Think Change

Riots, race and misinformation – has alarmist rhetoric on migration gone too far?

• ODI

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The fatal stabbing of three young girls in Southport by 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana back in July ignited riots which have swept across the UK and made global headlines.

What followed from the tragedy was a racist, Islamophobic and anti-migrant campaign fuelled by misinformation and disinformation, which spilled into the streets with targeted attacks on mosques and ethnic minorities.

This senseless violence again cast a spotlight on systemic issues of racism and inequality, and highlighted the potentially deadly consequences of our collective failure to tackle false information online, as well as the demonisation of migrants.

This episode dissects these problems, asking what the recent riots reveal about the rise of the far right in the UK and elsewhere, and how to counter alarmist rhetoric on migration. Our guests discuss how we can move forward towards a place of greater solidarity, understanding and trust.

Guests

  • Sara Pantuliano (host), Chief Executive, ODI
  • Afua Hirsch, Journalist
  • Fizza Qureshi, CEO, Migrants’ Rights Network
  • Marvin Rees, Visiting Senior Fellow, ODI and former Mayor of Bristol
  • Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, Director, Politics and Governance programme, ODI

Related resources

Welcome to Think Change. I'm Sara Pantuliano. Here in the UK, we're still dealing with the aftermath of the recent riots which swept the country and made headlines all around the world in August. On the 29th of July, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana fatally stabbed three young girls in Southport. What followed was a racist, islamophobic and anti-migrant campaign, a campaign that was stoked into a frenzy by online misinformation and spilled into the streets, with targeted attacks on mosques and ethnic minorities. This violent riot threw into focus once again the underlying systemic issues of racism and inequality. It highlighted the potentially deadly consequences of our collective failure to tackle misinformation and disinformation as well as the demonization of migrants. These problems are obviously not unique to the UK, but they present a critical challenge for governments and citizens all around the world. So, we've invited an esteemed group of guests to help us explore these issues today, to discuss with us what concrete actions we need to take to try and move forward from this senseless violence and move towards a place of greater solidarity, of greater understanding and trust. 

So, joining me today I have Afua Hirsch. Afua is a writer, broadcaster and best-selling author, well known to many. Fizza Qureshi, the CEO of the Migrants’ Rights Network. Marvin Rees, recently appointed as ODI Visiting Senior Fellow and Former Mayor of Bristol. And our own Kathryn Nwajiaku-Dahou, our Director of Politics and Governance at ODI. Afua, let me start with you. You have been writing extensively about Britishness and the sense of belonging and identity as a black woman living in the UK. What was your take on what the far right has done in terms of hijacking the tragic murders in Southport to really further a racist agenda? Were you surprised by just how much destruction and carnage there was? 

To be quite honest, I'm actually surprised something like this hadn't happened sooner, because the reality is that the climate of governance we've had for the last decade really has been so violent in the language and policies it's advocated against people coming to this country, it’s created a perception that there is no such thing as a lawful reason to come to this country and seek asylum, for example. We had the Home Secretary admitting at one point there was no legal route to the UK. And I think for people who don't understand international law, don't understand Britain's international obligations, have been encouraged to believe that demonizing and othering immigrants and migrants is legitimate and normal and to understand their own legitimate economic grievances as the fault of people who are visibly other. These are all ideas that have been perpetuated openly by government, then it's no surprise that that is ripe fodder to be weaponised by extremist groups.

And so I say that not in any way to apologise for or excuse the behaviour of the far right, because this has been the far right playbook since the mid 20th century, since the early 20th century. You can see it repeated in the 30s and in the 60s and in the 80s. You know all of these cycles of violence we've had against migrants. But what I think about what's happened now is that we're seeing that repeated again with unprecedented levels of support really from mainstream political figures, some of them in the highest offices of state. So actually, this attack on the idea of Britain as a multicultural society and a place that has legal obligations to welcome people from other countries and is economically dependent on the labour of migrants and immigrants has become extremely normal in our political discourse.  

