The Observer’s take on the UK riots: political neglect is at the root of our fractured communities | Observer Editorial

LLast Wednesday, businesses closed early and stores were boarded up in anticipation of a surge in far-right violence in parts of the country. Six thousand trained police officers were on standby. In the end, the situation did not reach the scale that had been feared: relatively few agitators were overshadowed by huge crowds of anti-racist protesters who sent a clear message that the far right was not welcome in their communities.

It is a huge relief, but as the Prime Minister warned on Friday, there is no point in resting on one’s laurels. In retrospect, the social media messages announcing that actions were to be carried out in many places looked more like an attempt to spark protests than a sign of networked organisation. The swift arrest of so many rioters in the preceding days, some of whom have already been sentenced to long prison terms, undoubtedly had a deterrent effect. But on Thursday and Friday night, anti-immigration unrest continued in Belfast and the police remain on high alert this weekend.

The 2011 riots in England were much smaller in scale. But we must now try to understand what motivated the far-right to hijack the murder of three young girls, fuelled by misinformation about the identity of their attacker. Only 7% of Britons say they support the 2024 riots, but attacks on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers have exposed the extent of latent prejudice, including virulent Islamophobia, among a small minority of the population, and heightened fears among minority communities. There is a risk that misinformation about the state’s handling of the unrest – such as the false claim that white offenders are treated more harshly than those of other ethnicities – could further inflame tensions.

Most of the explanations put forward so far come from those who view the unrest through the prism of their own worldview. This does not help us understand the causes of the unrest or prevent future unrest. The government must order a proper investigation to determine who caused the unrest, who participated in it, and what the underlying causes are.

The review should look at the role played by far-right ideology and organisation, including in the spread of misinformation online. The far-right has long exploited the issue of asylum hotels, as highlighted by the government’s social cohesion adviser, Sara Khan, in a 2024 review. In 2023, protests outside a Merseyside hotel used to house asylum seekers escalated into violent clashes with police. Extremists of all types have become adept at using disinformation and conspiracy theories to attract and provoke people online. This creates an even more challenging context for the Prevent programme, which aims to prevent the radicalisation of individuals to the far-right, Islamism and other forms of extremism. Social media companies should do more to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation. The Online Safety Act is not yet fully implemented and should contribute to this, but it is complex to design levers that work effectively without compromising legal freedom of expression online.

Given the evidence that most of the 2011 riots took place in areas ranked in the bottom 10% for social cohesion, the government needs to develop a proper social cohesion strategy. Khan stresses that cohesion is a much broader concept than integration. The former is about helping “diverse but established citizens and communities to live well together and to withstand the inevitable tensions that will arise from time to time”; this includes intra-minority and intra-religious tensions. The latter is about helping new arrivals integrate into British life.

In recent days, the riots have been too often attributed to low levels of integration. In reality, the UK is performing well on some indicators of integration, with a steady decline in intergenerational prejudice, progressively lower levels of residential segregation and higher educational outcomes for children of immigrant origin than for non-immigrant children. Despite several reports on community cohesion since 2000, the government has no framework for measuring it or an evidence base for what works. There are examples of incidents that have broken out and been handled very poorly by local authorities, such as the appalling treatment of a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who was forced into hiding after giving a lesson on free speech and blasphemy that included images of the Prophet Muhammad.

Finally, social cohesion is inevitably undermined by economic hardship. Too many people have bad experiences of a dysfunctional housing market, insufficient economic opportunities and lack of access to good public services. This is the result of years of policy failure and creates fertile ground for right-wing populists who blame immigrants for the country’s ills: such populism has dominated Conservative politics for the last decade and has recently enjoyed success under the guise of reform. There are legitimate debates to be had about appropriate levels of immigration and how asylum should work; what is illegitimate is to claim that immigration is responsible for the underfunding of the NHS, the lack of school places or the high cost of housing, when these are largely the product of policy choices.

The worst of the troubles is, hopefully, behind us. But what has happened in the last two weeks reminds us that we cannot take a healthy, pluralistic and tolerant society for granted; it is a given that political leaders must learn to cultivate.