The cycle of violence and right-wing agitation in Britain has become all too frightening and frequent.
It can start with a stabbing, horrific in nature, that causes fear and anger. Condemnation from political leaders and law enforcement swiftly follows.
But when the attacker is an immigrant or a person of color, a malign, distorted narrative often explodes onto the internet. Right-wing politicians and commentators seize on it to foment outrage in support of their anti-immigrant agenda, aided by social media algorithms that feed on conflict and division. Within hours, the anger they stoke online has jumped to the real world, setting off protests that become angry riots.
There are pleas for calm and promises of action by government and law enforcement. But soon afterward, the cycle begins again.
Twice in the last 10 days, vicious knife attacks in England and Northern Ireland have followed that pattern. On Tuesday and Wednesday, protesters in Belfast who were furious about an attack by a Sudanese refugee set fire to cars and property and hurled objects at the police. That followed a night of angry rioting in Southampton last week after new video was released in the murder in December of an 18-year-old college student who was falsely accused by his attacker of having perpetrated a racist assault.
“There’s a playbook,” said Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which researches extremism, hate and disinformation globally. “An incident of violence like this is identified and rapidly amplified by not just a domestic but a global, transnational, far-right ecosystem who use such incidents to absorb them into their own kind of international narrative.”
He said the dynamic has become “alarmingly familiar and even predictable.”
Britain is not alone. Across Europe and in the United States, ascendant right-wing political groups are amplifying the frustration and anger that people feel in the wake of a scary episode, and funneling it toward hostility to immigrants. Researchers say the pattern is followed by members of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Germany and France’s National Rally Party.
“We have moved from stoking hatred online to actually bringing it into the streets in a variety of ways,” said Marta Lorimer, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University. “We’re certainly seeing a blurring between this online world and what is happening in the real world, and, and part of the problem is that the political class doesn’t quite seem to know how to deal with it.”
Ms. Lorimer said Britain is especially vulnerable because it shares the English language with the United States, which she said makes it easier for right-wing groups there to use the American-based social media companies to stoke anger from afar.
That was the case on Tuesday, when Elon Musk, the owner of X, called for people to “REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY” protest in Belfast. He highlighted an image that listed protest locations distributed by Tommy Robinson, an anti-Muslim agitator in Britain with multiple criminal convictions.
“The whole of the United Kingdom is hitting the streets tonight at 7pm following yet another invader attack on our people,” Mr. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, wrote on X.
Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s populist, right-wing Reform U.K. Party, has used both of the recent knife attacks to push his anti-immigrant policy agenda. The party has become a major political force in Britain, winning local races across the country last month and consistently topping national election polls. That recent success gives him more political clout than he had a decade ago when his party was on the fringe of British politics.
After video footage emerged showing police handcuffing Henry Nowak, the college student, as he lay dying in December, Mr. Farage posted a video last week urging the public to “respond to this with pure cold rage.” He accused the police of a system of “two-tier” justice that treats ethnic minorities better than white people in Britain. In that case, Mr. Farage expressed concerns about migrants even though the convicted killer, Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh, was born in Britain.
Speaking on Wednesday, Mr. Farage described the knife attack in Belfast as an attempted “beheading,” adopting language used on the internet despite the fact that no law enforcement or government official has publicly called it that. In that case, the police charged Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese man, with stabbing Stephen Ogilvie in the head, the back and the neck, costing Mr. Ogilvie his eye.
“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this man should not have been in this country,” Mr. Farage said, even though authorities said Mr. Alodid was in the country legally.
Sundar Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank that focuses on issues of identity, said politicians like Mr. Farage are increasingly using what Mr. Katwala called “flashpoint moments” to appeal to the part of his base who want him to embrace more aggressive language.
There were roughly 500 homicides in Britain last year, many of them shocking. But if the victim isn’t white, or the crime doesn’t fit a narrative that will demonize immigrants, it is not seized on to stoke angry protests.
Other politicians have urged restraint and calm, while trying to acknowledge the appalling nature of the knife attacks. In Parliament on Wednesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned Monday’s attack on Mr. Ogilvie in Belfast and the violence in the streets that followed on Tuesday night.
“We are all sickened by this attack, but the seeds of violence and disorder have no justification,” he said.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, said on X that “people have a right to be angry. And people have the right to expect their politicians to secure our borders.” But she called the scenes of rioting in Belfast “deeply disturbing” and said that “no one has a right to burn families out of their homes.”
Ofcom, which regulates the communications industry in Britain, has warned online service providers that they have a duty to ensure that they do not spread illegal content that could inflame a crisis — by inciting violence, for example. In an open letter on Wednesday, the agency wrote that “we are already contacting individual providers where we believe there are specific risks around the presence of illegal content relating to the civil unrest.”
But those efforts have done little to curb the spread of incendiary and often misleading information on the platforms. Mr. O’Connor, of the Strategic Dialogue institute, said his organization found repeated instances this week of Facebook pages with sketchy claims that the Belfast attacker said “praise be God” in Arabic during the attack.
Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats Party in Britain, denounced what he called a pattern in which a brutal crime “makes us all feel immense pain and anger, and then extremists who exploit that grief and anger to spread hatred and violence, aided and abetted by social media barons like Elon Musk.”
The push for limits on online behavior is renewing accusations from politicians like Vice President JD Vance that Britain is undermining the free speech rights of conservatives. When Liz Kendall, Britain’s secretary for technology, posted this week about tougher new online rules the government is considering imposing, scores of people responded to her by saying Britain wants to shut down legitimate debate.
“You pretend it’s about safety but it’s about control!” one person wrote. “We SEE YOU!!!!”
Experts who study the online platforms say that they are providing forums for right-wing politicians to become more a part of the mainstream.
“The stuff that we’re hearing today, 20 years ago, would have been considered absolutely fringe, completely wild things that only the more extremist political parties would ever defend,” Ms. Lorimer said.
At the same time, she said, liberal and centrist politicians like Mr. Starmer in Britain and some Democrats in the United States are feeling pressure to move to the right with policies that respond to the concerns of angry, frustrated voters.
That forces the right to “double down into even more extreme policies that then in turn become normalized,” she said. “You really end up in a situation where it escalates quite quickly, and that’s very much where we are right now.”
