There is a widely held sentiment among people of colour who call London our home that travelling beyond its reaches can feel like leaving one country for another, swapping multicultural tolerance for a roll of the dice. But over the past couple of weeks, for the first time in my life, I have feared that the city’s bubble might burst.
In Hampshire, where my mum and grandparents grew up, a police officer was injured as 200 people surrounded an Aldershot hotel housing asylum seekers on 31 July. Similar activity flared in Rotherham and Leeds while I visited family in Sheffield on 4 August. In Belfast, a city close to where my great-grandfather was raised on a farm, a girl was filmed gleefully yelling the P-word as riots exploded across the Northern Irish capital.
Black and brown communities, especially Muslims, became the targets of groups of white men nationwide: stopped in cars, chased with hedge trimmers, spat at and verbally abused. By the morning of 6 August, plans for the mob’s descent on the capital were shared among families and friends. Thankfully, this unrealised climax underlined a pause. Anti-racist protests were held from Walthamstow to Harrow to Croydon and far beyond. By 8 August, the dust had settled.
It feels far from over, but now we can begin to take stock. Prosecutions roll in. Nearly 800 people have been arrested, with almost 350 of those charged, and hundreds of suspects are held in custody – from teenagers on their summer holidays to men old enough to retire. Some reportedly cried in the dock.
While I support the incarceration of demonstrably violent racists, we cannot just arrest and imprison our way out of this mess. Fear-based solutions alone are plasters on a gaping wound.
For the past decade, I’ve worked with young people on the frontline of public services such as schools, youth services and prisons. My focus has been on understanding and preventing social exclusion and violence, particularly among male teenagers. As the riots and their aftermath have played out, I’ve been trying to make sense of how we should respond. There are no easy answers, but some clear places to start.
The fact that the misinformation that led to these riots was fuelled by the speculation of Elon Musk, Nigel Farage and Andrew Tate on X bears repeating over and over again. Concerns over social media’s potential to reward those exploiting it for clout – from the hyperreal provocations of drill rappers to the toxic masculinity of get-money-quick influencers – have long riddled public discourse.
Yet weighed down by antiquated, underfunded institutions, British lawmakers have failed to act with urgency. It is an understatement to regard the global tech industry as merely travelling faster than domestic government policy. It might as well exist within an alternative universe, where CEOs in faraway mansions see themselves as warring gods, algorithms supersede laws and the truth is remoulded by the highest bidder.
But we can and must try to do something about it. In England and Wales, 60% of teenagers report seeing real-life violent content on social media, while 42% perceive social media as a major contributor to violence. In addition, 35% would turn off social media for ever if they could, a proportion that rises to 48% for perpetrators of violence and 49% for victims.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is right to highlight the Online Safety Act’s insufficiency. That sentences have been handed out to armchair rioters for inciting racial hatred online shows a refreshing preparedness to deliver proportionate punishments for such harms. But these are reactive, not preventive, steps. They come after the torched high streets, defaced gravestones and stolen canaries. In other words, they are too late.
Violence is not inevitable. As the Youth Endowment Fund’s toolkit shows, there is a wealth of evidence from across the world that might help us plan how to stem it. Investing in social skills training to help children regulate their behaviour and communicate effectively might enable them to use social media more safely. Relationship violence prevention lessons, such as those being rolled out across state schools in London, can help boys and girls to understand consent, misogyny and abuse. Providing vulnerable young people with a trained mentor or trusted adult who can offer them guidance in times of crisis could be the difference between them choosing a reconciliatory path instead of a combative one.
I make these suggestions in the knowledge that tackling the proliferation of Islamophobia, far-right radicalisation and white supremacy requires much more. Faced with a ruined, unequal economy, the government has a tall task to resuscitate the public services we so need. Every rioter charged and convicted pushes the criminal justice system deeper into backlogged courts and understaffed wings.
Children’s involvement in serious violence has risen over the past decade. Ten years ago, 25% of crimes were successfully investigated in England and Wales; now only 9% are. Spending on youth services in England is less than half of what it was, and the number of children being taken into care shows a 23% increase. Last year, more than 1 million children were referred to struggling NHS-funded mental health services, nearly double the number in 2016-17. And so on.
These types of problems – left to fester over the past 14 years and incubated by the hot weather, the absence of Premier League football and the demonising alarmism of the tabloid press – have most degraded British life this summer. Not immigration. Which, to be clear, has risen at unprecedented speed since – and arguably because – we voted to leave the EU, when the last mass expression of nationalist fervour also saw spikes in hate crimes against minorities.
We have been here before. As a new Channel 4 documentary series, Defiance: Fighting the Far Right, reveals, the British south Asian community and our allies were able to stand up to the open, violent racism of the Thatcher years. My dad grew up in a Punjabi household, where I spent time as a child, metres from the Hambrough Tavern in Southall, west London. The pub burned down on 3 July 1981, when locals finally stood up against the violent intimidation of the far right.
That was a different time, with greater extremes more normalised in everyday migrant life. But to source grit and hope, I often think of the previous generation of Black and brown activists’ blunt refusal to be distracted or bullied.
A contemporary equivalent of this immovability has won out over these past few weeks. But the battle continues. How we respond next will define us for years to come.
Ciaran Thapar is the director of public affairs and communications at the Youth Endowment Fund and the author of Cut Short: Why We’re Failing Our Youth – and How To Fix It. He teaches writing for social impact at City, University of London, and writes a newsletter called All City
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