Smaller and less diverse U.K. cities have been rich ground for far-right recruitment

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

It's been more than a week of race riots across the U.K., stoked by misinformation and disinformation online. The violence has mostly been in smaller, poor and less-diverse U.K. cities, which experts say have become fertile ground for far-right recruitment. NPR's Lauren Frayer traveled to Tamworth, England, where a migrant hotel was attacked, and she sent us this report.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: I'm standing on a highway overpass, looking at the Holiday Inn Express, where there's some broken glass outside. One of the outer walls has been repainted because, just yesterday, it was scrawled with graffiti that said, get out of England. I talked to some of the hospitality staff, who described a harrowing night spent barricaded behind the front desk, terrified.

Matthew Seawright knows some of the people arrested for throwing bricks through windows here.

MATTHEW SEAWRIGHT: I do, yeah. No, I'm not even speaking to them anymore. Shameful.

FRAYER: Seawright is a boxer with a shaved head and neck tattoos. He grew up with these lads. He used to go drinking with them. But he says he's seen them succumb to disinformation and hysteria.

SEAWRIGHT: Yeah. I think everybody just needs to calm down. These immigrants, people think that - I don't know - they're taking the jobs or they're being pedophiles to people - kids. Because of social media, people believe stuff that isn't true.

FRAYER: And maybe it wouldn't bother him as much, says Seawright, who is white, if it weren't for his son.

SEAWRIGHT: I'm more worried about him because of his color.

BRENDAN SEAWRIGHT: I get it. Whether something's happening or not, I spend most days getting called things, so I'm just used to it now.

FRAYER: That's his teenage son, Brendan Seawright, who is mixed race, identifies as Black and feels pretty vulnerable now. This town of Tamworth, about three hours north of London, is typical of places where Muslims, immigrants and people of color have been targeted. It's mostly white, working-class, with fewer college grads. Social services have been cut. And a few years ago, the government took over the local Holiday Inn to house undocumented migrants.

JOHN MARTIN: They're getting food and lodgings, and people are like, well, we're paying for that - my tax money, your tax money.

FRAYER: John Martin is a self-described bin man, a trash collector, who says he doesn't condone violence, but he understands why people are, quote, "fed up."

MARTIN: You can go to some parts of Birmingham, and you'll see notices on lampposts saying, Blacks only - no whites after a certain time of day.

FRAYER: And where did you learn about that? You saw it?

MARTIN: I haven't - I've personally not seen it, but I've been told.

FRAYER: The fear and resentment he feels and the misinformation he's repeating is what far-right groups tap into and take advantage of, says Julia Ebner, the head of Oxford University's Extremism Lab.

JULIA EBNER: A lot of these movements do appeal to grievances that are socioeconomic, to people who feel left behind, who feel that they might be deprived of something or that they're being treated unfairly.

FRAYER: When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he restored several far-right accounts, including that of a British fascist who's been in and out of prison and calls himself Tommy Robinson. His anti-Muslim group, called the English Defense League, or EDL, was thought to be defunct. But Ebner says it was quietly gathering followers in places like this.

EBNER: The far right wants to go back to a world where white men hold all the privileges. And it's interesting because that is combined, however, very paradoxically, with a sense of technological futurism. They use the latest tricks on social media, even AI, to manipulate images, to spread disinformation.

FRAYER: U.K. authorities hope prison sentences and travel bans will be a powerful deterrent to radicalization and violence in communities like this one. But Ebner says she's not quite sure it'll actually work.

EBNER: Because you have crowds of people who've now been protesting already for several days. There's a very powerful group dynamic, and it's becoming part of their identities.

FRAYER: She studied the 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection and the social media accounts that incited that. And her conclusion was that when people who feel left behind suddenly feel part of a movement and believe in something, even if it's not true, it can be hard to convince them otherwise. And that is the challenge for the U.K.'s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, once this violence abates - first and foremost, to reassure minorities that they will be safe, and then to address the misinformation, radicalization and inequality that these riots have revealed.

Lauren Frayer, NPR News, in Tamworth, England.

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