Britain has experienced another bout of rioting and disorder in one of our many hyper-diverse neighbourhoods. Last Thursday in Harehills, a poor part of east Leeds, social workers attempted to take children from the area’s significant Roma population into care and faced hostility from the family. After they called for police assistance, word of what was happening spread locally and an angry crowd of Roma began pelting the police with missiles. A full-blown riot soon kicked off. A police car was vandalised and overturned, and over the course the night a bus was torched, a van was raided and its contents too, were set alight. Twenty arrests have since been made.

Why has this happened? Why are the residents of a 21st-century British city so angry and misanthropic that they would wilfully burn down their own neighbourhood? After these shocking scenes, most in our political and media class are taking the easy option of mumbling and looking at the floor. For others, the mixture of alarm, outrage, sympathy and disgust, have been channelled along familiar lines. As the dust settles, let us examine some of them.

The police can respond better or worse to a riot, but they do little about the conditions that gave rise to it in the first place

From the establishment right, a typical response is to talk about law and order. To blame the police, the lack of space in prisons and the alleged irreverent lefty attitudes of the younger generation. Social media may come in for a kicking, too. “Young people used to grow up wanting to be police officers”, says a typical Telegraph op-ed. “Now they are growing up ridiculing them on social media.” The Daily Mail meanwhile castigates West Yorkshire Police for appearing at a Leeds gay pride march last Sunday just days after surrendering nearby streets to rioters. Others have expressed outrage at a lone, middle-aged Harehills woman being arrested for a public order offence seemingly for criticising the rioters, with the now-frequent claim of “two-tier policing”. The police, in this telling, are woke, anti-white snowflakes and their soft-touch approach to ethnic minorities (riot police retreated from the disorder halfway through the night, realising they were outnumbered) is allowing lawlessness to go unchecked.

There is no doubt some truth to all of this, and I am all for holding the police to account. Yet the actions of the police to such a situation can surely only be reckoned a proximate cause here. The police can respond better or worse to a riot, but they do little about the conditions that gave rise to it in the first place.

A second typical response is to blame the right. On the night of the disorder, Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage tweeted: “The politics of the subcontinent are currently playing out on the streets of Leeds.” Many jumped at the chance to accuse Farage of “inflaming” the situation – even though by the time news started to break about Harehills on social media, buses and bins were already well ablaze. The Times report on the riots nevertheless included an entire section on the supposed problem of “far-right misinformation”, citing Farage’s tweet. 

In his haste, Farage forgot the great diversity of imported political disorder that now plagues the streets of England

Various commentators have been at pains to point out that – akshually – the original rioters were not from the Indian subcontinent, as Farage appeared to suggest, but were Roma gypsies. Farage and others were thus, in the words of LBC’s Iain Dale, blaming Muslims yet again “for something that they had nothing to do with”. Rakib Ehsan similarly devotes his Spectator write-up to calling Farage’s comments “wide of the mark”.

While it may feel cathartic to blame Farage, this is an entirely hollow victory. Indeed, if this is supposed to be a defence of multicultural Britain against the populist right, it’s hardly a convincing one. Think about what is being said here. Commentators are up in arms about Farage because, for this particular bout of ethnic-minority violent disorder, he has allegedly misidentified the ethnic origin its perpetrators. “Actually, bigot”, runs the argument, “the rioting in this particular hyper-diverse neighbourhood was not caused by the imported politics of the Indian subcontinent (as we saw in Leicester in 2022 and in Whitechapel that very same night). It was caused by an ethnic minority from somewhere else!” In his haste, Farage forgot the great diversity of imported political disorder that now plagues the streets of England: from sub-Saharan Africa, from Albania and, so conspicuous in the past nine months, from the Middle East – to name but three examples. “We are more likely to find the roots of the Harehills disorders in the politics of central Europe than on the Indian subcontinent”, community relations expert Ehsan admonishes the layman to remember. I can’t say that makes me feel any better about the state of diverse modern Britain.

