Sir Starmer's iron fist falls on the far-right rioters.

The sight of scurrying looters and widespread rioting across multiple English cities may be unusual. However, the violent public disorders that happened in England and Northern Ireland could occur in many European Union countries where the far-right is often underestimated as nostalgic and bizarre harmless small groups or as tub-thumping hooligans. Whereas those groups cultivate the same ideology based on hate of differences, homophobia, racism and the cult of violence.

The television images will take many back to the August 2011 riots, which engulfed London before spreading to other cities and were considered the worst week of public disorder to hit Britain for 200 years.

Then, like now, Keir Starmer was involved in quelling the disturbances. In 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions. He kept the courts open 24 hours daily to process offenders and allowed magistrates to pass longer and harsher sentences.

This time, as prime minister, he has accused far-right agitators of mercilessly exploiting the deaths of three girls to fuel attacks on asylum seekers and people of colour. He has openly called those rioters as terrorists.

Of course, Sir Keir Starmer wants to "put a stop" to the far-right violence that is spreading across the UK.

The question the prime minister must first answer is not how but who.

How widespread has the violent disorder been, and where?

In the summer of 2024, violence began on Tuesday, July 30, in the seaside town of Southport. Still, it quickly spread to over a dozen towns and cities across England. The next day, groups attacked the police in London, Manchester, Hartlepool and Aldershot. The disorder continued over the weekend, with clashes on Saturdays, August 10, in Liverpool, Blackpool, Hull, Stoke-on-Trent, Leeds, Nottingham, and Bristol, as well as in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

On Sunday, rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. Later, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, a similar incident played out at a Holiday Inn Express hotel – where reports suggested asylum seekers were also being housed – with fires being lit, windows smashed and missiles thrown at officers. In the north-eastern town of Middlesbrough, rioters smashed the windows of houses and cars. The following week, the violence has spread to more towns and small cities, including Plymouth and Darlington.

Police are investigating several racist attacks connected to the riots, including a video circulated online of a mob of rioters in Hull attacking an Asian man in his car. In Belfast, a man in his 50s was taken to hospital on Monday after he was seriously assaulted.

Police detectives said the riots were led by the far right, and they have made more than 700 arrests for alleged offences and promised "hundreds" more to come. Of the 741 arrests, 32 relate to online crimes such as incitement, and the scale of the operation is shown by the fact the arrest took place in 36 of the 43 force areas across England and Wales.

Arrests include allegations of violent disorder, theft and antisocial behaviour, and police say the investigations across the country will probably last for months to come.

The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) chair said: "Many criminal rioters have to wait to be arrested in the following days. We continue combing thousands of images, live streams, videos, and body-worn footage to find you".

Who is behind the UK’s far-right riots?

The event that sparked violence in England was a mass stabbing targeting children that occurred at a dance studio in Southport.

On July 29 2024, Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were killed in a multiple stabbing at a Taylor Swift-inspired dance class in Merseyside town. Eight other children suffered knife wounds, with five left in critical condition. Two adults were also critically hurt.

Axel Rudakubana is a 17-year-old British citizen living in Banks, a village in Lancashire a few miles north of Southport. The murderer grew up in a Christian family and originated from Rwanda. He has been charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, misinformation about the identity of the attacker began to spread widely on social media. False claims started circulating online, purporting to name the suspect as "Ali Al-Shakati", a radicalised Muslim, and claiming he had arrived in the UK on a small boat in 2023.

Soon after the attack on Monday, there were at least 27 million impressions on social media posts stating or speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, a refugee or a foreigner.

Infographics promoting the protests in Southport and Whitehall were also shared on both TikTok and Dubai-based messaging app Telegram, while organising details were shared on X.

Nigel Farage also posted a video at 5:34pm – seen by 2.5 million people as of Wednesday morning – in which he said: "I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us". "What I do know is something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country", the Reform UK leader said before posting footage at 10:47pm of "machete fights in Southend tonight" and claiming: "Our country is being destroyed, our values trashed and the public on the point of revolt."

With many smaller accounts sharing false claims, people always spread incorrect information after a tragic event. There is clear an attempt to exploit the sad incident by right-wing influencers and grifters – pushing an anti-immigrant and xenophobic agenda despite there being no evidence.

There have been bot activities online, which may be amplified or involve state actors, spreading some of the disinformation and misinformation.

Posts "overtly hateful" remained circulating widely on X for many hours despite violating the platform's stated policies.

Many people who had "riled things up" during these weeks had previously been banned from X. Now they are back after self-declared "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk took over the social media company and rescinded multiple bans.

