The most urgent thing to do when a forest burns is to put out the fire. And to do so with the right strategy, to prevent the flames from being fanned. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, has faced the first serious crisis of his mandate with the wave of racist and xenophobic riots that spread across the country last week, after the brutal stabbing murder of three girls in the coastal town of Southport.
Starmer was the director of the Crown Prosecution Service (something similar to the position of attorney general in Spain) in 2011. In August of that year, the Metropolitan Police in London shot dead Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black father of four. The violent riots that broke out in the Tottenham neighbourhood spread throughout the capital and spread to other British cities. The chief prosecutor was then able to see what was the best response to defuse the crisis. He convinced the courts to keep their doors open for 24 hours and speed up the trials and sentences of those arrested.
The Prime Minister has avoided the trap of condescension. He has avoided the tricky debate on immigration, as the cause of all the anxieties that agitate the British, which the Conservative Party has so well fuelled in recent years.
Starmer has launched a rapid response force of 6,000 riot police to be quickly dispatched to any part of the country where they are needed. And he has again succeeded in speeding up the trials of suspected rioters.
Nothing is free in politics. The Labour Party had inherited courts at their limit of capacity, with thousands of trials delayed, and a prison crisis, with jails full, which led to the announcement of the early release, starting this September, of thousands of prisoners.
The response to this week’s riots will mean further delays in court proceedings (some rape cases have been awaiting trial for over a year) and increased pressure on prisons. But it has demonstrated Starmer’s ability to resolve issues and his pragmatism.
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The protagonists of the riots.Four heterogeneous groups, together numbering hundreds rather than thousands of people, have been involved in the sieges of mosques, libraries, non-governmental organisations and hotels where asylum seekers are staying. Firstly, far-right and fascist activists, mobilised mainly through an encrypted Telegram channel, but also through X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook. Secondly, groups of men eager for a fight and loaded with alcohol and drugs (the same ones that fuel the hooliganismfootball, which is now so closely controlled by the police). Next to them, there are older people, many of them women, confused by an increasingly diverse society that leaves them disoriented. And a fourth group: young schoolchildren, some accompanied by their parents, driven by curiosity and the desire to participate in something that will liven up their summer.
From a distance, out of reach of physical violence, the real arsonists have positioned themselves. The multimillionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network X, who with a profound ignorance of British reality has assured that the United Kingdom “is on the brink of a civil war” and has attacked Starmer, whom he accuses of applying greater harshness against white men than against the young people of ethnic minorities who have confronted them. Or Stephen Christopher Lennon, known by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the fascist organization English Defense League, whom Musk amnestied when it bought Twitter and allowed him to recover his account on that social network, which had been banned for his hate speech. Since his summer vacation on the island of Cyprus, Robinson has encouraged his followers to go out on the streets and attack mosques.
And the worst of them all is Nigel Farage, who was aptly described by the brilliant Conservative politician Chris Patten as “a Tommy Robinson with a silk scarf around his neck”. The populist politician, who has been riding on the back of Brexit for a decade, finally won an MP position in the last elections on 4 July, but Farage still prefers the incendiary technique of posting videos on social media, in which he has suggested that the police had withheld information about the murder of the Southport girls.
Cyclical violence.At the end of August, the Notting Hill Carnival will take place in London, bringing together millions of people in a festive atmosphere. Few people know that the origin of this festival was the need to put an end to the racist violence of British whites against the newly arrived Afro-Caribbean community in the 1950s. Ten years later, the xenophobic and aggressive speech of the conservative politician Enoch Powell, dubbed by the media as the “rivers of blood” speech after one of his quotes, fueled the fascism of the 1970s. This was followed by the hooliganism from the eighties.
“The famous insularity and xenophobia of the English is much stronger among the working class than among the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are more nationalistic than the rich, but the English working class stands out above all others for the way it abhors foreign habits,” wrote George Orwell in his essay The Lion and the Unicornone of the most brilliant attempts to decipher the soul of the British. A decade of conservative governments more focused on stirring up hatred and ideology, with Brexit as a battering ram, than on solving problems, has resurrected the impulse of violence. It is in these forgotten areas of England, without social services or job opportunities, where the hostels that have been sheltering asylum seekers for years are located, which the extreme right is now attacking. Immigrants crammed together without an expiration date by governments with little desire to speed up the procedures for their regularisation or their asylum applications.
Starmer has inherited a country with serious inefficiencies, and the only possible response to avoid future outbreaks of violence is to get it working again and have a shared prosperity. But his first task, the most thankless, is to put out a fire that Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson have started again.
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