Andrew MacDougall: The long, hard road that brought Britain to these riots

What explains the chaos on British streets? There's a long and a short answer to that. Here's both.

By: Andrew MacDougall

Last month, Canadians likely witnessed the devastating result of a failure to clear enough tinder by the forest managers Jasper National Park. We also saw what happens when a series of governments ignore — or at least fail to adequately deal with — the long-term trends in climate that make forest fires greater threats. We fiddled, Jasper burned.

The lesson for our leadership? When longer term trends aren’t addressed, each spark becomes a potential wildfire.

And so it is with immigration, as we’re witnessing now in the United Kingdom. The nominal trigger of all the recent chaos was the horrific murder of three young girls in the community of Southport by a 17-year-old British citizen, the child of Rwandan immigrants. Since last week, the country has been rocked by mobs of people torching the streets of some of Britain’s provincial towns and cities. Mosques and immigration centres and hotels housing migrants have been attacked. British police have made hundreds of arrests already but have at times struggled to maintain order. The mob has sometimes outnumbered the police.

The disorder has not been confined to any one area. There have been riots on the streets of Rotherham. Thuggery and arson in Sunderland. More of the same in Hull, Portsmouth, Leicester, Liverpool, and London. North, east, south, west — it doesn’t matter. The agitators collude on Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups, listing the hotels where asylum seekers are lodged and the immigration lawyers’ offices who advise them. The lynch mobs are not only out, they’re proud. And it’s terrifying.

It’s not clear yet if this is just getting started or is already cooling off. The government and police are sending the message that the rioters will be stopped and held to account. But the number of protests, organized via social media, keep growing.

The scenes have been horrifying, but somehow not surprising. Something like this has felt inevitable for some time. While the recent brutal murders are what set this off, it has been fuelled by a series of governments not only ignoring the tinder and undergrowth that has been accumulating on British soil, but adding to it as well.

Before going a word further about the decades-long chain of events that brought Britain to this place, for absolute clarity: the violence and yobbery happening on the streets of Britain isn’t justifiable. It’s not “protest” and it isn’t an acceptable expression of frustration. I don’t care what you think about immigration or the nuances of any policy proposal, you don’t get to intimidate or destroy. You don’t get to loot and you don’t get to torch mosques or the hotels and hostels hosting asylum-seekers. If you’re one of those people, you should be preparing to meet the full force of the law. Your downfall will be cheered on by decent people the world over.

But this has to be understood properly. Some of this — a lot of it, even — is just the usual suspects on Britain’s far-right whipping up hysteria. It’s a modern-day return of those who spent the Seventies chanting “Pakis out!” at overwhelmingly peaceful and law-abiding immigrants. So yes — the worst of the current offenders on Britain’s streets are certainly out-and-out racists, of a kind those who’ve spent any time here will find familiar.

But here’s the thing that makes this moment so alarming: many are not. Many more observing from the safety of their homes aren’t, either. For every hooligan throwing a petrol bomb, there is a multitude elsewhere who are wondering just who is in control of Britain’s borders? They’re wondering how it came to pass that record numbers keep arriving in Britain, year-on-year, seemingly against the will of the governments of the day, and despite repeated government assurances that this practice would end.

Which brings us back to longer-term history. Because the conditions for this month’s riots didn’t appear overnight. 

For a start, the majority of British people of Pakistani descent — to whom the slur “Paki” is directed — came during another era, i.e. the Fifties and Sixties, as a shattered Britain rebuilt after the Second World War by opening its doors to the subjects of empire to fill the labour gaps at home, whether from countries like Jamaica or the Indian subcontinent. These early rounds of immigration were the ones that spawned the likes of Enoch Powell and the National Front. It was the shift that sparked the overt racism and nasty conflagrations on British streets in the 1970s and 80s. It was also the wave that included the parents of current political figures like former prime minister Rishi Sunak, former chancellor of the exchequer Sajid Javid and former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf. Out of the societal crucible came some significant political steel. 

