LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will hold an emergency meeting with police chiefs on Monday after days of violent anti-immigration protests intensified, with buildings and vehicles torched and hotels holding asylum seekers targeted.
Riots have erupted across towns and cities in the last week after three girls were killed in a knife attack in Southport in northwest England, with 420 people arrested so far.
The murders were seized on by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups as misinformation spread online that the suspected attacker was a radical Islamist who had just arrived in Britain. Police have said the suspect was born in Britain and are not treating it as a terrorist incident.
Interior minister Yvette Cooper said rioters had felt “emboldened by this moment to stir up racial hatred”, with bricks thrown at police officers, shops looted and mosques and Asian-owned businesses attacked.
Over the weekend riots broke out in Liverpool, Bristol, Tamworth, Middlesbrough and Belfast, in Northern Ireland, with largely young men wearing balaclavas and draped in the British flags hurling rocks and shouting “Stop the Boats”, a reference to migrants arriving on the south coast in recent years.
In Rotherham, northern England, protesters sought to break into a hotel that housed asylum seekers.
POLICE BLAME ONLINE DISINFORMATION
Police have blamed online disinformation, amplified by high-profile figures for driving the violence. One of the most prominent of these, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon who led the anti-Islam English Defence League group, has been blamed by media for spreading misinformation to his 875,000 followers on X.
“They are lying to you all,” Yaxley-Lennon, who is known by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, wrote. “Attempting to turn the nation against me. I need you, you are my voice.”
Elon Musk, the owner of X, also weighed in on the violence. Responding to a post on X that blamed mass migration and open borders for the disorder in Britain, he wrote: “Civil war is inevitable.”
Interior minister Yvette Cooper told broadcasters that tensions had been amplified and inflamed online, and the government would be pursuing the issue with social media companies.
“I think what you’ve seen is that networks of different individuals and groups that have been trying to fan the flames,” she told Sky News, swerving questions on whether foreign states had been involved.
While she said people had views and concerns about issues such as immigration, she blamed extremist, racist, violent groups for the violence.
“Reasonable people who have all those sorts of views and concerns do not pick up bricks and throw them at the police,” she said.
(Writing by Kate Holton; additional reporting by Kylie MacLellan, Paul Sandle and Michael Holden; Editing by Alex Richardson)
