The recent unrest in the United Kingdom (UK) spoke volumes of the deep social divisions and the influence of far-right extremism, said experts in an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN) on Sunday.
Since a knife attack at the end of July in Southport, northwest England, which left three children dead, far-right protests have rocked the UK, resulting in police officers being injured, stores looted, and hotels housing asylum-seekers stormed.
The National Police Chiefs' Council said on Saturday that 779 people have been arrested over rioting in the UK, of whom 349 were charged.
Roger Griffin, emeritus professor of Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, stressed that the roots of the riots were complex. Many of those involved in the riots had been marginalized in the society for a long time, thus are vulnerable to the influence and manipulation of the far-right forces.
"I would argue that if you bore down into it, we're dealing with a stratum or a social group spread throughout largely cities and inner cities in Britain who are permanently disaffected from the country. These are people who experience all sorts of forms of social deprivation and problems with housing and health and education. And they are, especially when they're youngish males who feel deeply disaffected with their future and have lost hopes of conventional ways of rising in society, are easy to seduce, to picking scapegoats, easy targets, to explain their real sense of despair," said Griffin.
In the interview, Tim Bale, politics professor of the School of Politics and International Relations from the Queen Mary University of London, said the far right has exploited the cultural anxieties and the anti-immigrant sentiment of the white working class to further divide the UK society.
"Well, that's certainly a narrative that has been pushed for some time by politicians on the right of politics, even though generally speaking, they don't like to get into questions of class when it comes to the distribution of wealth in this country. I think there is a feeling among some people, in that white working class bracket, that they have lost out somehow to people who have come into the country more recently, whether that be EU citizens who came in after 2003, or whether that be people from west Africa, east Africa, people from south Asia as well," said Bale.
Dal Babu, a former chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, highlighted the problem of online disinformation in UK society, which has been used by the far right to reinforce negative stereotypes of Muslims and mobilize its supporters.
"Thirteen years on we have the Internet that has dominated this disorder because people have been able to spread lies. We have a euphemism of misinformation, but effectively its lies. When those three young girls were murdered, the rumors that spread on the Internet deliberately, maliciously and falsely, was that this was a Muslim suspect. And he was a person who had recently arrived in the UK via a boat, and he was an asylum seeker. All of that information was incorrect. It was somebody who was born in this country. It was somebody who was from a Christian family. And the reality was that the far right, and I think the thing to point there around Islamophobia is very, very pertinent, because it's one of these triggers to try and get the far right supporters out in their masses," said Babu.
UK riots expose deep social divisions, influence of far-right extremism: experts
UK riots expose deep social divisions, influence of far-right extremism: experts
