Rioting: policy meets policing on the streets

It has been a week of violent disorder, most recently in my home town of Sunderland; it is tragic but we must be clear that it has no justification or legitimacy

I have written very little about the current outbreaks of disorder connected to, shall we say, concerns about immigration and policing in the past week or so. I was not wholly sure I had much to add which was startlingly new, or more insightful than anyone else, but Friday’s rioting in Sunderland made me think I should set down a few thoughts.

Although I once had to spend three-quarters of an hour trying to convince a colleague at a Christmas party that this is so, I grew up in Sunderland. I was born in Stockton-on-Tees and my parents lived in Sedgefield at the time (pre-Blair, I’m that old), but we moved to Sunderland in 1980 with a view to my going to prep school there. My childhood home was a glorious Victorian terraced house, in (apparently) “a pleasant tree lined cul-de-sac in the heart of Ashbrooke Conservation Area, ideally located for local amenities”. The street had been built gradually in the late 19th century for local shipbuilders and engineers, and our house was (I think) built in about 1890 for a shipyard manager. The house, like the street, and like the town, I suppose (it only became a city in 1992), was slightly shabby and run down, with echoes of better days, but I loved it and it was home. (In the unlikely event you want to know more about my childhood, I talked about it when I wrote about my mother a couple of years ago.)

It is a well-worn tale that the people of your home town are especially and peculiarly wonderful. I’m old enough and realistic enough to know that much of that is hokum, but, for all that, I think it can contain an element of truth. Insofar as it is possible to generalise about any group, Mackems, by birth or location, are warm, generous and instinctively welcoming (this may not apply if you are a Geordie, he said semi-seriously); they are neither angelic nor Pollyanna-ish, and like any population group they can raise an eyebrow at those who are different or at outsiders. More often that not, though, that leads to a gentle jibe or an amused observation rather than hostility or abuse. When I’ve fallen into conversation with people from different backgrounds and with different experiences, the dominant theme has been curiosity: what is it you do? How does that work? How did you start? What’s it like? It is an anecdotal but not irrelevant measure, but talking to taxi drivers in Sunderland gives you an insight into what is happening and what people are feeling. There is a deep-seated, sometimes obscured but enduring sense of decency.

Sunderland, in my lifetime, has had a hard time. The decline of coal mining and shipbuilding, which reached their nadir in the 1980s, tore the heart out of the traditional employers, and the opening of the Nissan factory in 1986 was a lifeline without which the future would have been even darker than it was. The establishment of an enterprise zone at Doxford International in 1990 was another boost, but unemployment, poverty and lack of opportunities have been a blight which successive governments have not fully been able to address. Nevertheless, the last few years have seen real regeneration and optimism: the construction of the Stadium of Light in 1996/97; the extension of the Tyne and Wear Metro to Sunderland in 2002; the development of the Riverside area and Keel Square; the approval of Crown Works Studios; last night, Friday, was the official opening of Sheepfolds Stables.

Of course challenges remain. The Health Index ranking still puts Sunderland in the bottom 20 per cent of local authorities in England, educational attainment and school absence are still higher than average, and the pandemic had a strongly negative effect on all sorts of indicators. But the statistics for last year show that employment is not far below the UK average, unemployment has fallen and economic inactivity is down. There is reason for cautious optimism, and when I spoke to Patrick Melia, chief executive of Sunderland City Council, a few years ago, in the immediate wake of the pandemic, he was talking a good but realistic game about the city’s future.

The city’s record is not spotless. In 2017, a group called Justice for Women and Girls, playing on fears of sexual offences by immigrants and asylum seekers, held a rally in Sunderland which was addressed by Gerard Batten, UKIP MEP and anti-Islam activist, veteran race-baiter Billy Charlton and far-right activist and founder of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson. The following month, Robinson held a book signing at Fletcher’s News and Booze in Hendon, and violence broke out. Robinson chose to wear a Rangers football shirt on a day on which Celtic were playing Sunderland at the Stadium of Light. A survey of University of Sunderland students in 2019-20 found that many had experienced racism, and those at the main campus had done so to a higher degree than at the university’s London outpost.

It is worth making the point that Sunderland has always been, and remains, a noticeably white and British city. The last census in 2021 showed that 93.5 per cent of usual residents were born in England (and 0.9 per cent in Scotland), and in terms of identity, 60.2 per cent identified as British only, 19.6 per cent as English and British and 15.9 per cent as English only (a total of 95.7 per cent). 94.6 per cent of the population was recorded as white, a fall of only 1.3 per cent in the decade since the previous census.

Earlier in the year, it was reported that actress Cynthia Erivo had tweeted in 2022 about not feeling comfortable in Sunderland:

We went to every city in the UK, some cities are wonderful. Other cities are not so wonderful. You go to Manchester, and it’s incredible, because it feels like London, really. You go to Liverpool, there’s a feeling about it....And then you go to Sunderland, and you’re like ‘where the fuck am I?’ I don’t know where I am... this is not where I live, at all...

