A month after taking office, Labour leader Keir Starmer is facing his first major crisis. On Monday, August 5, the British prime minister called an emergency meeting for part of his government, following a weekend of unprecedented violence, as rioters shouting racist slogans attacked people of color, emergency shelters for asylum seekers and mosques in dozens of locations across England and Northern Ireland.

At the end of the meeting, the leader, who ended 14 years of conservative rule on a very centrist program focused on order, justice and tackling anti-social behavior, denounced events that were "not protest. It is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities," said Starmer, who promised a "standing army" of specially-trained police officers was ready to be deployed to fight extremists – without going into details. He also hoped that the rioters would be brought to justice as quickly as possible, and stressed that "criminal law applies online as well as offline."

This urban violence is the most significant the UK has seen since the riots of August 2011. Back then, they spread from London to the rest of the country, after a Black Briton was killed by police in the north of the British capital. In recent days, it was the spread of false information on social media about the identity of the person suspected of killing three young girls in the July 29 knife attack in Southport, not far from Liverpool, that provoked the violence.

Rumors attributed the killing to a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived on British shores in a "small boat," which the police denied, specifying that the presumed murderer was born in Cardiff, Wales. But, as in Dublin when the Irish capital was ransacked by anti-migrant rioters in late 2023, following a false rumor born after a knife attack outside an elementary school, British rallies have been spontaneously organized via messaging apps - including Telegram – without any real leaders.

The resort to violence by the mostly male participants has been justified online by racist, anti-Islam far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, who present Muslims as a threat to British identity. They accused "comrade" Starmer of "double standards" when it comes to policing – claiming the police are lax with Muslim rioters and tough on white rioters.

The prime minister, who was director of public prosecutions (a kind of super prosecutor) for England and Wales in the late 2000s, presided over the judicial response to the riots in 2011, At the time, around 3,000 people were arrested and 2,000 convicted. The courts sat exceptionally to decide their fate as quickly as possible. "For me, it was the speed [of processing cases] that I think may have played some small part in bringing the situation back under control," said Starmer afterward. The Home Office highlighted on X on Monday evening that rioters could face up to 10 years in prison.

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