How the Southport riots broke Starmer’s government

An air of the last days of Rome hangs over Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership. The headlines grow more hostile by the week, and mutinous unrest among Labour MPs is now a steady, deafening drumbeat. If current trends hold, the party is staring down the barrel of a near-total wipeout — losing between 250 and 300 seats at the next general election. Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea the fires are burning.

Few now expect the prime minister to last much longer. He looks politically spent – a man overwhelmed by events he can no longer control. Meanwhile, Andy Burnham is circling in the wings, making absolutely no secret of his ambition to stage a political coup.

The question that needs answering is how a Labour government armed with a 174-seat majority managed to self-destruct this quickly? Why has Starmer become an object of such universal loathing? 

The answer remains a taboo subject in polite media circles. Yet the moment you dig beneath the surface, the riots that took place in Southport during the summer of 2024 become impossible to ignore. 

The fallout from Southport did something Downing Street never saw coming: it gave ordinary people language with which to dismantle the establishment’s lies. The “two-tier” narrative has just hit boiling point with the stomach-churning case of Henry Nowak, whose inhumane treatment by the law has ignited a public backlash against “two-tier policing.” 

The Prime Minister is now acting as a lightning rod for a level of public loathing that will not end until his premiership is consigned to the dustbin of history.

Red-green Keir

Up until now, the standard media consensus has naturally focused on Labour’s more obvious failures around immigration and the cost-of-living. As a political activist, Starmer earned the nickname “red-green” — a nod to his early obsession with identity politics and environmentalism. 

That background has dictated his instincts in office. One of his first acts as Labour leader was putting Ed Miliband in charge of energy policy. A committed Net Zero hardliner, Miliband has blocked new North Sea oil and gas, leaving flagship projects like Rosebank and Jackdaw stuck in limbo.

This was followed by the equally disastrous decision to make Rachel Reeves the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Despite pre-election promises not to turn on “the spending taps”, Reeves has hammered the public with £40 billion in tax hikes and jacked up borrowing by a staggering £36 billion. It is no coincidence that Britain now faces the most aggressive tax grab of any major global economy.

Meanwhile, the prime minister’s plan to stop the boats has collapsed into outright farce. One of his first acts as prime minister was to scrap the Tory plan to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda. He dismissed the policy as a “gimmick” but never seriously explained why.

In its place came the pledge to “smash the gangs” — a counter-terror-style crackdown on the smuggling networks.

The result was predictable — and disastrous. More than 73,000 illegal crossings have taken place across the Channel since Labour took office. Unlike terrorists, people smugglers are fragmented, fast-moving, and practically impossible to smash. 

One is left with the impression that Starmer will reach for any impractical solution just to avoid amending the Human Rights Act. His lifelong devotion to that Act has become a shackle, leaving Labour Home Secretaries powerless to clear the courtroom obstacles that make a mockery of our borders.

Two-tier Keir

Each of these failures has contributed to the rot spreading through the parliamentary Labour party. Yet the true point of no return for Starmer’s premiership was reached during the dark days of the 2024 Southport riots.

Starmer’s response to the rioting mobilised much of the media against him in a way few had anticipated. He went from being a dour technocrat in the pocket of the unions to something more sinister: “two-tier Keir”. And the charge did not stop with him. It quickly spread to the police and the wider criminal justice system.

In the wake of Southport, British people adopted a radical new language to voice their grievances:

• “Two-tier policing” refers to the abandonment of policing without fear or favour. 
• “Two-tier justice” describes a legal system shaped by activist judges and lawyers. 
• “Two-tier politics” captures the idea that politicians have courted ethnic minority voters with special access and privileges. 

That critique has now come full circle with the tragic death of Henry Nowak. The 21-year-old student was left to die in handcuffs because the police accepted his killer’s bogus claim that he was “racist”. It was only when Nowak lost consciousness that the police removed the cuffs and began resuscitation.

This shameful episode has understandably provoked widespread anger, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage describing it as an example of “two-tier policing”. Meanwhile, angry residents in Southampton have taken to the streets and clashed with police.

What is most striking is the reaction online. Large numbers of people are openly mocking the prime minister’s condemnation of the violence, while others are actively cheering the disorder on.

To understand how we got here, we need to remind ourselves of what happened in Southport and how the government’s response to that event turned the hapless Keir Starmer into a lightning rod. 

Two-tier politics

The most damning critique of the prime minister is that he remains a complete stranger to the nation he governs. A human rights lawyer by trade, he has spent his career within the echo chamber of the liberal establishment.

This profound detachment set the stage for disaster in July 2024, following the horrific slaughter of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The killer, Axel Rudakubana, was hauled into custody, but a wall of official silence surrounded his identity.

In the information vacuum that followed, a wave of violent riots exploded across England, with mosques, asylum hotels, and front-line police officers coming under vicious attack. What makes Southport significant is not the violence itself, ugly though it was, but the Labour government’s response. 

Just eleven days earlier, rioting had broken out in Harehills, Leeds, after social services removed children from a Romanian family. A police car was overturned and a double-decker bus was set on fire by angry mobs who surrounded and fought the police.

