THE RIOTS IN THE ‘UNITED KINGDOM’
By Femi Olugbile
On Monday the 29th of July, an unimaginable outrage occurred at a dance hall in Southport, Merseyside, the United Kingdom, in a community studio where a group of children were enjoying a dance and yoga workshop on the theme of popular American musician, Taylor Swift. Suddenly a young black man emerged among them with a knife, slashing left and right.
By the time he was overpowered and disarmed, two children lay dead in a pool of their own blood. Six children and two adults were in critical condition.
A third child would die in hospital from her wounds the following day.
The attacker was seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana. His parents had come originally from Rwanda, but he was born in Wales, and he was a British citizen. He had moved to Southport in 2013. His motive for the knife-attack is yet to be made clear to anyone.
Southport is a small seaside town that is seventeen miles from Liverpool in the northwest of England. Although the town regularly welcomes tourists because of its rich history and seaside location, it is a quiet, placid place where neighbours generally know each other, and nothing much happens, really.
As is usual in the aftermath of such tragedy, people gathered to light candles and lay flowers at locations associated with the tragedy and with the families of the deceased.
Within twenty-four hours of the tragedy, however, matters took a different turn, and it was a turn many people in Southport would never have imagined, and most would never have desired.
Shortly after the stabbing incident, word began to go out in certain social media outlets that the murderer was a Muslim asylum seeker. Misinformation was carried in some Telegram and X-accounts belonging to high-profile right-wing figures, including Tony Robinson, who was the founder of the extremist English Defence League. The rumours alleged that the knife-attacker was a recent immigrant named Ali Al-Shakati.
On the 30th of August, an angry group of protesters gathered, intent on attacking the Southport mosque. Police mustered quickly to keep the peace.
When Prime Minister, Sir Keir Stammer visited Southport to pay his respects, he was confronted by taunting protesters.
‘How many more, Stammer?…When are you going to do something?…’
The reference was to the relentless surge of ‘boat people’ – illegal immigrants mostly from Asia and the Middle East, who were daily crossing to the British mainland from France in small boats.
The rioters attacked the Southport Mosque, inflicting damage. Many police were injured.
The riots spread to several cities in the United Kingdom. Misinformation synchronised with disinformation.
The police tried to calm the tension by denying the lies put about on the internet.
Salacious and inflammatory commentary continued to fly about on X and Telegram and other platforms. Muslims and immigrants were responsible for the surge in unspeakable crimes and other misdemeanour in the country, many of them said.
The violence continued to spread.
In London, on the 31st of July, over 100 protesters were arrested in demonstrations near the Prime Minister’s residence. Violent protests took place in Manchester, Hartlepool, and in Sunderland. Protesters clashed with police and attacked homes and businesses owned by people of African and Asian origin, as well as hotels known to accommodate asylum seekers.
In a scary development, a ‘road map’ was published on the internet, indicating dates in the coming week on which rioters would descend on several cities across the nation.
Pathetic human angle stories emerged in the news – a Nigerian student who had just graduated in Middlesborough, who was afraid to go out of his apartment because the environment he had known as home all these years had suddenly turned hostile to his race. A Nigerian carer returning home from work to find his car burnt to ashes. A mother afraid to let her holidaying children go to the nearby park to play as usual because they might be racially attacked.
It was not a great moment for Great Britain.
Mercifully, the violence has abated, countered by harsh prosecution led by the Prime Minister, a former public prosecutor, and counterdemonstrations by ordinary citizens. The police have arrested hundreds of rioters, and government has promised them jail time.
But the underlying issues that impelled the riots are native to the United Kingdom and cannot be wished away. Some of the rioters were not ‘extremists’ but ‘ordinary people’ swept along in the prevailing climate of hate to attack and abuse their neighbours.
United Kingdom truly has an ‘Illegal Immigration’ problem – in one day recently, five hundred immigrants crossed the English Channel. Many working-class Britons are irked that ‘illegals’ are housed and fed at public expense, and enabled to have a generous living allowance that could go on for years. This, many complain, adds to the tax burden of the working population.
It is difficult to have a civilised debate on Immigration in the UK, because positions are rigid, emotional and ideological. It is also difficult to debate what sort of nation the UK should become ultimately, a multi-ethnic country with core British values, or a multicultural Tower of Babel with different ethnic cultural and religious pockets and ‘no-go areas’, such as what obtains in some parts of Birmingham where stolen Range Rovers are disassembled for sale, in blatant disregard of the local Police. When Nigerian-born Kemi Badenoch, aspiring leader of the Conservatives, defined the UK’s race problem as
‘Our integration is not yet complete’, she was howled down as a ‘black house slave’ by many Black and Asian Britons, whose predominant belief is that immigrants should automatically be members of the ‘left’, meaning the Labour Party. But those who howled her down might ask themselves if they would have reacted the same if Rishi Sunak or another ‘Asian-Briton’ had uttered the same, very true, words, and what their reaction implied about their own, very real, ‘reverse-racism’.
This week, King Charles has been visiting Southport, grieving with the families and thanking the emergency workers. All, it seems, is back to normal in the Kingdom. For the moment.
