Another summer and, once again, another riot.
By now the pattern is becoming familiar.
A tragedy occurs involving a white victim and a non-white perpetrator. The victim’s family appeals for calm and asks that their loss should not be used to fuel racial hatred. The appeal is ignored.
“We want to use Henry’s heartbreaking story to make change for the better. We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. We want his story to help make our streets safer for everyone.“
Politicians and commentators on the populist right begin asking questions, raising suspicions and hinting at wider grievances. Their language usually stops short of direct incitement. It rarely needs to go any further.
Social media does the rest.
This week it was Southampton. Two years ago it was Sunderland. Looking at the footage, the participants appear remarkably similar.
These are not respectable citizens reluctantly taking to the streets. They are often people with extensive criminal records, histories of violence, domestic abuse, drug offences and public disorder. The people claiming to defend their communities frequently pose a greater threat to those communities than the people they claim to oppose.
The statistics from the 2024 riots were revealing. Around 40% of those arrested had previous convictions for domestic violence. Since their arrests, around a fifth have gone on to commit further domestic violence offences. The self-appointed defenders of the community often turn out to be the people from whom communities most need defending.
Yet parts of the political right continue to flirt with these movements.
The most striking example has been the willingness of some Conservative and Reform politicians to endorse campaigns such as Raise the Colours. Several of the movement’s founders have serious criminal records. Andrew Currie, also known as Andy Saxon, previously worked as a bodyguard for the English Defence League and provided security for Britain First. He was later jailed following his role in a violent affray connected to a brawl in which a man died.
Another founder, Guramit Singh, served a prison sentence after tying up a shop assistant and threatening to cut his throat during an attempted robbery.
More recently, Billy Allison, the original founder of Raise the Colours, has been charged with murder and grievous bodily harm with intent following an alleged assault in a Staffordshire pub.
A generation ago this would have been politically toxic. Mainstream conservatives maintained a deliberate distance between respectable conservatism and extremist movements. The barrier was often imperfect, but it existed.
Today it is rapidly disappearing. In the United States there is a phrase for this phenomenon: No Enemies On The Right.
The principle is simple. Whatever differences may exist between conservatives, ethno-nationalists, populists and extremists, they should avoid criticising one another because the greater enemy lies elsewhere.
The consequences are obvious.
Once politicians stop challenging extremism within their own ranks, extremists become normalised. The boundaries shift. Yesterday’s fringe becomes today’s ally.
What makes this particularly strange is that it represents a sharp break with traditional conservatism.
Historically, conservatives saw themselves as defenders of order. They stood against revolutionary politics, mob rule and political violence. Whatever their faults, they regarded social stability as a virtue.
The modern populist right often takes a different view.
Disorder can be useful.
Riots create images of a country supposedly descending into chaos. Chaos creates fear. Fear creates a demand for stronger leadership, tougher measures and more radical solutions.
The message becomes self-reinforcing. The country is falling apart. The establishment has failed. Extraordinary measures are required.
The irony is that many of the people attracted to these movements are not society’s most disadvantaged citizens.
The stereotype of the Reform voter as a struggling industrial worker is increasingly out of date. Many are homeowners, retirees and people who have accumulated significant assets over their lifetimes. They are often economically secure but culturally anxious.
What they fear is not necessarily economic decline but social change.
They grew up in a more hierarchical Britain. Race, gender and sexuality carried different assumptions and different privileges. The world around them has changed rapidly and not everyone has adapted comfortably.
Some experience that change as loss.
The internet amplifies these anxieties. Social media feeds users a constant diet of outrage, conflict and perceived threats. The result is a distorted picture of reality in which crime appears to be everywhere, social breakdown is constant and enemies are lurking around every corner.
But there is another dimension to this. Many of the people consuming this content are older, less digitally confident and less likely to question where material comes from. A video filmed in another country, years ago, can be presented as evidence of events in modern Britain. Context disappears. Emotion remains.
The mechanism is often more mundane than people imagine. Much of this content does not spread through obscure extremist websites. It spreads through ordinary community Facebook groups. People join these groups to find out about road closures, bin collections, lost pets or the opening hours of local takeaways. Increasingly, they find something else entirely.
Take the “Have Your Say” groups that operate across parts of the North East. Sunderland Have Your Say has more than 50,000 members, a larger audience than many local newspapers. Yet much of the content circulating within it has little to do with Sunderland. Stories, videos and memes are routinely shared from elsewhere in Britain, often focusing on immigration, policing and culture-war grievances. The same administrators also run Durham Have Your Say, creating a network of ostensibly local groups under common editorial control. Posts by ordinary members are subject to approval, meaning what appears in people’s feeds is not simply a reflection of community opinion but the result of active curation.
That matters because these groups occupy a position once held by local newspapers. They are trusted because they appear local and familiar. Members join looking for practical information about their communities and instead find themselves exposed to a steady stream of political content. The political message arrives disguised as community information. By the time politicians begin asking their carefully phrased questions about immigration, policing or national decline, an audience has already been primed to hear the answers.
The result is a cycle that has become depressingly familiar. Online outrage becomes street mobilisation. Street mobilisation becomes disorder. Disorder becomes violence.
The far right has always depended upon an unusual coalition: wealthy backers, socially anxious middle groups and a street-level element willing to provide muscle when required.
The names change. The structure remains remarkably similar.
That is why these riots matter.
The question is not simply who threw the first punch or who set fire to a building.
The more important question is why some politicians continue to cultivate an atmosphere in which such behaviour becomes predictable.
When violence repeatedly follows the same political script, it is no longer enough to claim surprise when the final act begins.