RSI condemns Islamophobic, anti-migrant, racist riots
The tragic murder of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside on 29 July sent shockwaves through communities across the United Kingdom, leaving behind profound grief and sorrow. This heartbreaking event, which saw innocent lives lost and left others severely injured, should have united people throughout the UK in mourning and in our shared commitment to preventing such horrors from happening again. Instead, it became the catalyst for sickening, violent expressions of hate, fuelled by misinformation.
This horrible episode should prompt reflection about how we got here – including a years-long government failure to address racist agitation against migrants in Northern Ireland, where some of the worst acts of violence during the past several days have been committed.
What it should not prompt is an expansion of already-vague and sweeping laws on terrorism and surveillance. Experience shows that such laws will come back to haunt the most vulnerable members of society and those who face the most discrimination. What we need is real action to end racist violence and stop the stigmatisation of migrants by virtually all parties in government.
Over the past week, we have witnessed abhorrent acts of violence targeting migrants, Muslims and people of colour. Rioters and those who support them weaponised misinformation about the identity of the attacker in Southport to bolster hate-filled grievances. Although we should all have learned by now that the actions of an individual do not represent a community, this is not the first time someone’s identity, or assumed identity, has been exploited by people with dangerous agendas. This hate has spilled onto our streets in the form of vicious attacks, from England to Northern Ireland, creating an atmosphere of fear and division.
In Northern Ireland, the media have reported migrant workers saying they will leave the region due to the risk of suffering from racist attacks, while rioters have targeted others’ businesses and property, leaving some without a livelihood or a safe place to shelter. This evolving and dismaying situation further highlights the ongoing need for distinct legislation and strategies aimed at preventing racist violence, including in Northern Ireland, which still lacks a bill of rights despite decades’ worth of promises. RSI has highlighted many times that human rights in Northern Ireland remain unfinished business and that peace will never be tenable without them.
When we consider how the media, politicians and even the police categorise and respond to the violent acts of the past several days, we can see a disturbing inconsistency. Peaceful marches calling for an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people, or students expressing their views on the Middle East, are often depicted as ‘extremism’ or ‘extremists’ even though they are not violent. At the same time, very real anti-migrant violence and hatred have been left to fester without any consistent government programme to address them. In fact, the current government – just like the previous one – has spoken about ‘net migration’ as if migrants were necessarily undesirable and a problem. Treating migrants as having less human worth or potential than British-born people is no doubt part of what got us to this disastrous point.
We believe the UK’s ‘Prevent’ counter-extremism programme has also contributed to the problem. Under this programme, the government purports to identify and stop would-be ‘terrorists’ by policing the thoughts, ideas, and completely lawful actions of members of the public, especially children and young people under 20 – and, in our view, has perpetuated Islamophobia since its inception. Prevent has been in place for over 20 years, sending the message – at first explicitly and now implicitly – that Muslims in the UK are a threat. In February of this year, the controversial reviewer of Prevent took to the press to complain that the authorities had started focusing too heavily on the far right and not enough on ‘Hamas sympathisers’. To put it mildly, these comments – always wrongheaded and inflammatory – have not aged well. And the racist riots of the past week send a strong message that the government’s flagship anti-‘extremism’ programme has been, if anything, worse than useless: it licenses Islamophobia without providing real, evidence-based violence prevention, especially at scale.
What is needed now is a fundamental rethinking of the UK’s approach to preventing violence – against everyone. We must move away from the ineffective and divisive ‘Prevent’ strategy and sweeping, vague counter-terrorism powers, and towards a model that prioritises the prevention of violence against those who are most likely to experience it. This would mean identifying and addressing the root causes of violence, including against migrants, racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people and people without housing.
In this time of rising hate and division in the UK, we must reject approaches that seek to divide us further or grant the government even greater powers to stigmatise and monitor groups that some parts of the public and the press view as ‘the other’. Ending the ‘Prevent’ strategy is a necessary step towards this goal.
