Riots a symptom of UK’s broken political system

Opinion: In the small, seaside town of Southport, three girls – Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice Dasilva Aguiar and Bebe King – were killed the week before last while attending a Taylor Swift dance party.
The perpetrator was 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana. In the wave of misinformation that has spread since this heartbreaking tragedy, this Cardiff-born member of a Christian church was transformed into a Muslim asylum seeker, setting off a far-right conflagration across many towns in the north of England.
In the violence that has ensued, Muslims and people of colour have been attacked, houses vandalised, and shops looted. Meanwhile, those three girls, the 10 other people who were injured, their families and the community, have been all but forgotten.  
In response, the newly elected Prime Minster Kier Starmer has promised a new “standing army” of specialist police officers to deal with the ongoing violence.
During the Tottenham riots set off by the police killing of Mark Duggan in 2011, Starmer used his position as chief prosecutor and head of the Crown Prosecution Service to hand out long prison sentences – a response he later expressed some qualms about – without addressing the underlying issues that might have contributed to those events. 
Similarly, a former head of counter-terrorism policing, Neil Basu, has argued the latest riots have crossed the line into terrorism.
By labelling it as such and using state violence as the sole mechanism for responding to these violent riots, the UK’s political class, and the media more generally, have deflected attention away from a broader context, to which they themselves have contributed.
Islamophobia and the vilification of immigrants and asylum seekers is not new to the UK. As early as 2013, former Tory government minister Michael Gove was framing, in existential terms, the perceived threat of Islam.
 In his words, the “Islamist advance across the globe” was creating a challenge for the west … “as profound, in its way, as the threat posed by fascism and communism”.
More recently, former Tory MP Lee Anderson has claimed that Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, has given the capital “away to his mates”, such that Islamists have “got control of London”. And, in 2023, then-secretary of state Suella Braverman described demonstrators taking to the streets in support of a ceasefire in Gaza as participating in “hate marches”.
Unfortunately, while the rhetoric from Labour is nowhere near as vicious as that coming from the Tory party, it has made no concerted attempt to refute the overall picture underpinning these shallow and erroneous visions of British political life, which, at its best is a vibrant, multicultural society, fully comfortable with that diversity.
For example, the reason Labour gave for scrapping the Rwanda Asylum Act – a proposal to relocate people the United Kingdom identified as illegal immigrants or asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing, asylum and resettlement – was that it was an “expensive gimmick”.
To be sure, spending £700 million to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is expensive. But the more accurate and morally responsible response would have been to abhor it as a monstrous and degrading attempt to shirk the UK’s responsibilities.
Moreover, both Labour and the Tories have run with ‘Stop the boats’ as their respective parties’ approach to immigration, slogans now being chanted by far-right rioters.
In addition, Labour has failed to offer any alternative narrative to austerity. Their vision of government is one of committing to a set of fiscal rules that will not measurably improve the lives of most working people, while simultaneously lowering expectations to such an extent that people will acquiesce to a situation of underfunded public services, crumbling schools and few prospects.
It seems that what money there is for the overtime, batons and riot gear that will enable these ‘standing armies’ is not there for much else.
Migrants, whether asylum seekers or ‘economic migrants’, are not a threat to a British way of life, or to British values, or to democracy. They are ordinary people looking for the best way to provide for themselves and their families.
For those who want to argue that Labour must, as it were, ‘triangulate’ around immigration using the terms, strategies and policy frameworks supplied by the Tories – in other words, offer nothing substantively different but a more competent administering of the same tools – it is important to be clear about what that means.
It is an acceptance that the UK’s political system has broken, and that neither of its two major parties are fit for purpose. In a representative democracy, when the institutions tasked with offering different visions for our country and its future share space in this way, by approaching migration and migrants as threats to be managed – with varying degrees of severity – they are also sharing a wider understanding of the world and of the UK’s responsibilities to that world.
Nothing can excuse these riots. Many of the people engaged and encouraging them are reprehensible, their attitudes and politics repulsive. But it is important to acknowledge that these are fringe elements – not by any measure representative of the country as a whole – who have drawn sustenance from a political landscape that has been all too comfortable using the language of hate and division.