Fizza, you are a staunch advocate for migrant rights. You know you speak regularly against racism and Islamophobia. The riots were clearly racist in nature, but there was also a very specific scapegoat. You know there was these online rumours about the Southport attacker being a migrant of the Muslim faith. I've always said it very clearly, you know the press, the government have played a role, an important role, in perpetuating this anti-migrant and Islamophobic rhetoric. What is your analysis of how far this has gone? 

I mean we are where we are, where we've got these laws and legislation now, like the Nationality and Borders Act and the so-called Illegal Migration Act, which criminalize people coming to the UK to seek sanctuary and safety. I kind of want to go back to like the kind of the incident in Southport where not only was this person kind of rumoured to be a migrant and was in faith, but a person who'd sought asylum, someone who'd come over the boats, and then you saw that language that the government and the media had been, you know, perpetrating around stop the boats and the language of illegality was being chanted back by the rioters, by the far right and the fascists. You know, you heard them say this and repeating it, and then, obviously, when and immediately targeted a mosque again, so that the, the rumour was so serious that they went and acted on it. So, there's that Islamophobia as as part of the of the issue as well. And then we've seen this, and this isn't the first time that we've seen far right right outside hotels. They did it in Knowsley last year as well. Again, rumours went around about men who had sought asylum in the area and it just, it, just, it's just, as Afua said, like an opportunity for far right to mobilise and and and use. But that language is being used by the government. It's being used by the media, we've heard people seeking asylum being called invasion swarms by our Home Secretary in the past and the language of safe and legal routes again. 

This again going back to this, like it is illegal to to seek sanctuary without having to come through routes that don't exist. Um, but also the, the media in the way that obviously amplifies what the government say. But also how they almost legitimized what was happening on the streets initially. So they were refusing to even call them racist riots. They were calling them anti-migrant protests and these people had legitimate concerns around migration and then eventually it moved into being actually spoken about as racist riots, which is what they were. But there's, yeah, so there's a lot there around the rhetoric that is being perpetuated by those in power. And because it is around migration, it's less, it seems to be more palatable to talk about migrants in dehumanizing ways because it's divorced from racism and Islamophobia. So, there's a lot of work that needs to be done with those in power and hopefully we'll see an improvement, but probably not a massive change. 

Yeah, we haven't really seen a change in the underlying narrative. I think the language is marginally improved with the change of government but, as you sort of hint, the underlying positioning towards these issues hasn't really shifted enormously.

No, absolutely. I mean, the root causes of people seeking sanctuary are still there and those are not being discussed or addressed. And then, obviously, the responses to those are a reactive, harsh, how can we prevent this from happening, in terms of them coming to our shores, rather than why are people coming here? And then, when they are coming here, what welcome are we giving them?  

I mean, what we have seen actually is some swift legal action against you know many of the perpetrators and that seems to have dealt successfully in halting you know the mass riots and the destruction, but you know many people from ethnic minority backgrounds are obviously left with lasting physical and emotional scars that won't be easy to remedy. Afua how many steps backwards do you think the UK has taken in this quest to try and be a multicultural country? I mean, is this still a pipe dream in 2024 after everything we saw? 

I think that we need to avoid romanticising the pre-Tory era, because the reality is this actually started under new labour for all its optimism and talk of multiculturalism, that was the government that introduced the vocabulary of failed asylum seekers, which actually a phrase that is nonsensical under international law. If you're an asylum seeker, that means you have a legitimate right to seek asylum. If you're rejected, you're no longer an asylum seeker. So, you know, these ideas that brought in this notion of illegitimacy and illegality to the bodies of people seeking sanctuary was something that actually Labour introduced, and the policy of multiculturalism as a top down idea from Labour never had the racial or cultural intelligence to really understand the identities of minority groups. It was never accompanied by an open discourse about history and how empire assimilated people from Asia and Africa into the British story by force, on punitive terms, and was the reason they were here in the first place. It wasn't accompanied by history about the slave trade. It wasn't accompanied by education and understanding of Islam and its centuries, millennia of interconnectedness with the story of Britain. So, it was never a genuine movement to really educate British people about how people of other faiths and ethnicities were already part of the British story and how much Britain had been benefiting from their labour and contribution over so many centuries. So, I think that we haven't necessarily gone backwards. We're just now really seeing laid bare the consequences of the work that was never done, the foundations that were never laid.

