Far-right riots are ravaging the UK. Why are they happening now?

When a crowd of far-right rioters descended on a budget hotel in the British town of Rotherham Sunday, it had one target in mind: the tens of asylum-seekers living inside. First, the rioters blocked the emergency exits. Then, they tried to set fire to the building.

The Rotherham attack was not an isolated incident. On the same day in the town of Middlesbrough, 90 miles north, rioters blocked the roads, only allowing drivers who were “white and English” to pass. Farther south, in the town of Tamworth, a second mob targeted a hotel housing migrants, hurling petrol bombs and wounding a police officer.

As the United Kingdom grapples with the wave of racist, anti-migrant, and Islamophobic violence – which began after far-right groups falsely claimed that a Muslim migrant had been responsible for the fatal stabbing of three children in the town of Southport on July 29 – many are in shock. Mosques and businesses have been repeatedly attacked, and a library in Liverpool torched. Police are preparing for more riots Wednesday night in as many as 30 locales, according to reports.

But for the communities targeted by the far right, as well as the academics who study its movements, the attacks are no surprise. For years, they say, extremists have been able to build support for their rhetoric in online communities and with tacit acceptance of portions of the media and political spheres. The recent outbreak of violence is just the logical conclusion of that process.

“For too long, minority communities have been scapegoated and blamed for our country’s problems,” Zarah Sultana, a Muslim member of Parliament for the Labour Party, said on social media. “It is political choices by consecutive governments that have led us to this point.”

New messaging for the far right

Part of what made this weekend’s violence so disturbing was the openness of its prejudice and hatred. Racist and Islamophobic slurs were scrawled on walls and shouted in the streets.

“For a long time, obvious racism, like chants or the graffiti, has been consigned to the margins [of the far right],” says Aurelien Mondon, a lecturer focusing on racism and mainstreaming of the far right at the University of Bath. “It was a social taboo.”

But this lack of open prejudice doesn’t mean a corresponding lack of far-right ideals circulating across British society. Online platforms in particular have come under repeated scrutiny for allowing far-right ideals to flow more directly into people’s homes. Social media’s decentralized ethos could be seen interwoven as part of the weekend’s violence, which had no set figurehead. With no defined organization on which to clamp down, these informal networks are far more difficult for police to deal with.

“Social media has allowed for networking and far-right influencers,” says Aaron Winter, a senior lecturer at the University of Lancaster. He argues that social media has helped create a “post-organizational” far right. “I don’t think the violence we’ve seen is disconnected from the return of far-right and fascist figures to platforms such as X,” he says, referencing Elon Musk’s decision to unban figures like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a far-right agitator who uses the name Tommy Robinson, after Mr. Musk bought Twitter, now called X.

But both Dr. Winter and Dr. Mondon stress that large underregulated tech platforms are just one small part of a bigger, more uncomfortable truth – that traditional, mainstream media and politicians are also responsible for normalizing far-right rhetoric.

Younger far-right activists have become more media-aware than their older counterparts. Many have made efforts to couch their language in euphemisms, usually portraying themselves as populist rather than as fascist. When Mr. Yaxley-Lennon’s English Defence League held anti-Muslim marches at the height of its influence in the early 2010s – events that often ended with clashes with police or counterprotesters – they sought sympathy with the slogan “Not racist, not violent, just no longer silent.”

These more palatable far-right messages – such as linking migrants to fears of increased crime, or to overwhelmed public services – were eventually echoed in national British news outlets, a slow and steady drip of negative sentiment.

In some cases, journalists and politicians believed that submitting far-right ideas to scrutiny would help to defuse tensions. “The argument has long been that if we don’t talk about these ideas, if we don’t legitimize concerns about immigration, we’re going to have a far-right government or the far right in the streets committing violence,” says Dr. Winter. “Well, now we have the latter.”

Yet while some news outlets platformed or parroted far-right fears, others actively fanned the flames. In 2016, in the run-up to the Brexit campaign, analysis by journalist Liz Gerard showed that the British tabloid Daily Express had run 179 front pages dedicated to anti-migrant stories in the previous five years, while the Daily Mail had published 122.

“There seems to be no accountability for the idea that anti-immigration discourse, moral panics, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and racism are now part of mainstream politics. The mainstream media has been full of these discourses, expressing them as legitimate concerns, or as populist as opposed to far-right or fascist,” says Dr. Winter. “These riots, these confrontations, these attacks, are feeding off of that.”

U.K. politicians playing with fire

Media coverage has in turn impacted public discourse and policy. In April 2022, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unveiled plans to remove asylum-seekers to Rwanda while their applications were being processed. Accommodation for refugees – and its cost – have been mainstay topics in Parliament and in newspaper headlines, leading ministers to start housing prospective asylum-seekers on a windowless barge. Meanwhile, in the U.K.’s recent general election in July 2024, both of the country’s major political parties, the incumbent Conservatives and the then-opposition Labour Party, made promises to be “tough on immigration” as part of their election campaign.

The far right had already seized upon these issues. In 2022, anti-migrant activists were reported at accommodation housing migrants and asylum-seekers 253 times, a 102% increase from 2021, according to the campaign group Hope Not Hate. Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform UK party, also filmed a number of videos at hotels housing asylum applicants in 2020, telling the camera, “We’ve no idea whether some of these might be ISIS.”

(In an interview with London’s LBC radio station Tuesday, Mr. Farage denied any responsibility for the riots, telling listeners, “At no point in the last week or in the previous 30 years have I ever encouraged the use of violence.” That claim is open for debate, however.)

The tinderbox only needed a further spark to ignite real violence, eventually provided by the brutal killing of three children. The fact that the perpetrator was a Christian born in the U.K. with no ties to Islam hardly mattered.

“There is always a racist sentiment. But it’s the slow drip of far-right influences being legitimized by the mainstream that makes people feel it’s OK to act in a racist, violent manner,” says Dr. Mondon. “Two years ago, five years ago, people did not feel that they could go out and try to burn a hotel with asylum-seekers inside. But intellectuals and governments have said that these are legitimate grievances. We cannot play with the lives of communities like a political football without consequences.”