LONDON — Faced with a week-long wave of widespread violence and rioting by people authorities describe as far-right “thugs,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the police have been struggling to end some of the worst civil unrest here in more than a decade.
On Wednesday night, something unexpected happened.
Thousands of counterdemonstrators poured into the streets of a dozen English cities to denounce racism and to protect refugee centers, law offices and other sites that had appeared on an online “target list” for anti-immigrant protests.
Video of a gathering in west London’s Brentford neighborhood showed a large crowd chanting “This is what community looks like,” as police looked on from a distance. People shouted “No to racism” in Harrow. In Southhampton, a dozen anti-immigration protesters showed up, to be confronted by hundreds of counterprotesters who bellowed “Racists go home.”
There were reports of scattered arrests. But for the most part, the counterdemonstrators appeared to outnumber the agitators. And, for one night at least, they helped stop the violence.
In its first big test, Starmer’s new government has been trying to put down the riots with a strategy of more police, more arrests, more prosecutions. On Wednesday, officials highlighted the first sentences: stiff prison terms of 20 months, 30 months and three years. “If you provoke violent disorder on our streets or online, you will face the full force of the law,” the prime minister said.
Police in Britain have a free hand to arrest those who attack officers, set cars on fire and loot stores. They can also charge people for online incitement of violence, racial hatred and terrorism.
But experts say that stopping these sorts of riots with a law-and-order approach is harder than it looks. They note, too, that Britain’s police, courts and prisons are overstretched — partly as a result of a decade of funding cuts by previous governments.
One thing is clear: The British public is revolted by the violence.
A YouGov survey found that 85 percent of Britons oppose what the pollsters called “the recent protests and unrest.” Among the public, there is broad agreement with Starmer’s characterization of the demonstrators as “thugs.”
“Even if you think that migration needs to be controlled and it’s fine to send people to Rwanda, you can still draw a line at smoking people out of a hotel, because that’s attempted murder,” said Marta Lorimer, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. “These are very extreme behaviors that don’t have wide support.”
The current unrest broke out after a July 29 stabbing attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport left three young girls dead. Within hours of the attack, social media posts shared by prominent far-right figures described the assailant as an asylum seeker, with an Arabic name, who had crossed the English Channel illegally on a raft.
None of it was true. The stabbing suspect was later identified as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, born in Wales. His religion is unknown. His parents are from Rwanda, where the vast majority of people are Christian.
But efforts to disentangle the stabbing from concerns about illegal immigration appeared to have little impact. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots swept through cities in England, as well as Belfast in Northern Ireland, amounting to Britain’s worst disorder since 2011. Mobs chanting “We want our country back” stormed a library, a mosque and a hotel providing shelter for asylum seekers. Police in helmets brandishing plastic shields have found themselves deluged with flying bricks and bottles.
Starmer — a former top prosecutor — has urged police to hold the line. He wants them to protect life and property, and pursue mass arrests, using all the tools at the state’s disposal, including widespread coverage in British cities by surveillance cameras, abetted by AI-assisted facial recognition software.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council said that as of Wednesday afternoon, nearly 428 people had been arrested and 120 people charged.
Starmer’s new minister of police, Diana Johnson, said that courts could sit 24 hours a day to handle “thugs who maraud our streets.”
The government pledged that 567 extra places were being opened in Britain’s overcrowded prisons to make room for rioters.
But experts say that even with the ability to monitor some online activity, it can be difficult to anticipate where the next riot will break out and to assemble the security force that will be required.
“These are very fast-moving events, popping up here and there, in cities across the country,” said Tim Newburn, a criminologist at the London School of Economics. “There will be four or five one night and more the next night, in different cities. The police have to be very agile.”
In Britain, experts say, police do have extensive powers to make arrests.
“The police can pretty much arrest you for any kind of violent disorder,” said Geoff Pearson, an expert in crowd policing at the University of Manchester Law School.
But when police are overwhelmed, their first duty is to protect life and property — to keep the mob from setting fire to a mosque or an immigrant center, or to keep protesters and counterprotesters apart. Arrests may come later.
Newburn estimated that at demonstrations involving a couple hundred people, dozens have been throwing bottles and bricks at police, while most of the others have been shouting and filming each other with their mobile phones.
It appears the rioters are mostly leaderless, although they are attuned to far-right influencers and have been organizing themselves on social media, often on encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp.
Even while Britons are firmly against the violence and tell pollsters that the riots are unjustified, many people are unsettled by high numbers of immigrants arriving in recent years.
More than 125,000 people illegally crossed the English Channel in small rafts since 2018 — 900 crossed on Tuesday, with 12,313 making the perilous journey so far this year. Some 36,000 asylum seekers are residing in British hotels at a cost of $10 million a day. In addition, the previous governments have granted visas for a surge of students and workers. Net migration to Britain last year was 685,000, a record.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigrant Reform Party, which won five seats in the last election, has decried the riots and distanced himself from them, but said there are “deeper, longer-term” problems that remain.
“The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal,” Farage wrote on X.
The lack of public support may make this round of rioting difficult to sustain. But there’s also plenty of grievance to go around in Britain that could continue to stoke the violence. Experts say the riots could fizzle — and, like a brush fire, emerge again.