I don't say that to be dismissive of how serious this is, and I think many of us who study this and are familiar with the nuances of this area were not that surprised that this happened, because we already knew how deep those problems were and how divisive this rhetoric is. And you know, I think this is also a structural problem with governance in Britain that you know, we have these short-term election cycles. Governments want to show they want the quickest and easiest way to show voters that they have a quick fix for their problems. We have deep-seated inequality in Britain, deep class and regional inequalities that can't be solved by any slogan or three or four year idea, and instead of really addressing the deeper causes of those inequalities, but politicians are succumbing to the temptation of just blaming an easy target, a visible other, a minority group, and and then the media is also, you know, as a journalist, a huge focus of mine, and the reality is that we have been racialising crime.

We never talk about white on white crime. We never talk about white criminals or white paedophile rings. Many people in Britain genuinely believe that certain kinds of crime are the exclusive remit of some minority groups, and that is the most dishonest and untrue idea, but it's been completely normalised over generations in Britain. So, I think that this, this failure of education, this dishonesty in media and and this short-termism in government and policy, all come together, and you know, as we enter the digital age and the demands of our economic policy become much more profound, the idea that we need to radically change the way we train people for jobs. We're going to see so many professions disappear through automation. The need to have policies that answer those problems is going to be greater than ever, and in the absence of that, my fear is that politicians will continue to try to defer the blame by demonizing minority groups instead. 

Well, let me bring in politicians or former politicians. I don't know where you put yourself, Marvin, but you were celebrated as the first black mayor of African descent in the UK when you won the first term as Mayor of Bristol. I think that was particularly significant historically given the active involvement Bristol had in the slave trade and Bristol, incidentally, was also one of the UK cities that saw widespread unrest and violence. Listening to what Afua just said, can you tell us a little bit about the challenges that you faced trying to break into politics as a black man in Bristol and the challenges that the city itself faces? 

It can be a little bit dangerous to be a black person in public life and share the fullness of the challenges we face, because people tend to get offended. I mean, I think we took it from all sides. When I was elected, the conservative group in Bristol used to describe me as an inner city mayor on a couple of occasions. We know that's code right. To be honest, I took it from the political left as well. It was a black politician that told me don't mention the racism of the left because they will never forgive you.

In local press and I've seen this around Vaughan Gething, by the way the descriptors of me have been about me being aggressive, threatening. I did say I went with a journalist the other day. I said have you ever heard me swear at anyone? She said no. So, my predecessor did. Do you ever hear me shout people down in meetings? No, well, other politicians have. Have you ever seen me storm out of a meeting? No, well, other politicians have. So why am I the one that gets a description of being perceived as threatening? All right, I am just a six-foot odd, 14 and a half stone black guy. I can't pretend to be five two, eight stone, you know, to make you feel comfortable, so you have to deal with all of these things and that's, that's been a big media framework as well for me, you know as well, I just look people in the eye and make my case, but I think what's been pointed out has been very powerful by Afua and Fizza. 

You know, I've been dismayed at the way our national government has not led, they have led, but they've led badly. One of my frustrations has been you are creating a context in which it's more difficult for me to leave my city because within Bristol, we have 180 countries of origin, 45 religions, 92 languages. We have to live together within this 42 square miles. You're creating a framework that fractures that that society, weakens it, undermines it, and those fragilities will take place on our streets. And, by the way, that happens within a context in which our national government has disinvested in our country housing crisis, jobs, crisis, gentrification, you know, and and look, I've walked a real tight rope with this because I'm really and I mean I'd appreciate to hear what Afua and Fizza says.

So, I want to recognise that actually the field, the agitators I would call them, the predators of the right. There are some legitimate concerns, and by that I don't mean migration, I mean these communities have been left behind by globalisation, they've lost faith in politics, they don't know what their story is and who they are. And into that fragility and that weakness you get this. You get the seduction of the Farage’s and the Robertsons. I can tell you what your story is. You know, I could, and so I want to recognise the brutality of the racism that was on display on our streets. 

