Over the past six days, Britain has experienced its worst rioting since the summer of 2011, when the Metropolitan Police shot and killed a black man in North London. At the time Keir Starmer, as director of public prosecutions, kept the courts running 24/7 to bring the rioters to justice, and he has now vowed similarly punitive action.

For Starmer, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and other Labour figures, the violence and its causes are largely down to far-Right racism and anti-immigration bigotry. But some of the areas that have experienced the most intense rioting do not have an immigration problem. In fact, many of the flashpoint areas are extremely homogeneous.

In Sunderland, police faced “serious and sustained levels of violence” during riots over the weekend as buildings and cars were burned. According to the 2021 census, which provides the best data available despite the record mass immigration that has occurred since, 94.6% of 274,200 people in Sunderland identified their ethnic group within the “White” category. Only 3% identified as “Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh” (compared with 2.7% the previous decade). Only 1.8% of the population is Muslim.

UK riot flashpoint areas don’t all have high Muslim populations

Proportion of overall population identifying as Muslim in selected cities/towns (%)

In Tamworth, where a viral video showed rioters targeting a migrant hotel, 0.5% said they were Muslim while 95.8% identified their ethnic group as “white”. In Blackpool around 1,000 protestors were involved in violent clashes, with police horses separating anti-immigration protesters and anti-racist protestors. Only 1.4% of the city’s 141,000 population is Muslim, while only 2.6% of residents identified their ethnic group within the “Asian or Asian British” category.

Rotherham — a town which will always struggle to shake its reputation for the grooming gangs scandal — actually has a relatively small Muslim population of 5.1%, yet a hotel housing migrants was still attacked. By contrast Bolton, which also experienced riots with one of the largest Muslim counter-protests, has a 20.1% “Asian or Asian British” population, up from 14.0% in 2011, with 19.9% describing themselves as Muslim, up from 11.7% the decade before.

These case studies show that there is no exact rule about which places are likely to experience rioting, as both ethnically homogeneous and diverse parts of the country have suffered. But places where people feel left behind and totally abandoned by the South-East — the seat of power and the only solvent region — are naturally more susceptible to violent protest.

In 2022, Blackpool was named Britain’s depression capital, with 34,000 residents on antidepressants. In Hartlepool, where there was also serious unrest, it was reported in January 2023 that the number of deaths from drug addiction had increased by more than 50% and the town had more than double the national average opiate and crack cocaine use. In Sunderland, one in three children live in poverty and the city was given £900,000 by the Government to help tackle drug abuse after being designated a hotspot.

Starmer said yesterday: “Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest; it’s pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities.” Yet when law and order has been restored, the “apparent motivation” will still be there.

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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