What is behind the worst violence that the United Kingdom has known in this 21st century?

By: Ricardo Israel - 18/08/2024

The origin of the revolt was the horrific murder, on July 29, of three little girls, plus another five seriously injured and two adults in the coastal city of Southport (northwest England), by a 17-year-old African-British youth, son of immigrants. In the United Kingdom (UK) mass shootings and murders involving firearms are rare, so knives are used in around 40% of homicides. The attack took place with a knife in a multipurpose center, where children, between 6 and 11 years old, were in a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

From that moment on, violence was generated with enormous speed in different cities of the UK, riots that included assaults on police stations as well as businesses, hotels sheltering immigrants and cars, all of them very rare in that country. Many of the news and information behind the demonstrations were “fake news”, which had enormous influence.

Quickly, journalistic coverage documented the presence of far-right activists with a discourse against illegal immigration and against Muslim immigration, in addition to the determining role of social networks in the riots and violence. It coincided with the inauguration in those same days of a new Labor government, with Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, winner of the July 4 elections, a party that returned to power after 14 consecutive years of Conservative leadership, who quickly established a politically and also with great speed, justice acted, already condemning some of the participants in the excesses as well as those who conspired on social networks.

All of the above is true and has served as a kind of official history, but the characterization of what happened as “far-right riots” or “anti-immigration riots” may be insufficient, since it partially describes what happened, but does not explain everything. , and the reaction of the State in the form of government, police or judges, would not be solving the problem, but rather it could be repeated in the near future.

That is to say, there was a rapid response with characteristics that are difficult to find in other countries, a great consensus in journalistic coverage, in public opinion, among politicians, and, above all, a justice system that very quickly imposed almost immediate sentences that They included effective imprisonment.

The problem is one and big, that this consensus and the subsequent response could be mistaking the focus of the response, since it could be based on true but insufficient information, and on not having taken into due consideration facts that were not considered, and that help explain, and not just describe, what took place in the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) and Northern Ireland.

My perspective is influenced by the five years that I lived in England since I not only did my Master's and Doctorate there, but that residency had a lasting influence on my intellectual formation, so without it, perhaps I would not be writing this column or at least not I would say exactly the same things, which I believe complement the official story, since it is this addition that contributes to better explaining what could happen in the coming years, and some of the events whose occurrence is possible are worrying.

In the journalistic coverage and in the political debate, a look at the historical background that illuminates the explanation was also needed, that is, as a country with the characteristics of the UK that carried out a totally peaceful plebiscite, without incident, on Brexit, Now he had a violence that moved him, incidents that have varied causes and that cannot be explained only by the issue of racism or the extreme right, which in short are symptoms that do not necessarily allow understanding, since if they are converted into slogans they make it difficult to true understanding. Finally, there was not only one group demonstrating, but there were at least two, the self-proclaimed “anti-racists” and the self-proclaimed “patriots”, some who welcomed the new arrivals (“Refugees Welcome”) and others who assured that more that rejecting them was reaffirming traditional British values, and like their peers in Europe, they said they felt threatened in their culture by a massive and illegal entry that did not want to integrate, in addition to those who committed fraud by requesting asylum without complying with the requirements.

There is no doubt that in the way the information was disseminated, there was not only fake news and social networks, but also the mistake of not providing all the information, a concealment that traditional media and governments commit with some frequency in Europe and in the UK on the immigration issue, especially about immigrants, due to the predominance of political correctness and sometimes of their own agenda, since in short, not having all the information facilitates what in the end happened, that the vacuum It is filled with misinformation.

Sometimes, the problem has to do with legal limitations, since, in this case, the law prevents the public delivery of the data of minors under 18 years of age when there is a criminal accusation, which has now made possible all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories about the identity of the criminal, including that it was an Islamic attack or the perpetrator, a refugee.

One good thing about the UK is the ease it has, and public support it receives, the idea that justice is as quick as possible, since violence can be stopped more quickly, when those who used it as well as those who used it are sentenced to effective prison terms. They gave the instructions. Emergency legislation that comes from the Second World War or the fight against Irish terrorism of the IRA has been used before and now, more than once at the request of the government and convictions are achieved thanks to the ad-hoc convocation of prosecutors and judges retired or simply retired. In other words, there are also political decisions, which sometimes precede and other times only support, judicial efficiency in applying the law.