I don't want to take away from that. But I also have to say there's a role here being played by our national government creating the context and the framework through which people have been made more vulnerable and then almost ploughing the field. And then those people, the predators, that have come on and harvested the crop. There are some vulnerable people. Let's turn them out, let's give them the framework for misunderstanding the world.

And I and I did an interview the other day and I was just saying one of my pushbacks to people is any framework that leaves relatively powerless people blaming other powerless people for why their lives are the way they are is suspect, because when I look for causality, I look for power, migrants aren't powerful. So so they may have given you a sequence of arguments that lead you to blame migrants. Or there's one house, we have a housing crisis, there's more people that lead you to that conclusion, but it's a suspect framework, because those people are, by definition, powerless, just like you, and I've been trying to walk that tightrope of you know, of recognising the brutality of the racism but also making space for the fact that people are being manipulated and exploited as well, and they're the ones going to jail as well.

Interesting that you talk about causality. Fizza, the Migrants’ Rights Network, you actually dedicated to exposing the systemic nature of inequality and racism and the roots embedded in colonialism. You know your Words Matter campaign, which I found really interesting. It's focused on debunking harmful and anti-migrant tropes and their colonial origins. To what extent do you think the legacy of colonialism has this causality has contributed to the way migrants are treated, are perceived, are talked about in the UK, and how can it be tackled at the institutional level?

I mean, there's again the campaign that we're leaving with Words Matter was really interesting because we were having that self-reflection of what language we'd been using, what we'd been potentially kind of perpetrating as well in those stereotypes and harmful narratives. And actually, the first phrase that we started exploring was the language of illegal, illegal immigrant, which comes up really commonly and it's used by people of colour, it's used by the media, the government. It's just thrown out there and really demonstrating that, like, no one can be illegal. These about policies and laws and things that create illegality, right like, and that that is such a, it's so movable. For example, you know, one minute someone is deemed legal because the law states it and the laws changed and then someone's not, as we've seen with people coming to cross in the boats. Suddenly that act has become illegal and therefore those individuals are creating, having, committing illegal acts. And when we were exploring this, it really, we started to see other language that was quite commonly used where we could see that that legacy, like you said, of colonialism was really entrenched, or racism, right like white supremacy and racism. And we heard not too long ago, for example, was it the European Commissioner or one of them, talking about Ukrainian refugees being just like us again, so posing anyone who's not, who is a person of colour, who's a migrant of a racialised background. You are not like us western Europeans. You are an other still, and when we've, you know, as as the media and the government, the politicians, gave us a lot of food for thought around this and gave us a lot of kind of phrases and things that we wanted to explore and look at. And when we have done it, we've kind of reflected back and seen that the words originate, have a historic origination, right like, say, even the language of refugee crisis. It's not a crisis, it's a policy crisis. It's again a crisis of states not looking at the root causes of why people are displaced and why people are moving or having to seek sanctuary and safety. But it's manufactured as these are the people that are a threat, an ongoing threat to us.

And when you look at like the colonialism, it's migrants have to be deserving, they have to be contributing, so they have to bring something. You have to bring and you know, as it's always been in historically. When you look at the laws and policies that have been brought in in the UK over the centuries, you know you've always had laws created to prevent someone else, another group, from coming in. It started with Jewish refugees and Huguenots, and then it carries on and it's just another grouping that's like excluded. And then so you've got to the point where you've, like, you know, if you're going to come to the UK, you must contribute. Not only then contribute, but you must then integrate, and integration in terms of assimilation, so you must become part of um, the British, whatever society model, is um. And then you've got to um. You've got to aspire or behave according to British values, which we're still trying to work out, what those are.

There's some, like you know exactly.

