or relative deprivation. Thuggery, often alcohol-fuelled, would not be targeted at mosques, Muslim-owned businesses and asylum hotels if there were not active campaigns by relatively small numbers of English / British nationalists designed to demonise immigrant communities and blaming Muslims for all manner of social ills. The ‘extreme right’ and anti-immigrant populists opportunistically exploit poverty and relative deprivation, but they trigger aggressive and sometimes riotous behaviour wherever they can.
These are interesting comments, but a multivariate analysis of the relationships (a logit model) shows that deprivation is an even stronger predictor of riots - immigration has a weak effect but the Islamic variable is non-significant. The model can be improved in a number of ways, but it really has implications for some of the protests and riots that have occurred across Europe recently.
I don't think anyone familiar with earlier research on anti-immigrant / Islamophobic poets / violence would have expected that 'constituencies with many immigrants would be more likely to experience violence than those with few, or that we would see most rioting in constituencies with the highest percentage of Muslims. Actual familiarity with / living alongside immigrants / Muslims tends to inoculate against intolerance.
In any case, none of this helps to explain why immigrants and Muslims / mosques should be targets of those riots that do occur.
I think you have demonstrated that aggregate census data are not much help in predicting the incidence or the situational dynamics of violent protest.