By Amanda Taub

The violent unrest that has broken out in multiple towns across England and Northern Ireland this week feels simultaneously shocking and familiar.

Rioters have rampaged across more than 15 towns and cities, looting businesses, injuring police officers, attacking mosques and targeting hotels that house asylum-seekers. Britain has had sporadic outbreaks of semi-organized mob violence for decades, including brawls by infamous ‘firms’ of soccer hooligans in the 1980s and ’90s, an outbreak of race rioting in northern England in 2001 and a spate of rioting and looting centred on London in 2011.

But some circumstances are markedly different. While the 2011 unrest was sparked by the police killing of a Black man, these riots have stemmed from far-right disinformation on social media. Online influencers opposed to immigration spread the false claim that an asylum-seeker had killed three children last week in Southport, England, and called their supporters to attend “protests” against the supposed threat. Many of the gatherings erupted into violence.

More far-right protests had been expected Wednesday (7), but with a heavy police presence on the streets, they did not materialize on any large scale. Instead, thousands of anti-racism protesters gathered in cities across the country.

Most Britons and most elected officials have recoiled at the anti-immigrant violence, indicating that for now, it has hurt the nativist cause more than helped it. But in the long run, experts say, the effects are much harder to predict.

A number of politicians and pundits from the anti-immigration right, while condemning the violence itself, have claimed that the unrest is evidence that immigration needs to be restricted, even though it arose out of false online claims about a migrant attack. (In reality, the suspect is British-born and his parents, according to the BBC, are from Rwanda.)

Nigel Farage, a newly elected member of Parliament who is the most prominent face of Reform, a small far-right party, issued a statement denouncing the violence, then went on to say that “mass, uncontrolled immigration” had “fractured communities” and that Parliament should be recalled to “have a more honest debate and give people the confidence that there are political solutions.” Others on the right echoed those remarks, claiming that the violence was caused by a failure to limit immigration and asylum.

In fact, while immigration is a frequent political flashpoint in the country, Britain is a notable success story when it comes to several measures of immigrant integration. Children of immigrants to Britain tend to be better off financially than their parents, which is not true of many immigrant communities in France and Germany, for example, and studies show that immigrants are a net positive for the British economy.

Students from families of Asian and African origin perform better on average in the main national high school exams than white British students do. British cities are also less segregated than those in the United States, studies suggest, and segregation levels are falling.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of foreign nationals seeking to settle in Britain enter the country legally, with visas. While much attention is paid to asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, they make up a small fraction of the total.

 ‘A mistake’ for politicians?

The British public’s reaction to the rioting has been resoundingly negative, suggesting that the strategy of using the unrest to push anti-immigrant policies could backfire, at least in the short term.

In a YouGov poll published Monday (5), nearly half of respondents said that those taking part in recent riots should receive “harsher” sentences than those that would normally be issued for that type of crime. Those numbers were even higher in the north and in central England, where much of the unrest occurred, further suggesting that the rioters were not expressing the views of a silent local or national majority.

And in another YouGov poll published Wednesday, the vast majority of respondents, including Reform voters, said that they did not believe the unrest was justified, did not support it, and did not sympathize with the views of those who committed it.

“I’ve spent a lot of time chatting to Reform voters,” said Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, a nonprofit that tracks public opinion and promotes dialogue on polarizing issues. “The vast, vast majority are not in any way sympathetic to what is happening.”

A small focus group he held last Friday, with participants who had pre-existing concerns about immigration, strongly condemned the violence and expressed particular outrage that the rioters had “claimed to speak for us,” Tryl said.

Farage’s statement, which appeared to draw connections between his political agenda and that of the rioters, was a marked departure from his past policy of distancing himself from violent, extreme-right groups. In 2018, he resigned from UKIP, the political party he once led, in protest of the decision by its leader at the time to appoint the English Defence League’s founder, Tommy Robinson, as an adviser.

By taking a different tone this week, “I think he’s made a mistake,” Tryl said of Farage. “He got himself on the wrong side of his own voters.”

Why anti-immigrant violence might bolster the far right in the future

There is some research to suggest that the medium- or long-term consequences of the violence might benefit hard-line anti-immigration politicians like Farage.

A 2022 academic study by Maureen Eger and Susan Olzak found that anti-immigrant violence in Germany did, in fact, lift support for far-right parties among voters who already held anti-immigrant views. A smaller number of voters with neutral views on immigration also shifted their support to the far right in the wake of anti-immigrant violence. But it didn’t have that effect on voters who had been pro-immigration before the attacks, so the net result was a more polarized electorate rather than a general shift to the right.

Eger and Olzak argue that this happened because anti-immigrant attacks made immigration more salient to voters across the political spectrum.

In political science, salient issues are those that are particularly prominent in people’s minds and influential on their decisions. The idea captures an important insight, which is that if an issue becomes more salient, that can have a radical effect on behaviour even if people’s opinions about the underlying issues don’t change. (In the United States, for example, voters’ opinions of abortion have been fairly stable for years. But abortion has become far more salient to voters since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, giving it new power to affect elections.)

Researchers have often found that when immigration becomes more salient, it increases support for the far right. That may be one reason mainstream-right parties often fail to win back far-right voters by adopting similar platforms on immigration: Doing so pushes the issue into public consciousness and debate, making it more salient, which then often leads voters to support the far-right parties most associated with anti-immigration policies.

Eger and Olzak’s study concerned Germany, not Britain. And they also looked at a much longer period of anti-immigrant violence than the unrest that has happened in England and Northern Ireland this week: days of rioting, while shocking, may not have the same impact on immigration’s salience to voters.

The most recent YouGov poll offers some hints that the unrest in Britain has increased the salience of anti-immigration views. Two-thirds of respondents said that “immigration policy in recent years” was partly to blame for the riots, though that phrasing was open to multiple interpretations.

But their findings may suggest that Farage’s strategy of tying the riots to immigration as an issue might not hurt him in the longer run, helping to ensure that the issue — and Farage, himself — remain politically relevant.

-New York Times