Riots across England: What can councils do to alleviate the rising tensions within their communities?

Following a tragic knife attack in Southport, riots erupted, fuelled by far-right violence against police and communities. LGIU’s Peter Smith comments on the unrest, covering the lessons from past riots and social media’s role in polarising views to exacerbate the situation – presenting a complex challenge for local government who are on the ground throughout, from facilitating clean up to community cohesion.

Introduction

We were all shocked and stunned by the knife attacks in Southport, Merseyside, that resulted in the deaths of three young girls and the wounding of eight other children and two adults, carried out by a 17-year-old boy. It was an horrific event that stunned the whole country. What we didn’t expect to see in the following days was the rioting that occurred in the aftermath of the stabbings and the rise of the far-right in instigating violence against the police and local communities, including mosques, hotels, businesses and individuals.

Little more than a week on from the horrific stabbings in Southport, we have seen violent rioting in towns and cities across England, beginning in Southport and then spreading to Sunderland, Liverpool, Blackpool, Rotherham, Bristol, Middlesborough, Hartlepool, Birmingham, Hull, Tamworth, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent and Plymouth. What is behind it all? And what is the role of local councils in stemming the rioting and rebuilding communities that have been affected by it?

The recent history of rioting in England

In 2001, I was working for the Local Government Association (LGA) and I was given the lead LGA officer role in developing our response to the Oldham, Burnley and Bradford riots of that summer. I worked with Professor Ted Cantle, the leaders of the three authorities and civil servants from the, then, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), to produce a guidance document for local authorities on developing community cohesion strategies, published by the LGA in 2002. The guidance document proposed actions that councils could take to build community cohesion in order to lessen the likelihood of civil disorder arising in divided communities.

The riots in the North West, over the summer of 2001 were triggered by proposed marches by the National Front (NF) and British National Party (BNP) in those areas and actual, or rumoured, clashes between far-right groups and Asian residents. However, the resulting riots extended into violent attacks on businesses and pitched battles with the police. Social commentators of the day pointed towards the underlying and increasing tensions within those Asian communities, which were both isolated and impoverished.

What is the difference in today’s rioting?

The recent riots are similar to the 2001 riots, in that their violence was directed at the police, but different in their focus of hatred within the local community. In 2001, the rioters appeared to attack local businesses at random – some were Asian-owned – whereas, in 2024, the rioters are targeting attacks on mosques, local hotels that are accommodating immigrants and asylum seekers, and other businesses and community groups that are deemed to be supporting asylum seekers, such as immigration lawyers and refugee support organisations, which have been identified by far-right groups and circulated on social media.

The rioting over the past ten days is also very different in its demographic. The perpetrators are predominantly white, not BAME (as was the case in the Brixton and Toxteth riots of the 1980s and the riots in North West England in 2001). It is also being fuelled by social media platforms that didn’t exist in the days of previous race-related riots.

The LGA guidance on community cohesion, in 2002, stressed the need for better integration of local communities to break down the social and economic barriers between ethnic groups that had developed in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham, where the Asian communities were isolated from the white communities.

Today, however, the social divisions are polarised by social media and the algorithms that separate us online, from neutral news sources to more politicised news sources, according to our perceived interests. This is an international problem that was exemplified in the US with the assault on Congress following the last US presidential election result.

Local government can do very little to monitor and regulate the growing influence of social media on community relations. That responsibility lies with national governments and international co-operation between those governments in enforcing social media companies (such as X, Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram) to self-regulate the posts on their sites and to censor those that seek to use their sites to propagate civil disorder.

The recent posts by Elon Musk on his site X demonstrate the need for international cooperation between national governments to hold social media companies to account. Those companies’ excuses for not censoring users—that they are open platforms for free speech—ignore the role they play in polarising users’ views through the algorithms they use to target people with inflammatory content.

So what happened following the 2001 riots?

The Ritchie Report, an independent review of the rioting in Oldham, published in late 2001, was widely viewed as providing key insights into the tensions that had led to the riots and informed actions by the council and within local communities.

In Bradford, in the same month of the riots, the Ouseley Report was published, which examined race relations in the city. Although this report, by the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Lord Ouseley, was researched and written prior to the riots, its findings and recommendations were welcomed and helped to inform action by the council and the local community. The report highlighted the segregation of ethnic communities that were fostering social divisions between different ethnic groups, including segregated schooling.

