At 11:45 AM on the 29th of July, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana got out of a taxi at Hart Street in Southport, England, walked into a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop at a community studio, and started stabbing. There were 25 girls present, and by the time the carnage was over he had managed to stab eleven children and two adults. Six-year-old Bebe King and seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe died at the scene. Nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar died in the hospital the next day. Rumors immediately spread online that the killer had been a Muslim, fuelled by memories of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, when Islamists attacked an Ariana Grande concert, killing 22 people and injuring more than a thousand others.
On the evening of July 30, a vigil was held outside the Atkinson in Southport’s Eastbank Square, with thousands of people arriving to leave flowers and notes at the scene of the attack. Many suspected that the authorities and the press were deliberately hiding the identity of the killer, and that evening, a group attacked a local mosque, throwing bricks and bottles and brawling with police. Some officers were injured, and a police car was torched. Other riots promptly erupted across the north of England and elsewhere, including Aldershot, Hartlepool, Sunderland, London, and Manchester. The mainstream press presented the reaction as far-right mob violence; online, videos of armed Muslim gangs taking to the streets were also circulated.
The British state made over a thousand arrests and began handing down hefty jail sentences even for social media posts. Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted that the unrest was merely the purview of a handful of troublemakers; his critics responded by calling him “Two-Tier Keir,” accusing authorities of being far harsher with critics of the regime than with immigrant troublemakers. At Unherd, Simon Cottee noted that there were three primary types of rioters: combatants, some of whom were genuinely racist and others who saw themselves as protectors of British women and girls; “Geezers and scallies,” who jump at the chance to riot for any reason; and “losers,” who joined in spontaneously due to booze or other situational circumstances.
There has been no shortage of commentary attempting to explain all this over the past several weeks. Douglas Murray’s prophetic 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe: Identity, Immigration, Islam, ended up back on the bestseller lists. American historian Joshua Treviño penned a viral piece on why England is essential, titled “This sceptred isle”—Louise Perry said that it moved her to tears. The European Conservative’s Mick Hume warned that the British security state will only grow in the years ahead. Aris Roussinos noted that the UK is descending into ethnic conflict. Ed West, the British journalist, author of over a dozen books, and proprietor of the popular Substack Wrong Side of History, wrote several pieces on the riots and their underlying causes, and we discussed the issue at length over Zoom.
“It’s been a rough month,” West noted. “There is a suspicion amongst the public that the true story about crime amongst migrants—and particularly illegal migrants—is being suppressed, or at least that the media and the government are not being honest about it. There’s a thing called ‘controlled spontaneity’ which has happened after previous attacks by terror groups or individuals with Islamic motivation, in which there is a contrived get-together of community spirit, websites are set up, and family members of victims are often approached and asked to give a message.” Indeed, Aris Roussinos wrote earlier this month that something similar unfolded seven years ago:
Following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the aftermath, like those of other recent terrorist atrocities, was marked by what later revealed to be a coordinated British government policy of “controlled spontaneity.” Pre-planned vigils and inter-faith events were rolled out, and people handed out flowers “in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support” as part of an information operation “to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather than reacting with violence and anger.” The aim was to present an image of depoliticised community solidarity within the state’s benevolent, if not adequately protective, embrace.
There is also a general distrust of the media—especially when it comes to being honest about migrant crime. “There was a case of a man who sprayed corrosive substances into a woman’s face in London, and every single media outlet reported it as a ‘Newcastle man,’” West told me. “He was an Afghan and happened to have lived in Newcastle before.”
As West wrote on his Substack about the riots following the Southport rampage, “There is a debate to be made over whether this is just hooligans who’ve spotted an opportunity or the bubbling over of pent-up resentment about immigration, as well as unemployment and deprivation.” The difficulty is that mob violence on one side “was downplayed or considered a legitimate grievance,” while any other concerns were dismissed as a far-right fever dream.
But as West and many others have been pointing out, things really are changing. For decades, the British people have been voting for less immigration. For decades, regardless of which party is in power, they have gotten more immigration—while the public conversation around the issue has been tightly policed. Everyone has been encouraged to say “we need more diversity,” West told me, but “to say that we need more white people would mean instant social death.” The rate of demographic change “is alarming to a lot of people, and I think it’s unwise.” West firmly dismisses the social media clamour about “civil war”—Elon Musk being one amplifier of this narrative—but the situation is still serious.
“We’re obviously not heading into civil war anytime in the near future,” West told me. “But all of the recent civil wars, in places like Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Fiji, for example, have all come about because of demographic instability.”
While it is difficult to parse the motives of individual rioters the massive influx of newcomers is clearly the backdrop to what has been unfolding over the past month. For example, the government practice of putting up asylum seekers in hotels in small towns—where there are often only one or two hotels to begin with—“was clearly a tinderbox waiting to happen, because people are very upset about that, and there have been quite a few murders and quite a few rapes”—which is unsurprising considering that the primary demographic of the asylum seekers is young men. For now, West noted, the British state appears determined to make an example of the rioters:
Some of the sentences handed out this week seem incredibly harsh to me, which suggests that the state wants to establish extreme deterrence to prevent this from happening again. They see what the rioters are rioting for as inherently very dangerous. There’s been a few very concerning cases. In one of them, the judge actually said the person in question—and a lot of these people are very unsympathetic—had posted ‘anti-regime’ posts, which I found an extraordinary characterization. In another case, a man with a criminal record, who had thrown projectiles at police and deserved to be in jail—the judge told him: “You don’t have a right to question who comes here.” It’s extremely concerning that a judge could think that. Of course has the right to question who comes here, and who should be allowed here!