The response of the authorities had popular support, since it managed to stop the violence, to which hundreds of detainees also contributed. Throughout this reaction, the “confirmation bias” of the English psychologist Peter Wason operated, that is, the tendency to favor information and decisions that come from previous hypotheses and from what we have firmly believed in for a long time, which for definition leaves aside verification and facts that may contradict it, which is not always good in the case of the media, since it undermines their credibility and prestige.

This confirmation bias is linked to “agenda setting” or the theory of agenda setting, that is, the great influence that the mass media would have, and, by the way, today, at the same or even higher level, the social networks. That is, although the press is not successful in telling people what to think, it is successful in telling its viewers, auditors or readers what they have to think about. This is what I verified by following these incidents on the BBC cable service.

The problem was not so much in what was said as in what was left unsaid, similar to what happened with other media in the UK and other countries. The main thing that was left out were three things: first, how racialized the protest was, not just a political or anti-immigration issue, but an issue of white people in the UK, both British and Irish, which which predicts a future with problems, above all, due to the displeasure it causes them that it is taking place in their own country, b) how similar the issue of immigration sounds in the UK and in Europe, and c) it is as if Brexit It would never have happened, due to the validity of the issues that were behind such a surprising vote.

The underlying issue is to understand how in the UK, terrible murders transformed a country with exemplary characteristics into a powder keg, and, by the way, the combination of fake news, extremist activists and racism is a partial explanation, perhaps too partial. In other words, it is impossible to comprehensively address the issue without debating the impact that immigration is having, especially if it is illegal and if, for whatever reasons, there is a striking percentage of the population that, for different reasons, feels threatened. That is the explosive cocktail behind the outbreak, and in no case should a serious debate avoid the underlying problem, since it also crosses Europe with notable cases in Sweden and France, as is also the background of the discrepancies between Poland and Brussels in the European Union as well as between it, many political leaders and the illiberalism of which they accuse Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Certainly there are elements of exaggeration but they must be balanced with the British tradition and its freedoms, as well as with characteristics that have distinguished it from other societies and empires in history, where integration or its lack plays a determining role, and where experience current difficulties in this regard is compared with the previous immigration, the previous one, of those who arrived from the empire with awareness of what the country was and with intentions of total integration, whose successful product is seen in those who arrived, for example, from India or the Caribbean and who are compared to those who do it today without relation to British culture.

The transformation of multicultural Europe into a rather identity-based model of good and bad as Spain is today does not help. Nor what happens in those media that today seek to give opinions rather than explain, more editorial opinion than delivery of objective information.

Treating the immigration debate with all seriousness and integrating the different approaches is the only thing that will prevent another explosion. Brexit did not achieve it, despite how much this issue influenced - in my opinion, wrongly - the final result of the vote.

Today it seems to be a taboo subject, which doesn't help at all. It was the image that I obtained following this violence on the BBC and with how much nostalgia I remembered that wonderful information product that I knew when I lived in England, which accompanied me since then, and for which I felt genuine admiration, but which unfortunately no longer exists at the same time. level.

This true taboo is also the tragedy of Europe, a heavy veil that is present, but at the same time, due to political correctness, it is not openly discussed. This racial factor is what scares me most about the future, communities facing each other, all with their flags raised, even more destabilizing than the religious factor that divided Protestants from Catholics last century in Northern Ireland, and that happily the RU managed to overcome.

In my opinion, this is even more serious, and skin color should be removed from the debate, since it appears this way simply because of the taboo that has prevented conversation without prior disqualifications and without assuming the intentions of the interlocutor. In my opinion, what has been absent and present at the same time, but has not been put on the table, is that the real fear, which is not the color of the skin but political Islam, that and nothing more than that, but due to political correctness it is a taboo, both in Europe and in the UK, and for this reason, one of the biggest criticisms of the police by the protesters was not so much the application of the law or public order, but rather the repetition that “those” police had become “Islamized” in some places.

Let's say in this regard that, according to the legal structure of the UK, the police are rather local, since with the exception of London (Scotland Yard) and a few other places, the police are organized on a territorial basis, around counties. or groups of counties, with commissioners even being elected in some places, and, by the way, London is the exception rather than the rule.

