OPINION - What's behind the attacks on Muslims and migrants by far-right groups in the UK?

• There's no doubt that the attacks were instigated and orchestrated by right-wing extremists tapping into what are, sadly, often widespread prejudices – particularly when it comes to people of color, Muslims, and asylum seekers

• Social media allows extreme-right agitators to tap into this worryingly deep well of mistrust and hostility by whipping up anxiety and spreading lies about tragic events

-The author is professor of politics at London's Queen Mary University and author of The Conservative Party After Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation.

ISTANBUL

In the past few days, the United Kingdom has witnessed a wave of violent disorder. Many of those involved are doubtless motivated not so much by politics as by the kind of excitement that football hooligans the world over have long derived from attacking the authorities. But there is no doubt that the attacks have been instigated and orchestrated by right-wing extremists tapping into what are, sadly, often widespread prejudices – particularly when it comes to people of color, Muslims, and asylum seekers.

Racist attacks in the UK nothing new

Of course, riots ostensibly driven by religious and racial hatred and opposition to immigration are nothing new in the UK. Indeed, one can go back as far as 1780 to see London suffering a week of violent anti-Roman Catholic disorder, while in the late 1950s various towns and cities were afflicted by “race riots” on the part of white men objecting to the arrival of Black and south Asian immigrants from the British Commonwealth.

More recently, 2001 saw riots in cities and towns in northern England, most notably in Oldham, Greater Manchester, which saw clashes between far-right activists and people from the town’s south Asian (predominantly Pakistani-origin) community.

Nor are violent protests outside hotels being used to house asylum seekers or attacks on mosques anything new. In February 2023, for example, a police vehicle was set ablaze and missiles were thrown at officers outside a hotel in Knowsley, Merseyside. True, the country’s mosques have rarely seen anything on that scale. But there are plenty of examples of isolated attacks on their property and on their worshipers – most horrifically in 2017, when a far-right extremist drove a van into a crowd outside the Muslim Welfare House and near a mosque in Finsbury Park, London.

Islamophobia underlying prejudices in the British

What is new, however, is the sheer spread and extent of the disorder that the UK is experiencing right now, prompting people both at home and abroad, particularly, perhaps, in Muslim communities and countries, to ask why us – and why now?

The answer lies, at least in part, in an underlying current of Islamophobia – not that the UK is by any means unique in that respect. Indeed, in many ways, the British are significantly less likely to hold that particular prejudice (and other, often related, prejudices) than the populations of other European countries.

The European Values Survey for example regularly asks people about people they would not like to have as neighbors. In the 2017-18 survey, some 5% of Brits ticked “Muslims,” while 2% ticked “People of a different race,” and 6% ticked “Immigrants.” Compare those figures with Germany (16% 5% and 7% respectively) and Italy (20%, 12%, and 18%), and the UK doesn’t – relatively speaking anyway – come off too badly.

Dig a little deeper, however, and the picture is more worrying. Research released earlier this year [1] suggests that a depressingly substantial minority of Brits buy into anti-Muslim stereotypes. Some 28% agree that “Muslims will never be as British as other British people,” some 30% believe that “Islam is a religion of violence,” and 36% think that “Most British Muslims in the UK do not hold British values.”

Put that together with even more widespread anxiety about asylum and immigration – and the failure of successive British governments to honor their promises to “take back control” of our borders – and you have a very combustible situation that only takes the right spark to ignite, particularly when the sun is out, work is over for the weekend or the evening, and beer is being drunk to excess.

Nowadays, social media allows extreme-right agitators (often amplified by the bot-farms financed by hostile powers overseas) to tap into this worryingly deep well of mistrust and hostility by whipping up anxiety and spreading lies about tragic events like the stabbing of children in Southport near Liverpool last week which they blamed (with no truth whatsoever) on a Muslim asylum seeker.

Moreover, the situation is further inflamed by superficially respectable politicians suggesting or at least implying that those joining in the riots are not merely thugs motivated by prejudice but people with “legitimate grievances” who have supposedly been ignored by the “elite” – for instance, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage crying “We want our country back” or high-profile Conservatives using words like “invasion” as they talk endlessly about “stopping the boats” bringing asylum-seekers across the English Channel from continental Europe.

The fact that July’s general election saw the right replaced by the left in the shape of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is likely, one suspects, only to encourage them to continue playing what, it turns out, is a very dangerous game indeed.

[1] https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/blog/how-prevalent-is-anti-muslim-prejudice-in-the-uk/

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu.