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Police Officers walk past a burnt out police vehicle as they are deployed on the streets of Hartlepool following a violent protest.
The UK’s new Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened an emergency Cobra committee meeting on Monday to address the anti-immigrant and far-right riots that have spread across England and Northern Ireland following the killing of three young girls last week.
In a major early test of his leadership, Starmer said he is establishing a “standing army” of specialized police officers and allocating more resources to the courts to handle the increased caseload related to the riots.
Starmer also said anyone inciting violence online could face legal consequences and called on social media companies to do more to crack down on extremism. He criticized Elon Musk’s amplification of inflammatory far-right posts about the riots, including one in which the billionaire wrote that “civil war is inevitable” under a video of the chaos.
Why are they rioting? After three girls were stabbed at a Taylor Swift-inspired dance class last Monday – 10 others were also injured – the suspect was inaccurately identified online as a Muslim asylum-seeker who had arrived in the UK by boat, spurring rioters to take to the streets shouting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slogans. Over the weekend, mosques were attacked, cars were set ablaze, police officers were attacked and injured, and hundreds of rioters attempted to set a hotel housing asylum-seekers on fire.
Although Starmer’s Labour Party secured a significant majority over the Conservatives last month, the win did not erase the rise of right-wing populism in Britain. Eurasia Group’s Europe Managing Director Mujtaba Rahman says that beyond his immediate response, Starmer will “need to address the concerns over illegal immigration that have seen the rise of populism across Europe, including in the UK, and have been used by the lawless hard right to foment discord last week and this weekend.”