Ryan Sheers, 28, had no previous convictions when he walked up to a line of police in the northern English town of Hartlepool carrying a beer can. He pushed and shouted, “I pay your wages!” A policeman stepped forward, leading a dog. “Get your dog a drink,” advised Sheers. The dog bit him in the backside. During his hearing at Teesside Magistrates’ Court, Sheers, formerly a McDonald’s worker, wept after admitting to violent disorder.
What makes somebody riot? Why do people throw bricks at police while being filmed by dozens of phones, knowing it could get them a jail sentence that ruins their lives? Their decision may be political. The current British riots — the country’s worst disorder since 2011 — clearly express anti-immigrant feeling. They were prompted by the fatal stabbing of three girls in Southport and the false rumour that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker.
But in fact, riots are not purely political events. They are more emotional than that. To understand them as a simple matter of rational actors calling for specific policies is to miss out a lot about why riots start, how they spread, and how authorities should respond.
Riots follow a centuries-old pattern, albeit with contemporary updates. They are commonly fuelled by misinformation. Today’s riots were sparked by the misidentification of the suspected killer (he was born in Wales, of Rwandan Christian origin). Another ancient constant is the belief that rioters are manipulated by political leaders — in this case, Nigel Farage. He questioned whether the police were withholding information about the killer’s identity, and called the riots “a reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease that is out there shared by tens of millions of people”. He has been widely criticised, with a Labour MP saying the parliamentary standards commissioner should examine his “dangerous comments”.
Yet since the French gilets jaunes movement began attacking police and luxury stores in 2018, we have been in an era of leaderless crowds. Just as the internet cut out high-street travel agents, it is cutting politicians out of riots. Donald Trump did incite supporters to attack the Capitol in Washington on January 6 2021, “but he wasn’t the driving force behind the riots,” says Julia Ebner, counter-extremism researcher at Oxford university.
Nowadays, social media influencers do the driving. Ebner says these riots have united the usually “splintered” online far right, from misogynist Andrew Tate through Islamophobe Tommy Robinson to the nationalist Patriotic Alternative. It’s as if the far-right internet has materialised on English high streets. Proud rioters posting videos of their exploits spread the contagion.
When peddlers of misinformation are banned from mainstream social media, they just pop up elsewhere. As Ebner wrote last year: “Extremists increasingly bring their followers to alt-tech platforms . . . which then serve as radicalisation rabbit holes, as they host . . . extreme content while being entirely cut off from outside information.” This time, “a Southport-themed group” emerged on Telegram hours after the fatal stabbings, reports BBC Verify.
Another constant: riots peak in summer, when it’s nice to be outside at night. A study of unrest in 50 African and Asian cities between 1960 and 2006 by Adam Yeeles of the University of Texas at Dallas found that heat made “urban social disturbances” more likely, with “peak levels of unrest occurring in the upper 20s [degrees centigrade]”. The 2011 riots started exactly this week, on August 6, after police in Tottenham killed a Black man, Mark Duggan. Most rioters are male — indeed, riots are an assertion of masculinity.
And riots both require and build group identity. People tend to riot with people they feel connected to. Those ties can pre-exist in real life, as in a small town like Southport. Or they can be forged online, then deepen during a riot, when a rioter’s personal identity merges with the group identity. Transgressing social norms with other people creates a particular bond.
That happened at the January 6 riots in Washington. Heather Tsavaris, a former senior terrorism analyst in the US State Department, studied livestream footage filmed in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel, where rioters gathered after the violence. She noted “a palpable sense of community, connection, and belonging . . . These people had come to be together with others who were like them. They chatted about where they had flown in from, how they were thrilled to be meeting other ‘patriots’, what this event meant to them.” Riots make rioters feel less lonely. That sense of connection may have been particularly welcome in early 2021, after months of Covid-19 lockdowns.
Forging group identities requires what sociologists call an “Other” — an enemy who helps define your own group. That enemy can be Muslims, as now, or Jews, as in past pogroms. In some riots, the “Other” is the police.
When people argue about the aims of riots, there are typically two rival theories, which are doing battle again this time. One theory is that rioters are mindless “riffraff” who must be punished. The other is that they are rational actors with grievances that must be addressed.