There's some terms out there democracy, rule of law, things that you think well, the government and quite a lot of others who would you know, say that they're through and through British, don't also follow um. And so you, you start exploring, you realise, like, how harmful the language is around migration at the moment, and it's because it's been divorced from racism, so the idea that you can talk about migration without being seen as racist or um, uh, so there's a, there's a, there's a big, I guess, like what we call political education or popular education, education to do around um, migrants, racialised people might, like myself, not harming ourselves by talking about ourselves in these ways are deserving and undeserving, but also kind of the the migration sector and the media and the government to start talking about you, you know migration as like, as a thing that happens. Everyone does it, everyone wants to do it and it should be just like a natural phenomena that is allowed to happen.

Yeah, um, I mean, these double standards you talked about is something we have written a lot um about at ODI. In fact, Kathryn herself has ordered some very powerful analysis just after the Ukraine war started to really expose the different attitudes towards migrants and refugees or asylum seekers of different origins. But Kathryn, coming to you, the UK is not the only country that is facing the impact of the rise of far-right rhetoric and online misinformation around these issues. How does this fit with broader trends that you are observing and writing about across Europe, but particularly in France, where you are based, as well as in other countries?

I feel that the resonances that Fizza talks there are resonances between what Fizza has just spoken about with respect to the UK and what we're experiencing in France and the rest of Europe. Clearly, and words do matter. I think it's critical to just observe that the slogans in the UK that were being used were the boat, so people were taking up the slogans that politicians were using and making them their chance, and it just speaks to how important politicians are, the political class are, in framing the narratives that can either divide or unite people. I'm really interested in this and I've looked at how it's done differently in France and the UK. Or what I'm observing in France is that, whilst we didn't have riots this year because there are histories of riots in very recent memory, what we've been having is a more structural you know, slow burn, cultural and political transformation that has made it what we call decomplexified to talk about migrants, to be racist, to be Islamophobic in the public space, and we saw very clearly how that came to a head in the recent European elections and their aftermath, which saw the, the far right party, the rassemblement national, now called formerly the Front National, the National Front, become the biggest party in the French Parliament, right, and you know, I want to also come back to this question of words and narrative because the media and the transformations that the media have undergone have really been at the heart of it. So, just like in the UK, in France we have a very popular channel called CNews, and not only is CNews very popular but owned by Vigue and other very important business interests, but they also own social media platforms, they also own the rights to a lot of the other channels, Canal Plus and so on, which means that they have ownership of the transmission of what are deeply far right, racist discourses. And so the worrying thing for us here is not so much the fact that there have been riots or not riots, but it's the societal transformation that's taking place. That is very, very, very, very problematic.

And whilst the far-right didn't get into power yet, haven't got yet into power, and a coalition of progressive left-wing forces at least challenged them, what you see politically is a kind of because it's become normalised to be far right an integration of the far right, as you know, as as as a, as a worthy political interest group, so that the new government that's going to be forming France, the new prime minister that’s been nominated that's as a worthy political interest group, so that the new government that's going to be forming in France, the new prime minister that's been nominated, is seen as an okay candidate by far right groups. So that's really where we are today in France. And I just want to just highlight on the media front as well. You know, there's a brilliant series that came out on Canal Plus, I think in March or April this year, which tells the story about France's evolution, its cultural evolution, and this culture war in fact. 

But it's more than a war of words, a real political war between the forces of the far right, emboldened by traditional politicians but also by social media and alternative narratives, that progressive forces are trying to depict. So, I think, what’s interesting in the UK, you saw the riots, but you also saw the counter-riots that are trying to challenge in greater numbers the messages and also the ability of those far-right groups to have their day. In France you do have alternative attempts at alternative narratives that are being promoted by progressive forces on what is described as the far left. But I see them as the progressive left that are trying to present an alternative vision of what it means to be French, which is diverse, which is black, which is Muslim, which is Arab. That is challenging the far-right notion. So, I do see the parallels as really very kind of blatant. But you know the jury is out still about which side is on the up. 

Marvin, to end on a more positive note, I mean, despite all the violence and destruction and, of course, the very long road ahead that we have to tackle systemic inequality and racism. The anti-racist protests that were held across the UK in response to the far-right racist riots, I think, signals, you know, towards a more hopeful, perhaps optimistic, future. Do you think the UK can come back stronger from these riots? What are the obstacles?