But the story of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s was also one of economic decline. It was a story of mass emigration across the country as a whole. It was the story of the loss of traditional industry and the many working-class jobs that went with it. It was the era when the identity and character of entire regions — whether Lancashire and West Yorkshire and its weavers, the Teeside and its steel works, or South Wales and its coal mines — changed forever. And not much came to replace it, despite a slew of promises to “fix things” made over generations by politicians of all stripes. The tinder was accumulating. 

Margaret Thatcher’s so-called “Big Bang” free-market reforms went on to further strengthen London’s whip hand over the heavy industry of the declining regions. Maggie went further, handbagging the unions and privatizing swathes of industry. Loads of “good” union jobs were replaced by more meagre hourly wages, if they were replaced at all. The urban professional soared, while the hinterland secondary school graduate cratered. Again, the politicians promised to help. And again, they failed. 

Indeed, the Thatcher (and Reagan, and Mulroney, etc.) reforms of the 1980s were consolidated in the 1990s, as centrist politicians like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Jean Chrétien kept on with free markets and free trade, adding the freer movement of people into the mix as well. Hundreds of thousands more Western working-class jobs now went to places like Mexico, China, Turkey, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Many high-paid university graduates came the other way to the West’s major cities, helping to push up costs there. All tinder for the growing pile. 

But it was the scale and speed of immigration that began grating most, first in Britain, and then elsewhere. Blair told his countrymen that tens of thousands might come from the EU, but Britain got millions instead. And a large number of them chose London and other major urban areas as places to live, placing huge pressure on infrastructure and services, including schools and the NHS.

And nowhere more so than housing. London has welcomed two million people to its population since the turn of the millennium, while only adding a paltry 200,000 units of housing. Prices shot up accordingly, up and out of the reach of “ordinary” people like teachers, nurses, and police, to say nothing of recent immigrants. The 2000s-era immigration also produced noticeable cultural change: the local greengrocer became a Polish or Middle Eastern shop; more churches were converted to mosques; ethnic communities became large enough to self-segregate. And nobody said much of anything about it. The tinder was accumulating. 

Then came 9/11 and the Iraq War and the attendant mistrust of native Muslim communities, whether those communities were long standing in places like Bradford or Birmingham, or relatively new in places like Tower Hamlets in East London. The government promised to integrate these communities while at the same time policing them for extremism. More tinder. And then the global financial crisis rocked the world. Banks failed. Savings were lost. The urban professional asset-holders did alright, but those on hourly wages with little savings struggled through the ensuing recession as the big banks were bailed out. White working-class attainment in the left-behind regions continued its drop to the bottom of an increasingly multi-ethnic pack. The tinder was accumulating. 

The above is a lot of history to take in at once, but it all matters, and begins to bring us to the riots today. The above trends became political fodder and people like Nigel Farage, a heretofore unknown trader with a posh London education, who began to make an impression. A marginal figure until the early 2000s round of Eastern European immigration, Farage found more purchase as the political class bailed out the few over the many following the financial crisis. He began to soar as leader after leader, whether Labour or Tory, promised and failed to “get a grip” on immigration. Farage pushed and pushed from the right until his performance in the 2014 European elections prompted then-prime minister David Cameron into putting the promise of an in/out referendum on European Union membership — with its free movement of people — into his plan for government in the 2015 election. And then the Arab Spring and the resultant Syrian civil war tipped over, exacerbating the already large increase in irregular arrivals from sub-Saharan Africa and the broader Middle East across Europe.

This is how we got Brexit. And Brexit is key to understanding the chaos on British streets this week. While the “respectable” pro-Brexit politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove downplayed immigration in favour of drier arguments about the economic opportunity Brexit would bring, Farage went in hard on Britain’s changing ethnic composition. And while it was nominally the Gove/Johnson campaign that led and “won” the referendum campaign, it was Farage’s support that powered it. And his supporters didn’t want some low-tax, Singapore-on-the-Thames, free-market nirvana. They wanted better services and more economic opportunity in their “left-behind” regions. And most of all, they wanted fewer immigrants, even if the chattering classes told the country it actually needed more. The official campaign knew this, too; it was no coincidence their slogan was “Take Back Control.”

