The evolution of Britain’s extreme right
THEY BROKE through the hotel doors soon after midday on August 4th. Around 700 far-right activists had gathered outside the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, a suburb in the deprived northern town of Rotherham, that morning. The mob chanted “get them out” and “burn it down” at asylum seekers housed inside and hurled chairs, planks and bricks at the police. Hotel staff erected barricades. One rioter started a fire in a doorway. It is remarkable no one was badly hurt.
The violence over the past two weeks in Britain has been horrifying. Sparked initially by the killing of three children on July 29th, the disorder took on a life of its own. Thousands have taken part in riots; violence has spread to 22 towns and cities. White nationalists have attacked mosques, asylum hotels and Muslim neighbourhoods and businesses. It is hard to judge how quickly it will stop. Fears of more trouble on August 7th were not realised as counter-demonstrators took to the streets. But further clashes are possible.
In some ways the violence, and some politicians’ ambiguous response to it, recalls earlier bouts of far-right brutality. But in its scale and the way it was organised, it points to something new.
The first major race riot in Britain took place in 1919. Up to the 1970s they flared periodically, usually in urban centres and poor mixed neighbourhoods. Most riots since, with a handful of exceptions, have been between black youths and the police. The last big one, in 2011, was sparked when police shot dead a black man in London; five other people lost their lives. But the past week has seen “the most widespread far-right violence in Britain’s post-war history”, says Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate, a campaign group.
That is a shock. Until recently the far right in Britain appeared a diminished force, caught between a decline in racist attitudes and a winner-takes-all electoral system that favours big political parties. Throughout the 20th century the far right tried, and largely failed, to combine street activism with success at the ballot box. The British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded by Oswald Mosley, an aristocratic antisemite, attracted some 50,000 supporters in the 1930s but failed to make any electoral headway. After the second world war, Mosley turned to aggressive street campaigning in migrant communities.
That was a tactic continued in the 1970s by the National Front, a white-nationalist group that campaigned against the arrival of Ugandan Asians. In an infamous clash, in 1977, 500 National Front members marched through Lewisham, a multicultural borough in London, under a banner that read “clear the muggers off the streets” before brawling with police. Bouts of street thuggery damaged the National Front’s appeal; the Lewisham riots came to be seen as the start of its decline. In the 2000s a successor outfit, the British National Party (BNP), won a handful of council seats and two seats in the European Parliament.
The electoral market for such extreme views, never that large, has steadily shrunk. Only 17% of people now say that to be truly British, it is very important to have been born in Britain, down from 48% in 1995. As a result a distinction has emerged between what academics term the “extreme right”, explicitly racist outfits like the National Front and the BNP, and the “radical right”, electoral movements whose ranks include populists like Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK.
In their different ways, both have made headway. The radical right is more prominent than ever. Mr Farage, who shares many of the extreme right’s concerns about immigration, crime and policing, is one of five Reform UK MPs in Parliament following the election on July 4th. Like other stars of the populist right, he gets top billing on GB News, a television channel. Extreme-right actors have meanwhile found new ways of tapping old grievances.
Whereas in the past the extreme right was organised through institutions with leaders, organisational structures and membership lists, it is now a looser constellation of influencers and networks. Its leading figure is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a 41-year-old former football hooligan from Luton who uses the pseudonym Tommy Robinson. On July 27th he drew 30,000 people to a rally in London where speakers melded genuine local concerns, for example about the location of asylum hotels, with wild theories about Britain being an “occupied country”. Although he has not taken part in the unrest, he has used a large social-media following to whip it up.
The English Defence League (EDL), an anti-Muslim group founded by Mr Yaxley-Lennon, is supposedly defunct. But its former members continue to share messages. Another important network is Patriotic Alternative. Whereas those associated with the EDL tend to be older hooligans, Patriotic Alternative targets a younger audience by organising video-gaming events and fight clubs. Neither group has many official members but both have a large reach through apps, says Julia Ebner, an expert on extremism at Oxford University.
The recent unrest does not appear to have been centrally organised. Instead local activists chose a specific location, announced an intention to congregate there and waited for their plans to be amplified via apps. This decentralised approach explains one difference with past riots, which tended to happen in cities. But in other respects the internet encourages uniform behaviour, as troublemakers repeat slogans pushed online. “They oppress the wrong people,” parroted one youth about the policing of a protest in Manchester.
How might things play out from here? One scenario is that a heavy judicial response has the desired effect, and, perhaps with the help of some rain, the unrest peters out. In a previous role as director of public prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer, now the prime minister, helped put almost 1,300 people involved in the 2011 riots in prison. The court cases have already begun; that some of the first to face justice wept in the dock does not suggest a movement hardened for a fight. Loose organisational networks may mean that far-right activity dissipates as quickly as it flared up.
Another scenario is that the unrest will continue, or mutate. The focus may move to mass rallies, or to protesting about those who have been prosecuted. Mr Mulhall notes that after a riot near an asylum hotel in Knowsley in 2023, similar events continued for six weeks. People who take part in violent protests may form stronger group identities, says Ms Ebner.
It will take longer to work out how the riots will shape the future of the right. Early polling shows that the great majority of voters abhor the violence, though some do not (see chart). Initially Mr Farage did not condemn the scenes, describing them as a reaction “to fear, to discomfort, to unease” shared by “tens of millions of people”. Leading Tories have been less equivocal, though some were slow to respond. British political history suggests that participating in street violence leads to electoral failure. The question today is whether finding excuses for it has the same effect. ■
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