SIR KEIR STARMER has made an odd connection between the recent riots and the overcrowding in Britain’s prisons. “People throwing rocks, torching cars, making threats, didn’t just know the system was broken,” he said in a speech in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street this week. “They were betting on it. They were gaming it.” Entering the minds of the rioters, the Prime Minister imagined: “They thought — ‘Oh, they’ll never arrest me. And if they do, I won’t be prosecuted. And if I am, I won’t get much of a sentence.’” Such rational thought seems unlikely given the drunken frenzy of many of the rioters.
Most commentators casually branded the rioters far-right agitators intent on destabilising peaceful British towns. Yet, when the rioters appeared in court, they turned out, mainly, not to be outsiders but local people. The narrative that they were “not from round here” proved false.
It is no coincidence that most of the riots occurred in poor areas: Liverpool, Rotherham, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Bolton, and Hartlepool. In Manchester, the local community newspaper, The Mill, got together with sister papers in Liverpool, Sheffield, and Birmingham to produce a revealing account of the disturbances.
The report began not with the violence in Southport a month ago (News, 5 August), but with a riot 18 months before, outside the Suites Hotel on the outskirts of Liverpool, which left a police van torched to a burnt husk. A bearded asylum-seeker from the migrant hotel was videoed approaching a 15-year-old girl in school uniform and asking for her phone number. “You don’t do this in this country. You go to jail if you do this,” the girl replied.
The video went viral. A peaceful protest began outside the hotel. But, before long, acrid smoke was rising above the streets of Kirkby, and missiles were raining down on the police. Eight men were handed prison sentences. All lived within ten minutes of the hotel. Locals complained afterwards that girls could not walk along the street without being approached by residents of the hotel. There were similar incidents in Dunstable, Skegness, and Tamworth.
Hooligans and looters, as well as racists and Islamophobes, were present in all these places. But so were many ordinary white Britons who now feel so profoundly alienated and even unsafe in their own country that they seek out scapegoats. A report by the Social Mobility Commission points to a new geography of disadvantage in the poor towns and seaside resorts in which disproportionate numbers of asylum-seekers have been placed.
Disadvantage has been clustered in Britain’s poorest places, where globalisation has closed large factories and brought no private-sector-investment alternative. Traditional jobs have disappeared, leaving only welfare payments to fill the vacuum.
The white British poor, the commission reveals, are likely to be out of work or dependent on welfare. They have low or no qualifications. Unlike poor people with Chinese and Indian backgrounds, they lack the educational attainment which is the key to upward mobility. It is into such communities that metropolitan politicians, who laud the advantages of immigration to the economy, place the majority of asylum-seekers — and then refuse to allow them to work.
Draconian prison sentences may quell the rioting in the short term. But only proper investment in disadvantaged communities will bring long-term peace to our streets.