Fascist riots and anti-Muslim hate marches raged across Britain and Northern Ireland this weekend as far-right forces seized on the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport to stir violence. Mobs organized online and via social media launched brazen assaults on mosques and hotels housing refugees and asylum-seekers.
Scenes reminiscent of Germany’s Kristallnacht unfolded in some towns as white supremacists smashed windows and tried to burn down buildings.
In Rotherham Sunday, rioters invaded a Holiday Inn where asylum-seekers are housed. The walls echoed with the sound of breaking glass, and smoke hung in the air as fascists set multiple fires in an attempt to set the building ablaze and burn the refugees trapped inside to death.
A similar plot was rebuffed in Cardiff after hundreds of counterdemonstrators arrived. The massively outnumbered fascist group there was sent running. In Liverpool, Sunderland, Leeds, and other locales, anti-racist demonstrators also answered the call for counter-protests.
The orgy of violence was initiated by the right after last Monday’s murder of three girls—Bebe King, 6; Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7; and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9—by a 17-year-old boy who stormed into a dance lesson and yoga workshop in the seaside English town of Southport armed with a knife. Eight other children were injured, including five who are in critical condition. Two adults are also still in hospital.
Because the attacker was a minor, his identity was initially withheld by police, in accordance with standard practice. Fascist and white supremacist groups took advantage of the information vacuum to spread their own intentional disinformation and lies about the perpetrator.
False claims were circulated online that the attacker was a Muslim and an immigrant.
Neo-Nazi leader Tommy Robinson—convicted criminal, founder of the anti-Muslim English Defence League, and ally of right-wing U.S. billionaires and fascist fringe think tanks—was among those responsible.
Also joining the tsunami of lies was the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative, which used the Telegram messaging platform to disseminate further lies and organize protests. In the days since the attack, the streets of more than 35 cities in the U.K. have seen lawless rioting by these right-wing forces.
A judge eventually overturned reporting restrictions and allowed police to publicly identify the stabbing suspect in an effort to take the wind from the racists’ sails. As expected, all the claims they’d made about the attacker’s religion and immigration status turned out to be false—he was born in Britain and comes from a Christian family.
Standing together against fascism
Britain’s fascists were already in a heightened state of mobilization even before the Southport killings. 15,000 of them marched in London last weekend to celebrate the breakthrough election win of racist Reform UK party leader and Trump ally Nigel Farage to parliament.
In the capital, they were met with a wall of counter-protesters, recalling images of the 1936 “Battle of Cable Street” when Jews, Communists, and unionists beat back Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
Stand Up To Racism co-convener Weyman Bennett told the crowd: “Today, thousands of anti-racists and anti-fascists drew a line in the sand. Every time Tommy Robinson brings racist and Nazi thugs onto the streets, we will be there to oppose them.”
After Southport, everywhere the provocateurs have reared their heads, impromptu anti-fascist coalitions have popped up in response. Muslim groups, trade unions, Palestine solidarity organizations, and Black Lives Matter groups—all have joined in the effort.
In Cardiff, BLM spokesperson Kwabena Devonish said the coalitions “must continue to build an anti-racist resistance to push the fascists off our streets and not allow racist rhetoric to poison our communities.”
In Wales, labor leader Shavanah Taj of the Trades Union Congress Cymru sector spoke, emphasizing the solidarity of workers with the people of Southport and with the communities under assault from the right.
The words and actions of several government figures have also come under scrutiny amidst the crisis.
A senior police commissioner, Conservative Party politician Donna Jones, revealed herself as a sympathizer of the fascists. She said arresting them was “treating the symptom and not the cause.”
In a now-deleted social media post akin to Donald Trump’s “good people on both sides” remark after the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi marches, Jones said the protesters were simply focused on “the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty” and “the need to uphold British values.”
She then accused the Labour Party government of having no solution for “mass uncontrolled migration.”
As for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his primary response to the riots has been to seek increased powers for the police, which many progressives warn would not be temporary and would actually be used against the left, anti-racist, labor, and peace movements in the future.
The PM announced his intention to expand the use of facial recognition technology on public security cameras and also increase the use of “criminal behavior orders” to restrict the movement of people involved in political protests.
Habib Kadiri, director of the police watchdog group Stop Watch, said Starmer’s scheme would “enable the overuse of a power on already overpoliced and racialized minorities.”
The Communist Party of Britain issued a statement late Sunday saying that the attacks and the government’s response “show that the left and the trade union movement cannot sit on the sidelines or trust the police to protect refugees, Muslims, or Black communities.”
The party said, “We must all protect our communities and take back our streets together.”
Fueling the fire
The anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence on display in the U.K. this past week is but the British expression of a trend apparent among other far-right movements around the world.
In India, it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP government; in France, it is Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and their anti-immigrant National Rally; and in the United States, it is Donald Trump and his “Mass Deportation Now” legions of MAGA Republicans.
The parallels in all these cases illustrate a direct link between the street violence of neo-Nazis and the bigger reactionary agendas of mainstream conservative capitalist parties.
A half-century of deindustrialization, the starvation of public services and infrastructure, falling living standards with inflation eating away at wages, tax breaks that funnel more wealth to those at the top, and the evaporation of good-paying jobs—all have combined to fertilize the soil for the fascism’s growth.
Most centrist and liberal parties, meanwhile, have not only failed to offer a credible alternative to the neoliberal economic onslaught; they have actually abetted it and undercut their own electoral prospects in the process.
Long-term strategies to defeat the right must be anti-racist, anti-Islamophobic, anti-homophobic, and anti-transphobic at their core, but they must also include an economic vision aimed at reversing inequality, rebuilding public services and infrastructure, promoting education and health care, and creating quality jobs.
In an editorial published Sunday evening, the Morning Star, Britain’s daily socialist newspaper, summed up the right-wing threat faced not only in Britain but around the developed capitalist world: “Politicians have created bogeymen out of desperate refugees to distract from their complicity in an economic system that screws over the majority of the population.”
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