It was a stupid, solipsistic, throwaway remark born of ignorance, lack of thought and fundamental prejudice, and many people in and from Sunderland were rightly annoyed and offended. But in the wake of the brief media storm, author and journalist Kenan Malik, writing in The Observer, made a telling point: yes, Sunderland was much more white than Erivo’s native south London, but it was not automatically true that it was therefore racist, and that racism as a force in British society, while still very much alive, was far less pervasive than in past decades.

But if Sunderland is not like London, neither is it like the Britain of old… there is, though, no reason to assume that because a town is more white or working class, it is necessarily more racist. There is an irony in preaching about the importance of diversity but being averse to a place that “is not [like] where I live” or which may “look and feel a bit different”.

I doubt she read Malik’s column, or absorbed it, but one can live in hope.

So we come to Friday 2 August, the end of a dreadful week for British society, with public disorder in Southport, Liverpool, central London, Hartlepool, Manchester and Aldershot. It began with the dreadful fatal stabbing of three young girls, aged nine, seven and six, at a dance studio in Southport on Monday. Almost immediately, false information about the perpetrator, a 17-year-old Cardiff-born boy eventually named as Axel Rudakubana, began to circulate on social media, and suggestions that he was a Muslim were amplified by far-right agitators. (Rudakubana’s parents are from Rwanda, a country which is overwhelmingly Christian.) The following day, violence broke out in Southport, including at a mosque on St Luke’s Road. For many, the mere hint of Muslim involvement was enough.

Last night was Sunderland’s turn. “Protestors” gathered in Keel Square, a recently redeveloped entertainment and hospitality area, while others congregated outside the mosque in St Mark’s Road, chanting “Save our kids” and “We want our country back”. Eventually a taxi was set on fire, shops in the city centre were looted and a police station was burned down. There were several hundred protestors, many draped in England flags, some with their faces covered and some chanting slogans in support of Tommy Robinson. Projectiles were thrown at police, with three needing to be taken to hospital. Eight people were arrested. The disorder was organised and co-ordinated over social media under the slogan “Stop playing lottery with children’s lives”, with would-be rioters told to bring England flags.

It has been heart-breaking to watch footage of the violence. Naturally and rightly, politicians and local worthies have queued up to insist that this intolerance and hatred does not represent the people of Sunderland, let alone the British people. My sympathy for the innocent bystanders is boundless, especially those whose commercial premises have been damaged or destroyed, and I pay unreserved tribute to the officers of Northumbria Police who have spent the night trying to preserve law and order. I also feel desperately sorry for the small Muslim community in Sunderland, less than 5,000-strong, who will, correctly if unforgiveably, have felt threatened and targeted by this violent disorder.

Let me get some talking points out of the way. It is true beyond contradiction that net migration into the United Kingdom has increased over the past 25 years or so, at first gradually but then very sharply in the past two or three years. In 1997, net migration was at 48,000 but shot up to 140,000 the following year and has only once, in the pandemic year of 2020, fallen below 100,000 annually since then. But the rate of increase has been enormous since the pandemic: 466,000 in 2021, 745,000 in 2022, 685,000 in 2023. That is like a new Coventry, followed by a new Sheffield, followed by a new Bristol.

The soaring rise in net migration is important because the Conservative Party’s manifestos of 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 all promised to reduce immigration, the first three pledging to reduce it to “tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands”. (The 2024 manifesto also promised to cut net migration.) Yet after each of those elections, which in one way or the other put the Conservatives into office, the trend was generally upwards, with any reductions being small. In 2010, net migration was 256,000, and in 2023 it was 685,000. This means that it is, on a superficial level, true to say that the electorate has consistently voted to reduce net migration, while the government has failed to deliver that promise in 2010-15 and 2019-24, while the reductions in 2015-17 and 2017-19 were modest and never brought it below 184,000.

It is understandable that this has caused frustration among voters whose trust in politics and politicians has all but collapsed. They see a political class which has mouthed the words of reducing net migration. Even the Labour manifestos of 2010 and 2015 promised to “control” immigration, while the prospectus on which Sir Keir Starmer romped to victory in July said that “the system needs to be controlled and managed and we need strong borders”. The rise of Reform UK, from the introduction of its current identity in January 2021 to it winning 4,117,221 votes and having five MPs elected at the general election, owes a great deal to its ability to harness dissatisfaction with immigration and the government’s inability to gain control of the system in any meaningful sense.

There are also concerns about the lack of integration by some immigrant and immigrant-descended communities. These tend to be anecdotally based, which in no ways means they are not true, but “integration” is a very broad field and there is no uniform pattern in geographic or ethnic terms. The University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory has produced a detailed and informative article on the subject which uncovers some of the complexities and shows how we need to read the available data.

