The Guardian81%
Riots and racism: why is the UK burning? 46%
By Daniel Boffey0%
6/13/2026, 5:00:04 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Confirmation Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 28.6% saturation with 380 hits. Analysis detected 2,791 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,328 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 48.1% and a BS Rank of 46% (11,897 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 54.40% of the article peer group.
As the people of Glengormley, on the northern edge of Belfast, tidied up and prepared for more violence in the midst of what has been described as a modern-day pogrom, a court 500 miles away in Southampton, on the south coast of England, started to deal with its own outbreak of thuggery.
The trigger for this week’s riots in the Northern Irish capital had been the image of a black assailant who appeared to be stabbing and slashing his supine white victim in the face and neck while shouting in Arabic.
The suspect was later revealed to be a refugee from Sudan.
In Southampton, the courts were dealing with the aftermath of separate violent demonstrations.
The prosecutor Siobhan Linsley told a hearing that 1,000 people had massed outside the city’s central police station on 2 June.
They had gathered after the release of police bodycam footage showing the last moments of Henry Nowak, a white 18-year-old student erroneously arrested and handcuffed over false racism claims while dying from stab wounds inflicted on him by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh.
Digwa, 23, who had made the false racism allegations, had just been jailed for murder.
A quarter of those who gathered outside the police station in Southampton over the Nowak case appeared to be drinking alcohol, Linsley told the court, and masks were worn.
One speaker had shouted out: “Do you want the house, the Digwa house?”
the court heard.
Hundreds of protesters then moved towards an incorrect address for the Digwa family in the St Denys area.
Protesters threw bricks, chairs and bins at police.
People streamed through gardens and driveways.
A trapped group of officers were “surrounded by a baying mob throwing projectiles” and a police car was attacked.
The disorder lasted for about two and a half hours, with police “coming under almost constant assaults”.
The fancy names struck a somewhat pitiful note as the court dealt with a number of those offering guilty pleas.
Taylor Grundy, 22, who had pushed a commercial bin on fire at officers and thrown a plank of wood, cried throughout the hearing.
He was sentenced to two and a half years.
A second defendant, Dillon Crawford, 29, a father of two with another child on the way, was given a three-year jail sentence for throwing a bin and a metal chair at officers.
He told the court he had been “angry in the moment” and lost himself.
Crawford, 29, had 19 convictions for 33 offences including battery, robbery, burglary and shoplifting.
On one occasion, he had broken a partner’s front teeth and punched her unconscious, after which he had bleached her hair, the court heard.
Do these cases in Belfast and Southampton tell us anything about the United Kingdom today?
For Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, the anti-immigration party riding high in the polls, the decisions made by the police officers at the time of Nowak’s murder offered evidence that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than ethnic minorities”.
As for the violence in Belfast, in which homes were burned and women and children were forced to flee from masked men shouting “foreigners out”, Farage said it showed that while there were bad actors, the “vast majority are fearful … [they] want action, they actually want something done to make their streets safer”.
He said: “I think the worry is, over the course of the summer … unless you give people hope, this stuff will get worse.”
For Farage’s critics, this sounded like a threat rather than a warning; another way for he and his party to stoke division for political ends.
Establishment voices echoed the claim that these disturbances were either an ugly symptom of the failures of the state to secure the country’s borders or, in the case of Nowak, proof that equality policies within the UK’s public institutions had gone too far and warped the priorities of public servants.
An editorial in the Times, headlined “Burning resentment in Belfast fuelled by inaction on immigration”, argued that a “bemused and drifting government has done nothing to tackle the root cause” of the violence.
That original seed, it claimed, was illegal immigration.
Yet, when these arguments are unpicked, the picture is more complex, and the facts arguably do not support the populist narratives.
Migration of any kind to Northern Ireland is low.
In the 2021 census, almost 97% of people described their ethnicity as white.
Just 2,248 asylum seekers, in a total population of 1.93 million people, were in receipt of government support in Northern Ireland as of 31 March 2024.
Just 200 people are estimated to have been involved in this week’s unrest.
That does not mean such riots do not say something important about the “zeitgeist” of the country, said Newburn, a professor of criminology and social policy at the London School of Economics.
The UK has endured a cost of living crisis, with prices rising in the shops and energy costs being some of the highest in Europe.
Yet the riots of recent years have predominantly been attached to issues relating to race and migration rather than those more traditionally linked to leftwing causes.
“It tells us a lot about the current preoccupations of our politics at the moment,” Newburn said.
“Notwithstanding that a lot of people are hurting in all sorts of different ways, the most obvious kind of points of contest at the moment seem to be around nationhood, race, borders and so forth.”
John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex, was a co-author of an analysis of the 2024 riots that followed the murder of three girls in Southport, Merseyside, by a perpetrator who was falsely claimed to be an asylum seeker in the immediate aftermath.
“These are collective racist attacks,” Drury said of the scenes in Belfast and Southampton.
“White victimhood is a massively powerful mobilising grievance.
It’s an empirical question how many of those participants, you know, really believe there is this white victimhood.
Some of them are using that as an excuse, but some of them honestly do believe that it’s part of their ideology.
It’s called modern racism.”
Drury said there had been a normalisation of toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric in recent years, accelerated by people online who were able to initially push their ideas anonymously but now felt empowered, not just by voices on the periphery but by the established media and politicians.
“If you look at what happened with Brexit, there was a well-known association of meaning associated with the Brexit vote: that it was a xenophobic referendum,” Drury said.
“We had an immediate spike, a spike in hate attacks around race and ethnicity immediately afterwards, because people felt they were not alone – ‘Many people in the country think like me’ – which is what these people are thinking now.
So, yes, we’ve got a problem of racism, but it’s more than that.
It’s the problem of racists becoming empowered.”
The disturbances in Belfast continued for two nights, ending with a peaceful protest on Thursday evening.
They did not spread elsewhere, despite the best efforts of antagonists such as the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
While on a trip to Moscow, he called for all of the UK to rise up.
His posts on X were reshared and amplified by the tech trillionaire Elon Musk to his 240m followers, but to little effect.
“It is difficult to predict a riot,” said Keith Flett, a historian and the editor of A History of Riots.
Meanwhile, in Southampton on Friday, Judge Mousley KC continued to sentence the perpetrators of the violence.
It had been, he said, a “hate crime, born out of a hatred of the police and in some cases racist views”.
“The impact on the community was profound,” the judge said.
“Local residents were subjected to fear, distress and a genuine sense of danger.”
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