British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday vowed to quell anti-immigration riots in the country with full force. "Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest. It is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities," he said after convening an urgent meeting.
The UK has been gripped with unrest and "far right thuggery" after three primary school girls were killed and several others injured in a fatal stabbing by a 17-year-old boy last week in the northwest town of Southport. The violence broke out once social media posts falsely disseminated the suspected attacker was a radical Muslim migrant.
Ever since, minority ethnic communities, especially Muslims, have been assaulted with shocking scenes of shops being looted, mosques, Asian-owned businesses and police attacked, and cars set alight.
These violent events cannot and must not be tolerated and all the UK government's efforts to suppress the appalling unrest should be supported internationally since there is no excuse for killing innocent people as well as looting shops, vandalizing property, torching the hotel and attacking the police and throwing petrol bombs at them.
However, once the situation calms and order is restored, London should review the factors such as allowing the anti-immigrant rhetoric to burgeon and become widespread over the last few years, which has emboldened the protesters to challenge peace in the country and safety of the Britons. The result is a more divided community with black and brown people being forced to live in fear.
The law and order in the UK has turned so gruesome that former country's head of Counter Terrorism Policing Neil Basu has sought to treat the violence as terrorism. "Not only does it fit the definition of terrorism, it is terrorism. It's nothing short of an attempt at a modern-day lynching and the people who did it should be facing life imprisonment, not a five-year sentence for violent disorder."
Knife crimes have become prevalent in the UK. According to the country's home office, more than 14,500 offenses were recorded last year, 46 percent of all homicides across Britain. Per the Labor Party, such crimes have risen nearly 80 percent since 2015, describing an arduous task for Prime Minister Starmer who during his campaign promised to tackle knife crimes as his "absolute priority."
Starmer should also consider an array of entwined factors driving violence in the UK. For instance, certain vulnerabilities within the UK youth such as "unmet primary needs" due to poverty, inequality and austerity cuts have allowed criminals and gangs to tempt youth into doing such violent activities.
While analysts blame the Conservative Party and British media for playing a destructive role in radicalizing the UK youth and instigating the violence, criticizing the attempts to frame the unrest as legitimate – scholars have also slammed the conservatives for ignoring the years-long warnings about growing far-right activism in the society and exploiting divisions in the UK with their complicity toward such far-right groups. Even former adviser to three UK prime ministers, Dame Sara Khan, held the Conservative government responsible for the chaos, saying the country was "woefully unprepared" to handle the catastrophe.
Still, British mainstream media is downplaying the threat by representing the violence as "deep-rooted anger" and "festering resentment" as some conservative leaders are trying to take political advantage of the mayhem. Burning down hotels and a children's library, looting shops, setting cars on fire, breaking windows, and assaulting mosques, black, Arab and Asian communities and police with mobsters roaming in streets cannot be defended and must be straightly and thoroughly condemned.
The violence has put the UK justice system to the test which has been overstretched over previous UK administrations' lack of focus on domestic issues. Just last month, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the release of thousands of prisoners who had served 40 percent of their sentences to "avert disaster." Unfortunately, the Starmer government now has to suddenly ramp up prison places and deploy a "standing army" to cope with the crisis, which was in the making for years but his predecessors ignored.
For more than a decade, the Tories ruled Britain. Throughout their tenure, their austerity on public services adversely impacted the police force's ability to respond to domestic challenges; it risked the lives of more than one million children with real-term cuts, increased poverty, homelessness and unemployment and bred more apathy, shirking their basic responsibility of providing a safe and secure environment to the Britons. Resultantly, the UK has descended into violence.
*My article that first appeared in "CGTN"