The “riffraff” and “rational actor” theories are constant, but who espouses them depends on the nature of the riot. In 2011, when many British rioters were poor non-white people, conservatives called them riffraff while the left defended them. Now that white rioters are attacking Muslims, the roles of prosecutor and defender are reversed. Ian Dunt, author of How to Be a Liberal, is propounding the riffraff theory: “It’s not about immigration, or integration, or Islam. It’s about a bunch of violent thugs blaming Muslims for a terrible crime, being instantly disproved, and then continuing with their bullshit anyway.” Meanwhile, rightwing academic Matthew Goodwin rationalises the riots: “What this is about, is that people don’t feel safe in their own country.”
The rational-actor theory of riots has gradually surpassed the riffraff theory among social scientists, especially after the 1960s black inner-city American riots, when many liberals sympathised with the rioters, notes criminologist Tim Newburn of the London School of Economics. But he adds that the rational-actor theory omits something: “Not all riots are focused, or not primarily focused, on some desire to bring about social or political change.” Quite simply: rioting can be joyous.
Take the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. They had a rational justification: LBGTQ people were fighting police harassment. Yet there was more to it. Decades later, Stonewall veteran Martin Boyce, speaking on the podcast Making Gay History, described the scene at dawn after the riots:
“I saw this queen who was exhausted, bruised a little, I believe, and couldn’t go on any more, was just on a stoop, exhausted but at peace, because near her was a cop who was also exhausted, that made no attempt to bother her. The riot was really over. Still, the street was glistening. It was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. The whole street just like diamonds, but in reality it was broken glass, the smell of the smoke of burning garbage cans was there, all those smells that a riot make[s], even a certain kind of sweat. It was ugly and beautiful.”
Sympathisers are now interpreting the British riots as political speech, a violent version of, say, American civil rights marches. But the alternative reading (not entirely mutually exclusive) is that rioters riot because rioting is fun. In that case, the parallel to today’s rioters can be found outside politics — in British football hooliganism.
Watch the footage of the current rioters. White men, with beer bellies and English flags, some wearing designer baseball caps and tracksuits, throw objects at police. There’s the occasional Nazi salute or tattoo. To those of us who watched football hooligans rampage last century, the resemblance is unmissable. Even the rioters’ chants are football-derived. The people in Leeds carrying English flags and singing “You’re not English any more” at counter-protesters were riffing off the traditional terrace chant, “You’re not singing any more.” The mob in Southport chanted, as if still at the Euro 2024 tournament, “England till I die.” Rioters who clashed with police near Whitehall, apparently trying to enter Downing Street in a sort of January 6 tribute act, sang, “Oh Tommy Robinson,” serenading him like a footballer. He wasn’t there. He is thought to be egging on the riots from his holiday in a £400-per-night hotel in Cyprus.
Robinson himself emerged from football hooliganism. Raised in Luton, originally named Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, he renamed himself after a member of the Luton Town MIGs hooligan crew. Robinson’s English Defence League, founded in 2009, recruited among Luton fans. The two groups overlapped: in 2011 Robinson was convicted of leading Luton supporters in a brawl with Newport County fans, while he chanted (again, echoing a football song), “EDL till I die.” From 2017, the pro-Robinson Democratic Football Lads Alliance tried to unite hooligans from different clubs in Islamophobic action.
One guide to today’s riots is the classic 1991 account of football hooliganism, Among the Thugs. Its author, Bill Buford, was an American graduate student at Cambridge university when he discovered Britain’s rampant 1980s football hooliganism. He began writing the book “because I wanted to know why young males in England were rioting every Saturday”. (British football hooliganism has faded since. Vigorous policing played a part, but hooliganism also seems to have gone out of fashion as a youth-culture activity. Many of its remaining practitioners are now ageing men, holdovers from the 1980s.)
Buford spent years hanging around with Manchester United’s hardcore. Some 1980s sociologists argued that hooligans were reacting against deprivation in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. But Buford concluded, from his experiences: “There was no cause for the violence; no ‘reason’ for it at all.”
Football hooligans weren’t expressing political grievances. They rioted because it was exhilarating. When Buford joins a march of English hooligans in Sardinia at the World Cup in 1990, he notes “a powerful sense of achievement. A crowd had been made by the people who had stepped into the street, and everyone was aware of what they had done; it was a creative act.” Once the crowd forms, Buford describes a four-minute “happy, happy phase” during which “everyone, myself included, felt the pleasure of belonging, not unlike the pleasure of being liked or loved. There was another pleasure at work as well, one derived from power.”