The severity of the crackdown appears to be part of a larger trend in which the state comes down hard on anyone with dissident views, from gender-critical feminists to pro-lifers praying outside of abortion clinics. West’s January column in the Spectator, titled “Britain isn’t a free country,” offers an extensive list of chilling examples. But even by that standard, the state response has been harsh. A woman who is the primary caregiver for her disabled husband posted—and then deleted—something about blowing up a mosque; she received up to two years jail time. “That seems very harsh to me,” West noted. “Another man with no criminal record posted racist memes about Asians and got eight weeks in jail. I don’t think that should even be a criminal offence.”
They are coming down very, very hard on this—and keep in mind that the background is nine months of protests by pro-Palestinian activists. They were overwhelmingly peaceful, but there have been repeated calls of ‘from the river to the sea,’ a questionable phrase—that I would not ban—that many people consider a call for genocide. Lots of people at these demonstrations have openly supported Hamas. There was also a case two years ago where people drove through a Jewish area with Palestinian flags in Bradford in the north of England shouting about how they were going to rape their daughters and all of this stuff about the Jews. They didn’t get prosecuted.
That will give the impression that the government sees these two sets of identity politics in very different ways. I think when it comes to issues of identity, obviously white majority unrest and violence is considered to be far more of a threat to the system than even most jihadi violence. When ISIS was at its most dangerous—and bear in mind that there were more British Muslims in ISIS than in the British Army—there were at least 25,000 known jihadis in Britain. That is, people who might not necessarily be blowing things up, but are actively sympathetic and in some way involved in Islamic extremism. That is a huge number. The jihadi movement has been reduced a lot since ISIS collapsed, but it is much larger and much more dangerous than any kind of ‘far Right’ movement. There isn’t really any organized ‘far Right’ movement—there are only a couple of tiny parties that might qualify. But there is no movement organized towards violence and overthrowing the regime. There is a wellspring of anger and resentment that is not organized.
The roots of the riots are essentially about identity—and that, West told me, can be dangerous:
I’m very anti-mob. I think they’re very frightening and dangerous and can get out of control very quickly. But there is a general feeling that Britain is changing forever, that we have no control over it, and that the people in charge really don’t care for the population and do not have their interests at heart. I don’t entirely know what their motivation is—it seems to be a mixture of things. But I support the idea that the government of your country should look after the interests of the country and try to protect citizens from harm and ensure the posterity of the country.
Indeed, while every non-English group is encouraged to celebrate their identity, ‘Englishness’ has become a concept infused with taboos, and it is increasingly difficult to articulate the fact that being English is about more than a culture—it is about a people. The term “white” itself, West noted, is now largely used as a pejorative. People are wearying of regime self-loathing; even more, Douglas Murray noted recently, of being told they have no culture to speak of in the first place. West noted that the denial of identity is in fact the denial of a fundamental right:
The right to identify as a group by some background, by some ancestry, I would consider to be a basic human right. Once you deny people a group identity, you are denying them as a people. We wouldn’t deny that to people outside Europe. People get adopted into the group, but it doesn’t mean the ancestry means nothing. It seems an unreasonable demand to deny that a group exists in an ancestral way. They do. You can’t taboo a group out of existence—even the English, who are self-effacing about this.
How does this end? Most commentators have been grim and many of their columns read like eulogies. West is more nuanced. “We’re far from the stage where we even need to begin discussing civil war,” he said:
General discontent and unrest might start to become much more heated than it has been for a long, long time. You can see that in the way people are voting. People are willing to vote for non-mainstream parties. The Labour Party only got a third of the actual voters in the last election. That’s incredibly low. The latest polls show that Reform are going up and up. The jail sentences may create a backlash, and certainly contribute to the sentiment that the English don’t really matter.
Across Europe, people are turning to populist parties more out of desperation than any coherent ideology. The seething rioters of this past summer probably don’t define themselves as conservatives of any stripe; most don’t live particularly conservative lives. They are, in many ways, a disinherited people—it is their parents and grandparents who declined to pass on their faith and values of their forebears. “On the other hand, your average London sh*tlib probably does make pretty conservative life choices—probably married, for example,” West observed.
But one thing is clear: people hate leaders who hold them in contempt, and that is why they are willing to consider alternatives. “That’s not because countries are going back to a dark history of fascism,” West said. “They’re not interested in actual fascism, or even far-right politics.” What they are interested in is leaders who prioritize their interests first. Can the Reform Party become a political channel for the anger we saw unfold across England? “I’m a big believer in ‘We shall see,’” West told me. I suspect that even rock-ribbed progressives might be forced to admit that Nigel Farage is preferable to the grimmer alternatives.
