Harehills, Leicester and the other riots we don’t talk about

This week marks the first anniversary of the ferocious stabbing spree at a dance class in the Merseyside town of Southport, in which three little girls were murdered by teenager Axel Rudakubana. In the days that followed, riots rocked Southport and other towns across England, fuelled by false claims that the perpetrator was an illegal Muslim migrant. More than 1,500 arrests were made and hundreds were imprisoned.

Rudakubana’s evil crimes and the riots they provoked have been a key focus of the British press in recent weeks, especially as tensions over asylum hotels have exploded into view in places like Epping in Essex and Diss in Norfolk. But there were other riots in the run-up to Southport whose anniversaries have passed without comment. One of them happened less than two weeks before the Southport atrocity.

Last year’s riot in Harehills, a multicultural suburb of Leeds, is one of the many disturbances in recent years that the establishment would like us to forget. Unrest was sparked after social services tried to take several Roma children into care. When evening fell, things soon descended into anarchy: a double-decker bus was torched, a police car was flipped on its side and a delivery van was also mobbed.

In response to this disorder, West Yorkshire Police essentially ran away. A day later, the Leeds City Council issued a joint statement with members of the Roma community – not to condemn the violence or disorder, but to praise their contribution to the ‘diversity’ of the area. According to local police, 77 arrests were made in connection with the riots, leading to 23 convictions.

Few towns illustrate Britain’s stark failures of integration as clearly as Harehills. It has become a parallel society, seemingly detached from the language, economy and even laws that prevail in the rest of the country. It is both deprived and diverse, with 43 per cent of residents born outside the UK, and home to more than 80 different nationalities.

It would be wrong to equate the scale of the riots in Harehills to those after Southport, which spread across the country and raged for days on end. But it is hardly a stretch to say that the response of the police and the media could not have been more different, despite the severe societal breakdown the Harehills riots exposed, and the damage they caused. Clearly, the ethnic background of those involved in the rioting, and the attention it drew to the darker side of multiculturalism, led to a squeamishness among the mainstream commentariat.

Harehills was not an isolated event, either. The riots that broke out in Leicester in August 2022 ought to have been an early warning sign to the establishment that all was not well in modern multicultural Britain. Then, subcontinental ethnic and religious grievances erupted in an English city. For weeks, Hindu and Muslim youths attacked one another on the streets. They also desecrated opposing places of worship and targeted businesses belonging to their antagonists. Symbolically, the rioting reached its peak on the eve of the late queen’s funeral. As in Harehills, police in Leicester – which was the first city in the UK to become majority ‘non-white’ – allowed many of the protesters essentially to tire themselves out. Although the unrest lasted off and on for nearly a month, a mere 32 convictions were recorded.

That the policing and media response should vary based on the political orientation and make-up of a crowd should hardly surprise us. We saw something similar in the summer of 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement reached British shores. The BBC described these protests as ‘largely peaceful’, even though 27 police officers were injured in a single protest – two seriously so. Property was damaged across the country, including significant monuments such as the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill. Yet these protesters were treated reverentially, with police officers and even Keir Starmer, then opposition leader, ‘taking the knee’ in solidarity.

Modern Britain is littered with tinderboxes that could ignite at any moment. We didn’t need last summer’s riots to know this – the evidence has been there for all of us to see for some time. What we have learnt, however, is that the police and media response will depend on the ‘narrative’ the riots fit into. A riot that exposes the pitfalls of multiculturalism will quickly be memory-holed.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.