This led to widespread mobilisation of protesters via social media to descend on Southport to protest the circumstances surrounding the girls' deaths.

The role of Conservative governments in fomenting hatred and racism.

If we really want to understand the roots of such brutal violence and hate against those who do not have English origins, we must consider these riots more than thuggery. They're the outcome of 14 years of Tory race-baiting. They sought to refocus attention on scapegoats. While racist thugs will always be with us, governments can create either an environment that curbs them or one that encourages them. Across its 14 years in power, the Conservative government encouraged them.

Conservatives kept telling was of "outsiders" threatening all we held dear. Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, the groups they targeted were Muslims, asylum seekers and other immigrants.

The Conservatives repeatedly glossed over the danger of far-right extremism. They failed to respond to her reports or to change the law to curtail neo-Nazi movements. The government scrapped its counter-extremism strategy altogether in 2021.

Rather than developing a coherent policy, it chose to keep redefining extremism, to exclude the bigoted elements in its own base and to focus instead on environmental protesters and peaceful campaigners.

The police kept warning that the far right was the fastest-growing terrorism threat in the UK, but the government did nothing.

Instead, it appointed people who could themselves reasonably be described as political extremists – some of whom were obsessed with Muslims and the “clash of civilisations” narrative beloved of the far right – to produce highly biased assessments of where extremist threats might arise.

When Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, falsely claimed that Britain was “sleepwalking into a ghettoised society” and that “Islamists … are in charge now”, she was allowed by Rishi Sunak to stay on the party benches.

Robert Jenrick, now a contender for the Tory leadership, claimed in parliament, without evidence: “We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists.”

Prominent Conservatives, sometimes with the party leadership’s apparent endorsement, repeatedly smeared the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, falsely associating him with radical Islamism simply because he was a Muslim.

The Conservatives leant heavily on culture war themes to distract voters from their massive failures. Because the Tories had nothing to offer the people of the UK except chaos, dysfunction, the gradual collapse of public services and a cost of living crisis, they sought instead to refocus our attention on scapegoats.

Asylum seekers and other immigrants were the perfect foil. Not only could they be blamed for crises caused entirely by government policy – the failure of housing provision, an overwhelmed NHS, crumbling schools and all the other erosions of the public realm – but they could also be performatively beaten up.

The Tories ramped up this sado-populism whenever confronted by a new scandal. Their choice of leadership contenders suggests they still need to learn about this strategy.

How is organised Britain’s far right?

Unlike in other European countries, Britain’s far-right has little political organisation.

While parties explicitly linked to the British far-right have in the past garnered hundreds of thousands of votes in general elections and won representation in local councils and the European Parliament, parties of the far-right have made little impact in recent elections at any level.

Instead of seeking an electoral route, Britain’s largely atomised far right uses social media to organise — and its most prominent figures and outriders from abroad leapt on and contributed to the initial disinformation spread in the aftermath of the Southport attack.

There appears to be little formal organisation behind the rioting — with social media used by those involved to try and recruit fellow travellers.

WhatsApp and Telegram have been used to organise gatherings at short notice, while flyers organising specific protests have been spread on Facebook. TikTok has been abuzz with videos of the violence.

While many, or even most of those who have attended, are not part of any traditional far-right organisation, they are inspired by far-right misinformation and are engaging in far-right activism.

Those riots have broadened out and are now drawing from a typical wellspring of anger and often recycle the same far-right and Tory slogans, in particular, “Enough is Enough,” “Stop the Boats”, and “Save Our Children.

How to crack down on the Briton far-right.

After years of tolerance towards the far right, it will be challenging to rebuild the informal network of these small groups and their connections through social media.

It will be equally complex to dismantle the disinformation machine that instigated these riots.

Starmer, elected just a month ago, fights to regain control of order on the country’s streets. Polling from the Opinium pollster shows that Starmer’s approval rating has dipped in the last fortnight. However long the riots last, Starmer’s honeymoon period in government is already over.

The Labour prime minister — setting to chair the government’s Cobra crisis committee — has attacked far-right “thugs” and warned those taking part in the violence that they “will face the full force of the law.”

The British government’s primary focus is on domestic criminals.

While the government acknowledges that there can be amplification of social media activity online, authorities are concentrating on local groups and organisations, including some of those fuelled by far-right extremists— as well as “local looters” opportunistically joining in with the violence.

However, “troll factories” in countries including Russia and Iran can play a part in stoking disorder.

The Premier intends to give the intelligence services more power and capability to crack down on how hostile states are seizing on every incident to create misinformation and fan the flames of extreme British actors.