(Bloomberg) -- Keir Starmer said that those responsible for the disorder and chaos that’s spreading across UK towns and cities will be punished for what he described as “far-right thuggery.”
“Those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law,” the UK prime minister said from Downing Street on Sunday. “This is not protest, it is organized violent thuggery. And it has no place on our street or online.”
Disturbances have taken place in towns and cities including Rotherham, Blackpool and Bristol over the weekend, with a number of police officers attacked and injured. The riots represent one of the biggest challenges facing the month-old Labour government, as it struggles to rein in the unrest.
Tensions have been rising since an attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance party left three young girls dead in Southport, near Liverpool, on Monday. The attacker was named as Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old from a village near Southport who was born in Cardiff.
Fueled by an online misinformation campaign, the attack was seized upon by far-right protesters, some of whom took to the street chanting anti-immigration slogans. In Rotherham, protesters on Sunday attacked a hotel they believed was housing asylum seekers and started a fire.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pledged the government’s “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. On Sunday, Cooper announced additional measures to protect the country’s mosques.
Around 300 people were involved in disturbances in the Walton area of 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. The police force said it made 23 arrests on Saturday.
“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 Sunday. Courts could sit through the night to deal with the large number of people arrested if necessary, she added.
After the Southport attack, a number of influential right-wing accounts on X spread false information about Rudakubana, including claims that he was an asylum seeker or a refugee. That led to protests and skirmishes with police, including in London, earlier in the week.
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 and break up and deter rioters. Three police officers were hospitalized after violence in Sunderland, the police force there said in a statement. There were also disturbances in Leicester, Stoke-on Trent, Nottingham and Manchester.
--With assistance from Alex Wickham and Sara Marley.
(Updates with Keir Starmer’s statement)
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