{"id":866424,"date":"2025-08-19T22:16:38","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T03:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/19\/conditions-that-led-to-disorder-still-there-and-could-escalate-again\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T22:16:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T03:16:38","slug":"conditions-that-led-to-disorder-still-there-and-could-escalate-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/19\/conditions-that-led-to-disorder-still-there-and-could-escalate-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Conditions that led to disorder \u2018still there and could escalate again\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

\"WEST<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The build up of \u201canger, prejudice and misinformation\u201d that led to the disorder last year is still there and could escalate again under the right circumstances, an anti-fascist organisation has warned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Hope Not Hate\u2019s director of research Joe Mulhall said it is a \u201cvery, very febrile time\u201d, as he described the 2024 summer disorder as the \u201cmost widespread period\u201d of far-right violence in post-war Britain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Last year disorder spread in some parts of the UK in the wake of the Southport<\/a> murders on July 29, after false rumours were spread online that the suspect was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK by boat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Mosques, community centres and libraries were attacked, while hotels housing asylum seekers were also targeted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Dr Mulhall told the PA news agency: \u201cI think it\u2019s without question the most widespread period of far-right violence, certainly the post-war period and possibly beyond.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cWhat makes it more shocking, the speed with which it\u2019s kind of stopped getting talked about or it got written off as legitimate anger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/picture>\n

Police outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex (Yui Mok\/PA)<\/p>\n

PA Wire<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThis is a really seismic historical moment in history, post-war Britain, and very, very quickly it fell off the radar.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The disorder what the modern far-right looks like, Dr Mulhall said, now made up of \u201cvast\u201d online and offline decentralised networks, which go \u201cwell beyond\u201d individual organisations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cYou can have people that are engaging in forms of far-right activism without having been a member of anything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

He added: \u201cI think the media narrative shifted because it wasn\u2019t possible to point to a specific organisation and say \u2018this fascist group was behind it\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

He said the decentralised concept of far-right activism makes it more complex \u201cbut I don\u2019t think it makes it any less far-right\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Read More<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\n

At the height of the disorder, a fire was fuelled outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Manvers, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, on August 4.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Two men were handed nine-year prison sentences in connection with the fire, the longest jail time of the hundreds of people convicted in relation to the countrywide disorder.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Dr Mulhall said that during the period \u201cno-one was sleeping\u201d as Hope Not Hate were speaking to their sources in the far-right and monitoring dozens of events in real time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The team would then pass the information to their policy colleagues, who would contact accommodation or mosques they felt could be attacked, or refugee charities, to say they were worried about forthcoming action.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cIn one sense, (it) was empowering. I think by the end, lots of people obviously found it quite traumatic, sitting there for 11 days watching really traumatic stuff, people being beaten, people being dragged out their cars.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Dr Mulhall said the \u201cquick crackdown\u201d and quick arrests and sentencing of rioters had a \u201cdamping effect\u201d on the far-right for the months that followed, and the organisation then had a quiet period.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cI think sometimes you can think of the far-right like a volcano, you know, once it explodes, sometimes it takes some time for the magma chamber to rebuild up and the pressure to build before it pops again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThat magma chamber I talk about, under-society of anger, prejudice, misinformation, all those things, is still there, which means it\u2019s a very, very febrile time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

He added: \u201cPeople<\/a> are still furious. In some cases, they\u2019re more angry, we\u2019re further into Labour<\/a> government, the economic conditions haven\u2019t got better.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cWhich means that when you have a trigger event, like an alleged horrifying event in Epping<\/a>, all of those conditions are still there. That means that very, very quickly they can escalate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean that we\u2019re going to see another summer of riots, but it does mean that it could have got worse, and something else could happen in the coming weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Multiple demonstrations have been held outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping since July 13, after an asylum-seeker was charged with allegedly attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Essex<\/a> Police said there was an \u201cescalation of violence\u201d during protests at the same site on July 13, 17, 20 and 24, involving hundreds of people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

More than a dozen men have so far been charged with offences ranging from violent disorder to failing to remove a face covering.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Elsewhere, protests outside asylum hotels have also been reported in Norwich, Canary Wharf in London, Bournemouth, Portsmouth and Leeds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

While monitoring the events last week, Dr Mulhall said they picked up on 17 protests planned over the next 10 days, and were \u201cslightly worried\u201d about planned protests for the weekend to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But he added \u201cthis is not a mass uprising\u201d, with numbers across the country combined between 1,000 to 2,000 from activity seen so far.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

On ways to curb the tensions, he said \u201cno-one\u201d thinks that housing asylum seekers in hotels is a good idea, and highlighted the role of technology and social media, when planning and organising of the far-right is happening across online platforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the longer term he said the only thing that is going to work is a \u201cgenuine social cohesion strategy\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cYou\u2019re much less likely to believe far-right misinformation about people that live in your town if you know them, if you\u2019ve spent time with them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Anahita Hossein-Pour
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The build up of \u201canger, prejudice and misinformation\u201d that led to the disorder last year is still there and could escalate again under the right circumstances, an anti-fascist organisation has warned. Hope Not Hate\u2019s director of research Joe Mulhall said it is a \u201cvery, very febrile time\u201d, as he described the 2024 summer disorder as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":866425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173,23087],"tags":[10956,21002],"class_list":{"0":"post-866424","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conditions","8":"category-disorder","9":"tag-conditions","10":"tag-disorder"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=866424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/866425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}