Then there are those on the right online who would view the rioters as so many lawless foreign “invaders” gleefully celebrating their conquest of our shores. I understand the sense of cultural displacement motivating this argument and I am not here to hysterically denounce it. Yet it doesn’t strike me as quite right either – this heroes-versus-villains narrative is more altogether more emotionally convenient than the bleak reality. Consider Green Party councillor Mothin Ali, a poster-boy for Islamist sectarianism who was alleged on social media to have been participating in the riot early on Thursday evening. In fact, he seems to have been trying to quell the disorder. The diminutive councillor, 42, can be seen trying to stop people pushing bins into a fire, facing down a much taller youth who is clearly irritated at having his fun interrupted. Later that night, Ali gave a creditable interview in which he called the rioting a “travesty”. His community had been “let down” by the authorities, he said, meaning that something like this was always just bubbling under the surface. “It’s our neighbourhood that’s been burnt down here”, he adds mournfully. 

It is certainly difficult, viewing this, to find him merely a gurning Islamist happy for Britain to burn – he is human, all too human, and he isn’t enjoying any of this either. Which in fact reveals the paucity of two perspectives: zealous leftists see Britain’s changing demographics and imagine ethnic minorities rejoicing at a multicultural utopia; bitter rightists imagine gloating foreign colonisers. Yet Ali is just as miserable about the situation he finds himself in as anyone else. There don’t seem to be any winners here.

One way of admitting there’s a problem but still missing the point is to blame state “multiculturalism” and insufficient “integration”. If only the woke grievance lobbies quietened down the identity politics, so this hackneyed argument goes, and everyone remembered that there’s “more that unites than divides us”, everything might turn out alright. Supposedly, with a sufficient level of civic nationalism, along perhaps with some Michaela-style disciplinarianism, they’d all be chumming along happily, at ease with each other, their social situation and the country they’re living in, deferent to authority and in gainful employment.

There is no majority culture in Harehills to be “integrated” into.

Perhaps this argument was once convincing, in previous times when immigration was relatively slow, GDP per capita was growing, and we hadn’t reached a diversity saturation point in our inner-city areas. Yet looking at the level of demographic churn in somewhere like Harehills, it is hard to see calls for “integration” as anything but a fantasy. More than 80 nationalities live in Harehills, with a whopping 43% of residents born outside the UK in a densely packed population of 31,000. It struggles with the highest level of unemployment in Leeds and 74.2% of households being classed as “deprived” at the 2021 census. Many residents can barely speak English. A Leeds City Council report last year found that only one in four Roma residents in Leeds had English as their main language, while one in five said they spoke “very little English, or no English at all”. The man alleged to have set the bus on fire, a 37-year-old father of two and a Romanian national, required an interpreter for court proceedings.

In any case, there is no majority culture in Harehills to be “integrated” into. The white British population of its two main districts is just nine and 16%. (The Pakistani Muslim population is much larger, a plurality, while the Roma population sits at around two per cent). Following the latest riots – Harehills also saw large anti-police riots in 2001 and 2019 – some of the few white British residents that remain are now looking to move out.

It’s easy to see why. Take the following interview with a Harehills resident, the morning after the riot. Graham is 59 and has lived there all his life. Nothing ever used to bother him walking about in Harehills, but now he says certain areas are “no-go zone[s]”. He recounts that barely weeks ago, he was walking along a Harehills thoroughfare wearing his England shirt, when he was sworn at to take it off, and told “get out of our area”. Yet Harehills is where he was born and grew up. “It breaks my heart”, he says.

If you time-travelled to when Graham was a young man and told him or someone like him what had happened in Harehills, what would he say? He might think that the police should have been doing more; he might think that it’s unhelpful to inaccurately label the ethnicity of the rioters, and he would likely hope that anyone living in Harehills would be well integrated into British society. Yet while he might agree with all these things, yet he would not for a moment believe that any of them were the causes of the bleak future he was told was to come. He would surely ask where these people came from, and why Harehills ended up being transformed in this way. He would ask whose fault it was. He would probably call it irresponsible, perhaps reckless, possibly cruel.

Ultimately, then, this is a failure of mass immigration. It is fundamentally from this unsayable fact that all the impotent, hair-tearing responses stem. Some are willing to wrestle with a handful of the proximate causes; the ultimate cause will go politely unremarked on. Councillor Ali says that Harehills has been “badly let down” – Graham, I am sure, would agree. What has happened in Harehills is the world-historical folly of mass uncontrolled immigration. Everything else, at the end of the day, is just noise.