It is difficult to determine what actions by local authorities in response to the Ritchie and Ouseley reports, the Cantle Report of 2001 and the LGA guidance on community cohesion of 2002 might have alleviated and prevented the spread of the rioting of 2001. Perhaps actions by local councils in developing policies and programmes that assisted in the wider integration of communities helped to ameliorate the community tensions that had triggered the rioting in the North West – but who knows? Maybe society just moved on, but local councils, as community leaders, always have a significant role to play in moving their communities on.

So what can local authorities do now?

The background of the current riots is very different to the riots of 2001. The past 23 years have seen a significant change in how we engage with each other and how we perceive the world. It is widely acknowledged that social media has had a major role in initiating and coordinating the civil disorder that we are seeing on our streets right now.

Local authorities have been playing a central role in the clean-up of the towns and cities affected by the riots. They are also crucial in coordinating support for those targeted in the violent rioting on their streets with local community groups and business communities.

The Covid-19 pandemic led to the development of community groups of volunteers to support vulnerable residents who were isolated by the pandemic. Those councils, that have maintained their relations with those groups, can reinvigorate them to assist in the support for the targeted individuals, communities and businesses that have been attacked in the recent riots. All councils need to maintain a database of committed community volunteers who will come to the help of neighbours who might be adversely affected by the actions of rioters, just as they might have been affected by the actions of a viral pandemic.

That is a brief summary of the actions that local councils can take to address the immediate impacts on their communities in the aftermath of the rioting of the past ten days, but what can be done in the longer term?

Longer term local government action

The major differences in this period of rioting from those that have gone before are three-fold.

Firstly, the rioters are not just youths. The 400 or so arrests to date, according to the news reports that I have seen, range from a 15-year-old boy to a 43-year-old woman and a good spread of ages across that generational divide. We are not dealing with a youth revolt here – there are men, women and children involved in the rioting. This creates a problem for councils in determining who to target to dissuade from following a far-right agenda of civil disorder.

Secondly, the instigators of the rioting are working from a variety of social media platforms that local councils can’t begin to monitor. The instigators of the ‘protests’, that may result in rioting and attacks on local hotels and other commercial premises, are probably not always local residents and, therefore, not known to local councils.

Thirdly, these riots are not necessarily being triggered by local communities. It appears that they are being orchestrated by national groups and ‘influencers’ that local councils have no handle on.

In the immediate future, local authorities should seek to monitor the convictions that will be appearing from the courts over the coming months, to determine whether there are local instigators of the rioting and, in partnership with local police forces, focus attention on those convicted rioters to determine the means by which they can be monitored and contained within their communities.

In the longer term, we need to develop programmes within our schools and community groups to ensure that the youth in our communities are not being brought up to believe that immigrants and asylum seekers are the sources of the ills in our society and that they shouldn’t be taken in by the poisoned influence of internet algorithms.

Conclusion

It is clear that these riots are drawing in a range of actors. Some have been hypothesising online that there are linkages between football hooliganism and this far right activism. It has been no secret that England has suffered from issues with football hooliganism over the last few decades. To the point that the English Football Association has needed to identify known hooligans and ban them from travelling to England games abroad – sometimes even requiring them to relinquish their passports for periods when England is playing in international tournaments.

Whilst the link between the riots and football hooliganism has not been formally established, what we do know is that some of the tools the authorities use to combat football hooliganism can also be used to tackle these sorts of decentralised networks of violent action. Part of the response includes working with football authorities and clubs to issue banning orders to those involved in the riots. The Home Office minister told LBC Radio that football clubs do not want those implicated in disorder “in their stands on a Saturday”. And perhaps this consequence, among others, will be strong deterrents to keep our streets safer.

I have also been comforted by the news, from Wednesday night, that the planned ‘protests’ by the far-right were nullified by the thousands of ‘counter-protesters’ that flooded the streets in those targeted areas to demonstrate the local communities’ unity and rejection of far-right politics. England as a whole is clearly not as radicalised by the far-right as recent events might suggest. What we need to address is the polarisation of communities, that social media is fostering, and learn how to deal with that and counteract it.

Here at LGIU, we send our thanks to councils across the UK who work day in and day out to serve their communities. Our member-exclusive Daily News service will continue to provide the latest updates, and we’ll continue to support our members through the issues they face, both now and in the future. If you have a request for our team, please reach out.