The day after Labour’s sweeping landslide victory, veteran political journalist Andrew Marr optimistically predicted that Labour’s Britain would stand out as “a little haven of peace and stability” amidst the chaos that was engulfing fellow Western democracies. After years of Conservative rigmarole and internal fighting, Britain finally had a strong and stable government that could get on with the serious job of planning reform, cutting NHS waiting lists, and spearheading investment and growth.

Yet Marr’s prediction now reads like an ironic joke, as the first month of Labour governance has been overtaken by a steady flow of serious riots and disorder that now demand the Prime Minister’s full time and attention.

A few hours after street battles broke out in Whitechapel over events in Bangladesh, the Harehills neighbourhood of Leeds went up in flames as under-resourced police retreated from local rioters. Just a week later, an intimidating mob rallied outside Rochdale Police Station, outraged at a video of police kicking and stamping a local man at Manchester Airport. This was quickly overshadowed by a stabbing spree targeting little children in Southport, which became a catalyst for disorder throughout the country, starting in Southport itself and over subsequent days spreading to an array of English towns.

Despite comparable levels of violence and disorder between Harehills and Southport, only the latter has deeply rocked the political class and led to calls for an extreme clampdown. The disorder in Harehills can be met with the familiar measures called for following such outbursts. A few perpetrators will be made an example of and locked up, which will be paired with a recognition that the community has legitimate grievances and is in need of more resources from the state. Perhaps a new community hub will appear, so that in future licentious local youths will be too enthralled with their game of ping pong to go out and lob bricks at police. Though an unpleasant spectacle, there is no sense in which what happened at Harehills represents a mortal threat to the stability of the British state.

On the other hand, the disorder in the wake of Southport poses a threat to the state that Labour will struggle to placate.

Telling people to not look back in anger, to not let “them” divide us … it is all far too facile, too cliché

The tragedy playbook cooked up by the Home Office, executed perfectly during previous attacks such as London Bridge, Manchester Arena, and Nottingham, no longer cuts through. Telling people to not look back in anger, to not let “them” divide us, to follow community leaders (who no one has ever heard of) in coming together, to choose love over hate — it is all far too facile, too cliché. Moving the focus away from the perpetrators towards the victims, from focal points of hate to those of love, has started to backfire. In the case of the Southport attack, the initial dearth of information regarding the identity and intent of the attacker left open a vacuum that was filled by speculation and unfounded misinformation.

The demographic makeup of the latest bouts of disorder, which are almost exclusively white British, means that they pose a particular difficulty that riots predominantly led by a single minority do not. Under Britain’s form of state multiculturalism, the state recognises certain “community leaders” as the legitimate representatives of each minority group, and these leaders can be called upon in times of unrest to help pacify their respective communities. But there is no equivalent to the prominent local imam or respected community elders with Britain’s white communities that the state can liaise with to reign in troublemakers. Insofar as the state recognises the rioting white communities as having any leaders, it believes them to be the likes of Tommy Robinson and other far-right influencers. Even if it were the case that the rioters in Southport were all in tune to Tommy Robinson’s marching orders, no politician would dare meet this kind of “community leader” in order to discuss the concerns and needs of the aggrieved locals.

The limitations of these softer methods for riot prevention means that Labour will need to find alternative methods to quell and kill the unrest. Given that prisons are already at full capacity, and that Starmer appointed a Prisons Minister who does not actually believe in the efficacy of prisons, simply locking up wrongdoers en masse is not an option. This leaves open the space for far more radical measures to be implemented in an attempt to restore order, which could spiral into a severe attack on civil liberties and political freedoms.

The Prime Minister has thus far refrained from implementing radically drastic measures, announcing in his speech dedicated to addressing the riots that no new legislation will be immediately enacted. He instead declared the deployment of facial recognition technology and criminal behaviour orders to restrict the movement of the “thugs” he blamed for the violent disorder, as well as warning social media companies that any violent disorder whipped up online “is also a crime”. These relatively restrained measures are unlikely to have much immediate effect, and as disorder spreads and escalates, the temptation to enact ever-more draconian measures will become more tantalising.

Former journalist turned Labour cheerleader Paul Mason has touted the idea of turning Britain into a “militant democracy” in order to suppress the fascist forces he believes to be behind the wave of disorder. Paradoxically, he claims that the only way to protect liberal democracy is to abolish some of its founding principles. Freedom of association, assembly, internal movement, speech, and protest — all are to be restricted for those deemed a threat by the state. But such draconian measures are not intended to apply only to those inciting or participating in riots; Mason calls for Ofcom, the state broadcasting regulator, to intervene and ban commentators who “sympathise with the rioters” or say that “the rioters have a point”. Presumably, anyone caught repeating Martin Luther King Jr’s aphorism that “riots are the voice of the unheard” is to be booted off the airwaves for good.

There is thus a risk that the riots will be exploited to give cover to a project of political suppression, where even mild dissent from state orthodoxy, especially on the issue of immigration, will be brutally stamped out on account of it being divisive and inflammatory. Activist groups such as Hope not Hate are already labelling statements such as “multiculturalism isn’t working” as a “far-right view”, even as their own polling shows it is a view held by the majority of the British public. 

The suggestion that the disorder is mostly an expression of disapproval towards mass migration and its second order consequences cannot be allowed to stand on its own, for accepting such a framing would lend legitimacy to the idea that the transformational demographic changes of recent decades have intrinsic flaws. Instead, the more palatable and less politically consequential theory of false consciousness will most likely be reached for, whereby the concerns over migration can be dismissed as the product of political and media manipulation rather than organic or rational assessment. The natural solution is therefore to stamp out the purveyors of manipulation, without whom it is assumed no discontent over mass migration would remain. In essence, certain views must be kept from the public for their own good. To stop the riots and ensure such scenes are never repeated again, it will be claimed that certain views, along with anyone espousing them, must be shunted out of mainstream society, all for the sake of democracy.

After all, this is Britain, not Putin’s Russia

The risk of the riots to law and order in Britain should not be downplayed, and Labour face an almighty challenge in bringing peace back to Britain’s streets. But sporadic outbursts of violent disorder are not sufficient cause to assault Britain’s core civil liberties. Those caught engaging in criminal behaviour should be locked up, unpopular as incarceration is with the current government, and the necessary extra prison capacity built speedily. Yet any attempts to suppress political dissent by going after media and political figures expressing reservations about mass immigration or multiculturalism should be seen for what it is: a cynical and anti-democratic attempt to use a crisis as a cover to suppress opposition and punish Labour’s political enemies. Any such moves should be stringently opposed. After all, this is Britain, not Putin’s Russia.