When racist riots broke out across the UK in July this year, Mobeen Azhar was better placed to cover the story than most documentary-makers because he had already been investigating it for months. What happened nationally, when hostility towards refugees moved from protest to pogrom, had been foreshadowed in February 2023 in Kirkby, near Liverpool, where a group of angry local people gathered at the Suites hotel, which was being used to house refugees awaiting processing. A standoff with police soon turned nasty.
Small Town, Big Riot follows Azhar as he visits Merseyside in the early months of this year, in the run-up to the sentencing of several Kirkby men for violent disorder and other offences. On his quest to find the source of the disturbance, he talks first to an influencer who tells him that men from the hotel had propositioned young girls. “Quite a lot of children [were] getting approached in parks.”
The programme identifies several factors that cause ordinary people to become racist vigilantes. One of the main ones is online disinformation. The TikTok interviewee has scant hard evidence for her claims – seeming to think that accusations become true if enough people repost them. “Obviously with social media, nothing’s always going to be 100% accurate, but I have heard a lot of people saying that.” Throughout his investigation, Azhar meets people who have rejected “mainstream media” because they believe it lies to them – that they may often be correct about that is no comfort when we see they’ve replaced TV and newspapers with the wild rumour mills of Facebook and Telegram, where users are somehow more inclined to believe a claim the less corroborated it is.
In Kirkby’s shopping precinct, Azhar is confronted with the results of this. He is starting to interview a female shopper who has hot intel on children being followed home from school when a man hurries past, bellowing: “Send them all back! They’re all paedophiles!” Once he has wandered off, the woman tries to take a more rounded view. “It’s hard,” she muses, “because not all of them will be paedophiles … but some of them are paedophiles, so everyone [who is] angry is just trying to protect their children.”
Protect them from what, precisely? Azhar is keen to find out, so he deconstructs the single piece of evidence that led to the riot. Kirkby’s smaller-scale disturbances had an equivalent of the 2024 Southport stabbings – an inciting incident that was real, but which wasn’t nearly enough on its own to support wild claims about refugees generally being dangerous. A video did exist of a Suites hotel resident talking to a Kirkby girl who filmed their encounter: we can’t hear him clearly but he does seem to be inappropriately propositioning her after she tells him she is 15 years old. After a few more vox pop interviews – one man confidently asserts that the girl, whose age he references as 13, had previously had several similar encounters with the same refugee – Azhar locates the girl’s mother. She won’t appear on camera, so Azhar paraphrases what he was told: look, she’s not racist but they are all paedophiles, it’s their culture.
Azhar’s journalism clearly illustrates how latent racism is made blatant by online gossip, but he doesn’t stop there and, although his inquisitive open-mindedness shouldn’t be unusual, he provides a fuller picture than that offered by the nation’s self-interested press and compromised politicians last summer. He strikes gold when he gets into a cab driven by Neil, who speaks of the “managed decline” of austerity politics: “We’ve been ignored, it breeds a defiance … life is becoming unbearable in Kirkby. We’ve got a lack of job opportunities, a lack of housing, food poverty, wage insecurity. Everyone’s on the brink.” But Neil is clear on who has capitalised on this vulnerability: “Every two days, the front page of the tabloids is: migrants on boats, infestation, swarm. Nigel Farage on a boat in the English Channel.” Azhar agrees that “decades of inflammatory headlines” have caused deep divisions.
There is more saying of the unsayable when Chantelle, a podcaster and local councillor, makes a point in response to the regular refrain that the “protests” are not racist: nobody complains about white Ukrainian refugees, she says. Azhar also does the legwork necessary to track down and give voice to a refugee who was inside the Suites hotel when it was besieged, who says, for what it is worth, that the guy in the viral video was swiftly identified by the authorities as a problem and moved on.
Cathartic and educational as all this is, Azhar ends the first of his two episodes with a depressing snapshot of a wider phenomenon. He goes to Ireland, where another group of agitators, hostile to him as a representative of the mainstream media, assail him with exactly the same unevidenced statements about refugees he has heard back in England. This mess will not be cleared up easily, but Azhar does a better job than most of showing what we’re up against.
• Small Town, Big Riot aired on BBC Three and is on iPlayer now.