It's difficult to know. I mean, certainly it's welcoming to see the people standing up against it. In Bristol we had some violence. I went out with one of my former fellow politicians in Bristol, Afzal Shah, and we went down to the counter rally for the Wednesday when they were talking about another far-right activity taking place. The streets were absolutely log jammed with people and I looked at it and no one could get past here. Actually, it threw that planned action from the right for that evening. It threw it into shock contours which seemed to be disorganised and minimal, diminutive the way the city turned out and you know that was uplifting. At the same time, the underlying weaknesses in many of the things that have been picked up and said today, I think they remain.

One of the, you know, I have a number of concerns and I'm a member of something called the Mayors Migration Council, which is a group of Mayors from around the world who are trying to talk different well, not just talk differently about migration. Talk about migration in the way we need it to be talked about mayors from the global north and the global south. And, by the way, when we're talking about the colonial legacy, the empire legacy, that includes mayors like Iwanaki Sawyer saying I don't want to lose my population in the first instance. Now I'm really careful about that argument because it's different when it comes out the mouth of you know, the right up here, but mayors in the global south who were constantly facing the challenge of losing energetic, talented, educated members of their population leaving their cities of Freetown and Kampala, right. So, one of the questions is, when we look at that, you might call it loss and damage uh, channel uh of redressing historical inequalities. How do you get the investment into the hands of people like Yvonne so that she can build a city that retains talent, that retains people, and she can do good urbanisation?

But I think that when you look at the combination of climate change, the economic instability, social instability that could result from decarbonizing the economy, with climate displacement that will go into the hundreds of millions, with social media and these predators, these political predators still out there, I think we have a very dangerous cocktail in front of us. And, as one of my, one of our key city partners in Bristol, we have to be better at grooming than the groomers, you know. We have to be better at putting the framework through which people understand their world and their place in it than some of those who are most active on social media now. 

I just like to endorse Marvin’s point about the interconnectedness of this crisis the legacy of colonialism, the unfairness of global economic capitalist system that we have, and the climate crisis. They're so interconnected, you know, and I think one of the things that people on the right try to do is present those of us who actually care about the humanitarian situation of migrants and the basic human rights of all people, regardless of race or ethnicity um, to portray us as people who think it's great that so many people are crossing the channel and small boats dying in the channel to undertaking these very perilous journeys uh, at the hands of people traffickers. I think that, you know, it's incredibly cynical. I think we're interested in the root causes of why people feel forced to make these journeys. In some cases, they're economic factors, and I think there's some really interesting work being done.

I saw in Spain recently about how you can actually normalise and legalise routes so that people who do want to travel, to do seasonal work and go back home and do so without risking their lives, you know, and the conflation of all these different reasons for migration into this kind of lump of illegals is so bad for everybody.

It's so bad for the people who then find their lives at risk. It's bad for people in Britain who can't plan that completely natural movement in a globalised economy that people do move and do travel for work. And then also the ignorance of why people are leaving countries because of conflicts that often we have armed or been involved in starting or exacerbating, or because of poverty or climate change that we have a role in having created through colonialism and our ongoing economic exploitation of those countries. So, you can't really tackle one without the other, and that's why I think it's really important to have conversations like this, where we we look at the bigger picture.

100% agreed, but thank you so much, Marvin, Afua, Fizza and Kathryn for joining this really important conversation today. Actually, today we've been doing a lot of work and research on misinformation, disinformation and the impact that it has on democracy and societal fabric, particularly also linked to migration. We've done extensive work on public perceptions about migrants in the UK and beyond, in several other European countries, and the mobility and visa issues, and all of this really chimes with what you've been discussing today and very much points to the really critical issue of political leadership and the role the media do have in perpetuating certain images and certain perceptions and really the lack of courage that a lot of our political leaders have to challenge those who exploit these issues for their political benefit. 

Thank you everyone for listening. Some of the most relevant research material resources that we've referred to in the episode are available in the show notes. If you want to learn more about what we have discussed. Remember to subscribe to the show and to share your feedback. Until next time, thank you for listening.

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