21 January – 4 February 2025

There are multiple signs, as documented in our regular calendar of racism and resistance, that a myopic narrative around the far-right-orchestrated racist riots of summer 2024 is in the making – that normalises racism and forecloses on any discussion of the organised violence of the far Right.

Channel 4’s quick fire defence of its new documentary series, ‘Go Back to Where You Came From’, is that it was not platforming extreme racist views, but engaging with a ‘vocal voice that is shaping our political landscape’. And research by the Children’s Commissioner’s Office, into what drove 147 young people to participate in the riots, finds that children who took part (a total of 14 were interviewed) were not primarily driven by far-right, anti-immigration or racist views, but other factors, including, ‘a curiosity about events’.

Finally, the remit of a new cross-party commission, led by former Labour and Tory communities secretaries, John Denham and Sajid Javid, is similarly weak. Facilitated by the Together Commission, it will tour the country and speak to millions of people about ‘how we live well together in modern Britain’.

All these examples make the intervention of over 60 racial justice and Muslim organisations, on the six-month anniversary of the riots across England, extremely timely. In a letter coordinated by the Runnymede Trust and supported by IRR, groups urge action to address the root causes of racism. In warning of the pitfalls of an uncritical community cohesion agenda as the single route to addressing the riots, they point out that community cohesion proposals have a history of blaming racialised communities, particularly Muslims, migrants and refugees, for ‘failing to integrate’, and that such policies have also previously by-passed issues of economic scarcity in desperate communities deprived of assets and resources.

To coincide with the intervention, the IRR releases some preliminary findings from a research project on charging and sentencing after the riots. Based on an analysis of 101 prosecutions that followed right-wing mobilisations against asylum accommodation, mosques and other symbolic locations in towns and cities across England. Read our interim findings here.

There is evidence in our data that might interest those who conducted the Children’s Commissioner’s research. In the cases we have been following, some defendants and their lawyers, perhaps aware that religiously or racially aggravated offences carry higher sentences, have argued in court that their clients were not motivated by racism. In response to one prosecution arising from an attack on asylum accommodation in Manvers, Rotherham, a clearly jaded Judge Richardson replied to mitigation pleas by the defendants’ lawyers saying: ‘Almost every defendant who had appeared in this court, of which there have been many, has indicated curiosity as being the reason’ behind their participation in ‘this particular episode’.