Starmer calls emergency security meeting after weekend of riots

Andrew Atkinson, Alex Wickham and Lucca de Paoli

Aug 5, 2024 – 4.15pm

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London | UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called an emergency security meeting in a bid to quell anti-immigrant protests that rocked communities across the UK and threatened to plunge his month-old government into a polarising cultural debate.

Violence erupted in towns and cities including Rotherham, Blackpool and Bristol over the weekend in the first major test for the new Labour government. The disorder has been fuelled by an online misinformation campaign since an attack a week ago left three young girls dead. The far right falsely accused the suspect of being a Muslim migrant to stoke anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment.

Riot police officers push back anti-migration protesters outside the Holiday Inn Express Hotel, which is housing asylum seekers, in Rotherham, England. Getty Images

In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, protesters on Sunday (Monday AEST) attacked a hotel they believed was housing asylum seekers and started a fire, injuring around a dozen police officers. Around 150 arrests have been made in England’s worst rioting in over a decade.

Speaking from Downing Street, Mr Starmer described the riots as “far-right thuggery” and said those who took part would face “the full force of the law”. On Monday, he planned an emergency Cobra meeting with senior ministers and police chiefs, according to a government official.

Cobra meetings are named after Cabinet Office Briefing Room A in Whitehall.

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The prime minister was also preparing emergency court sittings, getting prosecutors to work longer hours and weekends to process cases, and the redeployment of police if necessary.

The violence is the worst in England since the summer of 2011, when rioting spread and raged for five days following the police killing of a black man in north London. That led to the prosecution of thousands of people and lengthy prison sentences. Mr Starmer was the director of public prosecutions at the time and is expected to take a similarly tough approach to the latest unrest, according to the official.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced additional measures to protect mosques and pledged “full backing” for the police in dealing with the unrest. “Anyone who gets involved in criminal disorder and violent thuggery on our streets will have to pay the price,” she said in a video posted to X.

Tensions have been rising since the stabbing attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport, near Liverpool, on July 29. Police have said the suspect, Axel Rudakubana, 17, was born in Britain, in an attempt to counter false claims spread on social media that he was a Muslim migrant.

Around 300 people were involved in disturbances in Liverpool on Saturday night, according to Merseyside Police. The force, also responsible for Southport, said that a local convenience store was set on fire and that a library was damaged, while firefighters who attended to the scene had a missile thrown at their vehicle.

In Hull, demonstrators gathered outside a hotel that houses asylum seekers. A number of windows were smashed and bottles thrown. In videos uploaded to social media, many of the protesters can be heard chanting “Stop the boats,” a reference to crossings made from the European continent by migrants attempting to get to Britain.

Many police forces across the country have issued so-called dispersal orders to try to break up and deter rioters. There were also disturbances in Leicester, Stoke-on Trent, Nottingham, Manchester and Middlesbrough, as well as Belfast in Northern Ireland.

“We will do whatever it takes to make sure that people can get through the court system,” Diana Johnson, the policing minister, said in an interview on Sky News. Courts could sit through the night to deal with the large number of people arrested if necessary, she added.

For the UK’s strained justice system, haste could prove difficult.

Since 2010, when the Conservatives took office, funding cuts have left much of the court system struggling to process even their regular workload. More than half of magistrate courts, which deal with lower-level offences, closed during the Tories’ 14 years in power. Those courts are now working with a backlog of around 387,000 cases as of April this year, a figure that has surged since the pandemic.

The unrest comes just days after the House of Commons rose for the long summer recess. Priti Patel, a former home secretary who is now vying to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative Party leader, has called for parliament to be recalled.

“The situation is not yet a crisis” but with more rallies planned “it does pose a major challenge to the new government”, said Cassia Rowland, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government think tank.

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