The problem is not the influence of local particularities nor the administrative division between England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Nor is the fact that immigrants from previous waves have acquired political power, as demonstrated by the fact that defeated Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is of Hindu descent.

No. On the contrary, it is a healthy process of integration, as is the fact that the mayor of London is a Muslim, whose rise to political power is unstoppable since it has been repeated for some time in other cities, and whose objective would ideally be for him to be a process of integration and not division, perhaps similar, keeping the differences, with that of African Americans in the United States. However, the transformation of the subject into taboo has made it difficult to have a vision shared by all, helping some to see it as which is not, at least not yet, like the triumph of one sector of society to the detriment of another, not like the triumph of British democratic values but like the dangerous manipulation of these.

This serious problem of not being able to openly discuss “the” issue has operated as a true censorship, as a cloak of silence that has also fueled violence. It is not only a problem of loss of prestige for the BBC, but also leads to serious errors of judgment in important decisions. Not being able to discuss the problem openly led, for example, to the last conservative governments choosing to sign an agreement with Rwanda, so that after payment of money, asylum seekers would be sent to the African country from London, and even that the Former Prime Minister Sunak said he was willing to abandon the international human rights system in the face of growing voices denouncing the idea. In any case it came to nothing, since the new government rejected it upon taking office.

This gives an idea of the perfidy of the problem that affects Europe and the UK, a true disease of political correctness that leads authorities and the media to forget some of their best traditions, since the Rwanda project, in addition to being a imitation of Australia's leasing of some islands to Indonesia for its unwanted asylum seekers, is that basically what they wanted was to send asylum seekers suspected of Islamist militancy to the other side of the world, and, therefore, potential violentists, who would also be unlikely to integrate.

It is the suspicion that runs through Europe and the UK, that these are not citizens eager to make use of freedoms, but rather people who deeply despise the societies they enter, since theirs is the desire for common laws to be replaced. by the Islamic code of Sharia, as the foundation of life in society, more than any law.

There is a painful fact in this regard and not just history and tradition, since the Islamist terrorist attacks of 2005 hit British tolerance hard and it was a rude awakening that among the terrorists there were British people who were as British as the authorities, born there.

In the past, there were ethnic riots that shook the country in 1981 in Brixton after a Caribbean carnival of the Jamaican community or the more recent one in 2011 that spread to the entire country from a multi-ethnic district like Tottenham, but what has now happened witnessed is different, starting from the fact that it is not appropriate to define it as “ethnic.”

There is certainly a lack of debate on the actions of the police or whether justice has been completely fair or whether there was a confirmation bias in excessive punishment of the protesters, whether the local character of the police influenced different attitudes, whether there were also sentences predisposed, from the moment that some two hundred common prisoners will be released early to make room for troublemakers in the prisons.

The condemnations include violent individuals, but a necessary debate has also been opened about whether it was also appropriate not only to investigate and allocate resources to social networks, but also to condemn for what was said there, for its meaning for freedom of expression.

Even more striking would be the role that Elon Musk would have played, about whom police chiefs have said that there would be interest in his person and that no one is above the law, not only as the owner of platforms like combines threats from commissioners of free competition in the European Union (later it has been added that it was not a decision of the political authorities), which makes it doubly interesting, since there has not been even remotely similar interest towards others billionaire activists like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, presumably, as in the US, because what would bother would rather be their political ideas which would explain a different treatment, also by some media outlets.

In conclusion, due to the type of issues that have arisen, it seems that Brexit had not existed or was not the solution, whether due to lack of fulfillment of promises or due to reality, the most serious problems continue to be shared between Europe and the RU, including illegal immigration and the seizure of borders, both by human dramas and by mafias of human traffickers, since none of these problems are as black and white as they sometimes try to present.

Among the most serious problems is the fact that underlying issues are not always discussed openly, which contributes to extremism. As in this case, exaggerations and lies abound, but also desires to defend a lifestyle, a history and a tradition that is not always exemplary, but without a doubt these people must be listened to and their problem must be debated on equal terms. , or if not, it helps information circulate only through social networks and stimulates violence.

It is the cost of not discussing the substance, especially in a great democracy.

@israelzipper

PhD in Political Science (U. of Essex), Graduate in Law (U. of Barcelona), Lawyer (U. of Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».