Britain is on fire — and its new leader hopes to put out the fires by turning to his background as a lawyer.
After just a month as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Keir Starmer has found himself firefighting riots linked to the far right.
Britain has faced days of noisy protests, many of which turned violent and targeted mosques and hostels housing asylum seekers. Starmer is fighting to regain control by ramping up the U.K.’s stretched justice system.
The fresh barrage of violence began last Tuesday in the seaside town of Southport, but quickly spread to more than 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 Saturday in Liverpool, Blackpool, Hull, Stoke-on-Trent, Leeds, Nottingham and Bristol, and also 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. This week, the violence has spread to more towns and small cities including Plymouth and Darlington.
Police are investigating a number of 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.
There have been more than 400 arrests with numbers expected to rise. The damage is not – so far – considered to be as extensive as that caused by the riots 13 years earlier.
What sparked the latest violence?
On July 29, Southport — a seaside town just outside Liverpool — was rocked by unimaginable tragedy.
Three girls — Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine — were fatally stabbed while attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance event. The attack also injured 10 others, some critically.
A 17-year-old male was arrested, and he was later revealed to be born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda. He has no known links to Islam.
As is usual under British law for suspects aged under 18, the police did not initially name him. Within hours, social media was awash with false rumors about his background — including that there was an Islamist connection to the killings and that the attacker was an asylum seeker, both of which the police later said weren’t true.
A vigil for the victims last Tuesday was hijacked by people that police said were linked to the far-right English Defense League, a now-defunct organization. They tore bricks from residential properties to throw at police and Southport’s mosque, which said it was also hit with petrol bombs. In the days that followed the Southport riot, further disorder flared up across England and in Northern Ireland.
