After a week of violent riots across several major British cities, leading to dozens of police injuries and over 400 arrests, the UK government is suggesting that foreign countries were involved in inciting the riots.

The government’s adviser on political violence and disruption Lord Walney told Sky News this weekend that “far-right actors” leading violent protests are “almost certainly aided and abetted by hostile states in creating and planning disinformation to put out false narratives.” He referred explicitly to two countries: “You’ll have troll factories in places like Russia and Iran full of Russian or Iranian nationals pretending to be Brits with extreme views.”

Violent protests started in Southport in Northwest England when a teenager attacked a community centre, stabbing a group of child dancers, killing three and wounding more. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim social media accounts quickly claimed that the attacker was a Muslim immigrant.

British courts broke a legal tradition of not naming minor defendants and released the name of the 17-year-old attacker, who turned out to be a British-born Christian from a church-going family. Meanwhile, however, riots broke out in response to the original disinformation in cities like Manchester and Liverpool. On Saturday, far-right activists attacked a peaceful demonstration calling for stopping the war on Gaza in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.

The government is trying to curb the violence, vowing to use greater police force and resources and have the judicial system work around the clock to ensure those responsible for violence are properly indicted. According to eyewitnesses and government officials speaking to the media, “what we have seen are not demonstrations, but violent acts of racism and thuggery that cannot be tolerated.” Protesters have attacked police officers, setting fire to businesses and other public properties.

The Neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative, and the extremist far-right English Defence League (EDL) are both involved in the violence. Protesters chant Islamophobic slogans that have been called hateful. Some politicians from the right and far-right are pouring oil on the fire by statements emboldening the rioters’ behaviour.

Hours after Monday’s attack in Southport, MP Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigration Reform Party, posted a video insinuating that the police had withheld information about the stabbings. Many of Farage’s followers from the defunct British National Party were spotted in those violent protests. His remarks gave more credence to spreading the lie that the Southport teen was a Muslim immigrant.

The Conservative (Tory) Party leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch claimed in an interview with the right-leaning paper the Daily Telegraph that “integration is not working”, attacking the idea of multiculturalism in Britain.

Extremist far-right views are now more visible and they have been adopted by mainstream politicians like former Home Office minister Suella Braverman and Priti Patel. Commentators have tried to downplay the threat of extremism from within by blaming social media disinformation on foreign powers.

The former head of the intelligence service MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove told LBC Radio he would not be surprised if the riots in Southport, London, Hartlepool, and Manchester were stoked by “Kremlin bots”: “We’re in a state of grey warfare with Russia. We may not feel that we are, [but] they certainly think they are, and the information space, and the exploitation of that space, is a fundamental tactic in their conflict with the West.”

Some commentators actually blame the unprecedented violence by extremists on the streets of British cities on Israel and its Islamophobic “cronies”. British producer and editor David Miller posted on X that the main figure behind the false information that started the riots “has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counter-Jihad’ Islamophobia movement established by that state”.

He is referring to the EDL founder “Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, publicly known as Tommy Robinson. Last Monday, a High Court judge issued an arrest warrant for Robinson for his alleged breach of an injunction forbidding him from repeating lies about Jamal Hijazi, a teenage Syrian refugee at the centre of a 2018 school bullying row in West Yorkshire. In July 2021, Hijazi won a hundred thousand pounds in damages following a defamation case against Robinson, who had falsely accused him of being “a violent thug”. However, Robinson chose to repeat the claims in a film he broadcast at a mass rally of his followers in Trafalgar Square, central London, last weekend.

When the EDL was incorporated in 2011, two years after its inception, it was named the English & Jewish Defence League, according to Miller: “The Jewish Defence League, a Zionist terrorist organisation, has been a key part of violent Islamophobic street thuggery in the UK over the past decade.”

Miller added that Robinson is “one of the most high-profile actors in the State of Israel’s Online Influencers Programme in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm. He and others, like Oli London, Noa Tishby, Hen Mazzig, Arsen Ostrovsky and Emily Schrader (and many others) are paid to distribute Zionist propaganda; of which pushing back against pro-Palestine protests and sowing Islamophobia are two important and inter-linked aims.”

Those claims by Miller are no more verifiable than claims by government officials that Russia or Iran are behind the spread of false information. What remains true is that some politicians, not only far-right ones like Farage but mainstream figures like Badenoch, are empowering extremists with their anti-immigrants and anti-Muslim rhetoric. This feeling is not only echoed by them, but also exaggerated by social media, fringe websites and even in the mainstream press like The Telegraph and The Times.

Many observers do not expect the rioting and violence to subside any time soon, as the government continues to take a cautious approach despite strong statements from ministers. The UK looks to be set for an exceptionally hot summer, but for all the wrong reasons, with wildfires started by extremists looking difficult to control.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly