Thousands of additional police flood British streets after race riots

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Thousands of additional police are flooding British streets today after a week of race riots across the country.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

Far-right mobs have attacked people, mosques, even immigration law offices. It's the biggest challenge to date for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who took office just a month ago. Already, he's in a standoff with Elon Musk about this issue.

MARTIN: NPR's Lauren Frayer is in Tamworth, England, where a hotel housing asylum seekers was attacked. Hello, Lauren.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Hi, Michel.

MARTIN: So tell us what's the atmosphere there?

FRAYER: It feels like hysteria, disinformation, people just repeating things over and over that they see online. The hotel that was attacked here, it's been used as temporary refugee housing for the past two years. And locals have all these crime stories that they blame on it. Here's a man named Stephen Roberts I talked to.

STEPHEN ROBERTS: Apparently, the other week, by the bowling alley, there was a machete attack. Their own fighting each other. Oh, it's been going on for ages, but that doesn't get reported in the news. That's the problem.

FRAYER: There was a knife attack recently. It was reported in the news. There's no indication, though, it involved asylum seekers from this hotel. And the same jumping to conclusions is what started these riots. Children were stabbed last week. Rumors spread that a suspect was an undocumented migrant, a Muslim, none of which was true, but these riots erupted and have spread across the country. Muslims, minorities, people of color, are being targeted, and people I've talked to are terrified.

MARTIN: Lauren, is there any sense that these riots are organized? Do they appear to be organized in any way?

FRAYER: I put that to Julia Ebner, who heads an extremism lab at Oxford University. And she says, yes, the violence is organized in part by the English Defence League or EDL. It's an anti-Islam group that was thought to be defunct but clearly is not.

JULIA EBNER: It's not just migration and Islam that they're protesting against, it's also what they see as the complicit media outlets who they believe are covering up stories, covering up migrant crimes.

FRAYER: And here in Tamworth, they're tapping into existing prejudices and amplifying them online. Elon Musk himself is playing a role in this.

MARTIN: How so? What's he been saying?

FRAYER: So Musk, when he bought Twitter, he restored the accounts of some far-right figures who had been banned, including one of the leaders of the English Defence League, a man who calls himself Tommy Robinson. He's a fascist who's been in and out of prison. He and Musk have been interacting on X sharing conspiracy theories. Musk wrote to his nearly 200 million followers that a U.K. civil war is inevitable. And he's also been sort of taunting the prime minister here, Keir Starmer, online, accusing Starmer of having a two-tier policing system that treats white people unfairly. The U.K. government is pleading with Musk to use his platform responsibly - lives are at stake here.

MARTIN: And what is the U.K. government doing?

FRAYER: So aside from deploying thousands more police, speeding up court appearances for suspects, the government has a special team flagging social media posts that incite violence. And I've actually seen this anecdotally. People here show me - want to show me something they saw on Facebook or TikTok, and then it's been removed. People are being arrested for hate speech online, hate crime laws are being used and the government is looking at officially banning groups like the EDL, just like they do for terror groups abroad.

MARTIN: That is NPR's Lauren Frayer in Tamworth, England. Lauren, thank you.

FRAYER: Thanks, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.