Starmer’s response to Harehills was restrained to the point of near detachment. He described the scenes as “shocking and disgraceful” but stopped short of speaking to the public directly from Downing Street. His spokesperson simply urged people to avoid “speculating on the cause of the disorder.”

The response to Southport was very different indeed. Following the mayhem in early August, Starmer said rioters “will feel the full force of the law”. He added, “I won’t shy away from calling it what it is. Far-right thuggery.”

No doubt some of those involved were on the far-right, especially those attacking mosques. But the broad-brush language coming out of Number 10 felt tone-deaf. 

Footage from the protests showed that many people were not extremists at all, just ordinary people venting anger without turning to violence. A YouGov poll in the aftermath found that while 85 per cent of the public opposed the rioting, 58 per cent were sympathetic to those protesting peacefully. 

The prime minister’s night-and-day response to Harehills and Southport left the impression of a man whose moral outrage was anything but consistent. After all, the Harehills rioters were mostly Romanian migrants who posed no direct challenge to the multicultural state — unlike the ones in Southport. To many observers, it looked like “two-tier politics” in action.

Two-tier justice

It has now largely been forgotten, but when the riots first broke out Keir Starmer came under fire for reacting too slowly. He did not convene a COBRA meeting until six days after the violence began and had still not cancelled a planned holiday.

That lull proved short-lived. Within hours of his first COBRA meeting, Starmer unveiled a “standing army” of specialist police officers, alongside a raft of emergency measures: fast-track riot courts, facial recognition sweeps, strict bail conditions and an online dragnet for incitement.

A forceful response was clearly needed. Unlike Harehills, the Southport unrest spread nationwide and pulled in far larger numbers from England’s native majority. Public opinion also backed a crackdown: an Opinium poll found just 18 per cent thought the government had gone too far.

But there was a clear danger. The authorities had already been hammered for soft-touch responses to earlier unrest, including Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestine protests. Against that backdrop, Starmer needed to show strength without giving the impression that state power was being used arbitrarily.

Instead, the British state charged across that line. Many of those swept up had committed no violence at all. Their offence was online speech. And some of the punishments looked wildly heavy-handed. Tyler Kay received 38 months for posting nasty tweets. Lee Dunn got eight weeks for offensive memes. Jamie Michael spent 17 days on remand in custody for a video on Facebook.

Such cases fed a growing sense that justice was being handed out unevenly, and that the state was picking its targets. It was an exercise in “two-tier justice”, where right-wing media posts were trawled, screenshotted and fed into fast-track prosecutions. 

Meanwhile, those on the Left who spread dangerous misinformation, such as veteran anti-racist campaigner Nick Lowles, were not even investigated by the authorities let alone prosecuted. 

Two-tier policing

From that moment, the prime minister became “two-tier Keir” — a damning epithet that captured the belief that white Britons were being singled out by the state while other groups were handled with kid gloves.

Last week, that narrative came back with a vengeance after the shocking murder of Henry Nowak and the shameful conduct of the police. After stabbing Henry, Vickrum Digwa attempted to cover his tracks by claiming that it was Nowak who had launched the attack.

The police swallowed Digwa’s cover story, and they prioritised handcuffs over a first-aid kit simply because the killer accused Nowak of “racism”. 

Two-tier policing increasingly treats minority wrongdoing with indulgence while subjecting the white majority to relentless moral scrutiny. British law mandates the strict policing of racial hostility. If officers prove an offense was racially motivated, the Crown Prosecution Service applies a mandatory judicial upgrade. 

Meanwhile, the promotion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has moved beyond basic slide presentations into mandatory, scenario-based training overseen by the College of Policing. Other programs like the Upstander strategy instruct frontline officers to challenge “microaggressions” or biased behaviours among their peers and superiors. 

Officers have been conditioned to think that racism is the worst crime imaginable, and that white people are uniquely guilty of it. Meanwhile, any ethnic minority accusation of prejudice is taken as gospel truth — even when the circumstantial evidence points in the opposite direction.

Two-tier Britain

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was fond of asking, “Who? Whom?”. It is a question that strips politics back to its essence: who holds power, and who is on the receiving end.

For many in Britain, Southport gave a stark answer: A multicultural elite indifferent to mass immigration stood above the rest — backed by the two-tier authority of the state, with Starmer at the helm. (As protests rage in Belfast over a shocking attempted murder, allegedly perpetrated by a Sudanese asylum seeker, the state faces another major test.)

That narrative did not stay on the comment pages. It quickly spilled into the wider public consciousness. Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups showed how fast the “two-tier” charge took hold among ordinary voters. It offered a simple way to package a wide set of grievances into something neat and intelligible.

Combined with Starmer’s failure to “smash the gangs”, this hardened opinion at remarkable speed. Many feel the country they grew up in is being reshaped without their consent, while a political class seems determined to shut down anyone who says so.

For many voters, the verdict is already in. The Prime Minister does not represent them; he resents them.