Friends of Firsat Dag, a 25-year-old Kurdish asylum seeker, said he came to the UK to escape violence. Instead, he was stabbed to death in a park on his way home from a night out. It wasn’t an isolated incident. In the weeks surrounding his murder, gangs followed refugee children to and from school – one five-year-old boy was attacked with a baseball bat, according to an anti-racist campaign group – while hundreds of local residents held angry protests at the housing of asylum seekers in their deprived neighbourhood.
This is exactly the kind of violent escalation that many must fear happening after the riot in Knowsley last Friday. In fact, Dag’s murder took place more than 20 years ago, in Glasgow in the summer of 2001. Then, as now, inflammatory political rhetoric played a part: in the early 2000s, Britain was in the grips of a tabloid-driven moral panic over asylum. Far-right groups were also trying to whip up anti-refugee sentiment, holding demonstrations in other parts of the country.