And the most direct way to express power is through violence — first against property, then against people. There’s a thrill, explains Buford, in “the act of un-making the rules that citizens have made”. The moment when the fabric of society tears, “the house burns”, is exhilarating. He writes: “I know no excitement greater.”
All this leaves the question: how to respond to the riots?
They are dangerous. We are seeing again now that when people start tearing the social fabric, others will copy them — or fight back. In Birmingham on Monday, armed Muslim youths, who had apparently gathered to counter a far-right protest, attacked vehicles and a pub. The risk is Weimar-like street battles between rival gangs, with deaths and martyrs. That could spark a low-level version of the “race war” of far-right fantasy.
The Farage view is that government should hear rioters’ grievances about immigration. But that doesn’t sound very democratic. Rewarding rioting seems perverse. A democracy determines policy by voting. Britain did that last month. Who elected the rioters? Only 12 per cent of the population believe that “those causing unrest at recent protests” represent the views of most Britons, according to pollsters YouGov. The party that’s ideologically closest to the rioters, Farage’s Reform, won 14 per cent of votes in the general election. The virulently anti-immigrant message seems to have even less appeal in very mixed London, where there have been no riots so far.
Martin Luther King Jr once took a similar position to Farage. He called riots the “language of the unheard”. But at the risk of liberal special pleading: that argument is more convincing when the rioters are minorities. African-Americans in the 1960s were poor, discriminated against, and accounted for about 10 per cent of the US population. Voting couldn’t get their particular concerns on to the national political agenda.
By contrast, today’s British rioters are white people in working-class towns. About 82 per cent of Britons are white, and 52 per cent describe themselves as “working class”, according to last year’s British Social Attitudes report. That suggests that more than 40 per cent of voters self-identify as white working class. That’s enough to get their concerns heard without throwing bricks. Indeed, since 2016, Conservatives and Brexiters have tailored their appeal to the white working classes — or as they’re known in right-wing language, “ordinary people”.
Advocates sanctify rioters as representing “communities”. That, too, is dubious. In several places, rioters have been outnumbered by counter-protesters who chanted “Nazi scum off our streets”. People in Southport brought brooms to sweep away damage to the mosque. In Liverpool, many white people joined crowds protecting another mosque. On Wednesday, thousands of peaceful counter-protesters in cities across England formed human shields to protect asylum centres, holding signs with slogans such as “Reject racism, try therapy” or (for older women) “Nans against Nazis”. Are these people not “the community”?
Governments seldom listen to rioters. In 2011 the prime minister, David Cameron, dismissed any search for motives, calling the riots “criminality, pure and simple”. The then director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, kept courts open at night to try rioters. He later explained that rioters “gamble on: ‘Am I going to get caught? Am I going to get sentenced and sent to prison?’ And if the answer is: ‘I’m now watching on the television some other people who had been caught 24 hours or 48 hours after they were on the streets with us’ — I think that’s a very powerful message.”
Britain’s prison population jumped from 85,000 to 88,000 after the riots. Today, as prime minister, Starmer is backing police to take “all necessary action” against “thugs”.
The first rioters are already being sentenced. Derek Drummond, a 58-year-old who shouted “shithouses” before punching a police officer in the face in Southport, said afterwards that he had been “a fool” and accepted that his behaviour was “appalling”. It was too late. He was jailed for three years. Admittedly, he had 14 previous convictions.
Many rioters, explains Ebner, “are developing powerful bonds with their peers as a result of these shared experiences and are no longer thinking rationally. They are willing to go all in for their group, to risk everything — their lives, their careers.” If you stick marginalised people in dangerously overcrowded prisons, you risk marginalising them further.
Ebner recommends the immediate taking down of misinformation on social media, and banning bad actors. Once falsehoods spread, she says, it’s too late to debunk them.
Starmer seems to want to stop riots from forming. He proposes “shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology and preventive action, criminal behaviour orders to restrict their movements, before they can even board a train. In just the same way we do with football hooligans.”
But British towns also need to find ways to build a sense of community that transcends ethnicity. Churches, trade unions and political parties have been shrinking for decades. Days before July’s election, I reported from towns where perhaps one home in a thousand had a campaign poster in the window. Forty per cent of eligible voters in the UK were too disengaged to vote. Since Covid-19, workplaces have emptied, and many Britons have dropped out of employment, probably due to ill-health. People increasingly live alone on their phones. The feeling of community that rioters experience is all too rare.
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