The public discourse on immigration, integration and multiculturalism has been characterised by avoidance, misrepresentation, misunderstanding, the active promotion of ill-will, the mendacity and evasion of politicians across the spectrum and a striking indifference to evidence. That was, in a way, summed up by the false (and I have no doubt in many ways malicious) identification of the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings as a Muslim and the consequent knee-jerk hostility and violence towards the town’s local Muslim population.

I have no hesitation in acknowledging the existence of the public concerns mentioned above. That does not mean I necessarily endorse them in principle or extent, but they are valid subjects for debate in any discussion of public policy. The debate should be careful and moderate, as should all political argumentation, but it should not be—and is not—off-limits.

(I am wearily astonished by the succession of talking heads and agitators who complain, especially on social media, that you “cannot talk” about immigration, race or identity, yet seem to spend their public careers doing nothing but that. Equally sourly amusing is the idea that you are automatically branded a “racist” if you try to discuss these matters; that happens, though I think relatively rarely, but you also run the risk of being branded a racist if you espouse views and propose policies which are, for want of a better word, racist. The public often knows very well what it sees.)

Yet all of the above does not qualify or invalidate a simple truth: rioting and public violent disorder are to be condemned. By shouting anti-Muslim slogans outside a mosque, you are not “having a debate”; by throwing stones at police officers, you are not “having a debate”; by looting shops, you are not “having a debate”. You are committing crimes, and you are attempting to excuse your criminality because of some real or imagined grievance and the framing of a scapegoat. It is unacceptable and the public sees through it.

This really is not a complicated equation. However strongly you feel that net migration should be lowered, or that political parties have let you down, if you cover your face, throw beer barrels at police officers and set fire to cars and buildings, you are on the wrong side of the argument. You have sacrificed any intellectual legitimacy you may have had by choosing violence, and you have essentially admitted either that you cannot make your arguments rhetorically or intellectually, or that they are bunk. Violence is the last resort, and we all see why.

Do I apply this to groups other than those protesting about immigration? Yes, of course. While I support the right to public protest, it is not absolute, and I have concerns about the conduct of many of those who have participated in the endless marches in London and elsewhere against the conflict in Gaza. There is a truth here that, if you engage in violent conduct, or conduct which eventually becomes violent, you will attract those for whom the violence is the attraction. They may not be your allies or your friends, but they will come and you will not easily dislodge them, and it will not be long before you are trying to insist that they are not connected to you, and no-one will want to listen.

I fear there will be more disorder this weekend, because it is obvious that right-wing, anti-immigration, racist agitators have no scruples in exploiting the horrible deaths of three young girls in Southport to take their prejudices violently to the streets. I hope there will be no more trouble in Sunderland, though my confidence is not high: these thugs who organise and inspire the violent disorder are adept at exploiting grievances of any kind, genuine if often inchoate anxieties and a sense of generalised dissatisfaction and disenfranchisement.

The prime minister said the right things when he made a statement in Downing Street on Thursday, that the rioting was an “assault on the rule of law and the execution of justice”, that “we will put a stop to it” and that “the law must be upheld everywhere”. But in the few weeks in which he and his ministers have been in office, Sir Keir Starmer has demonstrated an unwillingness or an inability to distinguish between words and deeds, between saying something is or should be so and it actually being so. Consequently I am not confident that the government will move the needle very far in controlling these outbreaks of violence, but I hope that individual police forces and their chief constables do so, efficiently, cleanly and robustly.

Violence of this kind is the failure of politics in two ways. On the one hand, it is to some extent the failure of politicians to communicate with voters and to see where sensitive issues are growing in intensity and temperature, and, in some ways, a failure to make it clear that there will be no tolerance for violent disorder. Much more, however, it is a failure, an intellectual, moral and ethical failure on the part of those who choose violence, who kindle the flame or pick up the rock or throw the punch. They have failed to make an argument which politicians and voters alike take to heart, and that is either a failure of persuasion and communication, or a result of an argument which is false, flimsy or downright wrong.

When the home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, addressed the House of Commons in July 1981 following rioting in London, Liverpool and Manchester, he was resolute in his analysis.

Whatever else the disorders that we have suffered represent, they were first and foremost criminal acts that have to be dealt with by the police on the spot in containing them, in arresting the offenders and bringing them before the courts. No reason, no explanation, for recent troubles justifies what has occurred.

Whitelaw was right, and his argument remains correct. It does not matter how powerful or persuasive your case may be, when you cross the line between peaceful protest and violent disorder, you give up your right to be heard and your political and intellectual legitimacy, and you should expect the firmest application of the law. The rules of society have to apply to us all and frame the way we express our views. To go beyond those rules is arrogant and unacceptable.