A month after the riots that shook the British summer began, calm has returned. The reason for these clashes is false information spread by far-right networks according to which the alleged murderer of three girls in Southport (north-east England) on 29 July was a Muslim and had just arrived in the country in small boat even though he is British, police have made more than 1,000 arrests and at least 200 people have already been sentenced (most of them to prison terms).
The storm seems to have largely passed, and counter-demonstrations initiated by anti-racist groups also played their part, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to express their opposition to the Islamophobia and racism uttered by the rioters. “exploited the flaws of our society after fourteen years of populism and failures [des conservateurs] »This was stated on Tuesday 27 August by Keir Starmer, the British Labour Prime Minister, who has been in Downing Street since July and has promised to play politics. “differently” to respond to “social black hole” that these riots revealed.
This also highlights a paradox at the heart of the British far right. Unlike the rest of Europe, no movement that emerged from it has ever succeeded in winning elections. However, its power to mobilise, multiplied tenfold by social media, proved considerable during the riots and its potential for violence was very real. On 27 July, Tommy Robinson, the best-known figure of the British far right, managed to gather 30,000 supporters in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London. There were hundreds of them, the following days, in Southport, throwing bricks at the police.
In addition to Reform UK, the party of the charismatic Nigel Farage, which British politicians consider more of a far-right party than a right-wing extremist party (“Accepts democratic principles”(Notes Tim Squirrell of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue), there are a dozen other groups that sometimes do not even have the status of political parties: the Reclaim Party, the Patriotic Alternative, the Homeland Party or Britain First. These small groups – at most a few thousand active activists (exact figures are not available) – are often rivals, but they have in common that they profess hatred of foreigners and Islam, and attract mainly white men. For Tim Squirrell, “They often don’t even get enough votes to get their election deposit refunded.”.
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