Only the subsequent administrations of Theresa May/Boris Johnson/Liz Truss/Rishi Sunak didn’t take back control. Not one little bit. No, the people who voted for massive change got more of the same, and sometimes worse. The economy slowed down, predictably, given the loss of the EU market. As a result, the left-behind regions were not “levelled up.” The COVID-19 pandemic then worsened economic inequality, with the professional classes scoring another victory over their working-class peers. More importantly, the immigrants kept coming — whether legally or illegally, with numbers soon reaching record highs. It was a logical consequence of leaving the EU, even if no one on the “leave” side of the ledger spotted the logic. As a result, belief in politics as a vehicle for change, already on life support, dimmed further. And if that belief dies completely, the people will begin to take matters into their own hands. The tinder pile cannot grow forever.

All the tinder was waiting for, in Britain’s case, was another spark. And sparks are not hard to come by these days, not in the age of the polarized information economy. Not on platforms that prioritize conflict and deliver group polarization. Britain found this out anew after false information about the alleged Southport killer appeared online, sparking the first riots. Social media said the killer, a British-born Christian, was a Muslim man known to the security services who had crossed the English Channel on a small boat in October 2023. The modern information economy is an accelerant of flame, not a fire break. 

Returning to the original question: Why are people rioting in the streets?

The answer is, there isn’t one reason, only a confluence of factors. The tinder isn’t uniform. Some are rioting because economic opportunity feels further away than ever and their communities are dead or dying. Others are rioting because the people in power don’t live their lives and haven’t for generations, even if those in power still feel entitled to deliver lectures and offer admonishments. They’re rioting because they haven’t been listened to and feel they will never be listened to. Most of all, they’re rioting because politician after politician has told them one thing, and done another. Especially on immigration. And then told them off for expressing concern about it. As David Frum once put it, if the liberals don’t defend national borders, the fascists will. 

Here, too, successive governments have missed the accumulating tinder. Support for “far-right” groups has been growing steadily for years. Tribunes like Tommy Robinson have been building their followings on the major tech platforms out in the open. We have been able to see this one coming. But instead of assessing and treating the underlying disease producing the symptoms of far-right sickness, the governing and chattering classes have been happy to condemn the symptoms and the people who suffer them and then leave it at that. Our leaders have chosen to leave the tinder and undergrowth in place.

The bigger and more important question, therefore, isn’t what the rioters are thinking. It’s what the people who aren’t rioting, but who are worried about some of the same things as the rioters are worried about, are thinking. It’s the roughly 60 per cent of the British public who think immigration is “too high” who need to be heard. Polling shows these people — like the majority of Britons overall — don’t support the thuggery now happening on Britain’s streets. Political leaders must be sure to listen to this cohort, not further alienating them with overbroad rhetoric that tars every person concerned with immigration with the sins of the rioters. The thugs who are out committing crimes should be condemned, and jailed, not given a wave of new recruits. This will take the political dexterity of a Swiss Army knife, not the blunt crush of a sledgehammer.

More importantly, the problem isn’t going away, even if the rioters are all put down. Indeed, the one way this will get worse is if the people who have presided over this bipartisan and multi-generational failure keep painting with a broad rhetorical brush on the subject of immigration. Something has to change. Politicians need to lead a debate on this delicate subject without ascribing motive to large groups of people with whom they have little in common in terms of “lived experience.” In other words, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the rest of the political class must proceed with caution, openness and humility. They must provide an avenue for a slow, controlled burn. That means not playing to the grease fire of social media. The people need to be told what they need to know, not what they want to hear.

Most of all, the political class will have to stop making promises it can’t keep. It will have to stop lying. Whether it’s lies about immigration. About “stopping the boats.” About trade-offs. About what is possible for a nation to do on its own in a world that is buffeted by global forces. And the media who cover them must not let their lies take root, no matter what their readership would prefer in terms of outcome. 

There is no easy fix on immigration. To pretend otherwise is to invite the accumulation of tinder and the spark of unmet expectation. And we all know where that leads: more of the same, or worse.

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