Shops destroyed in Hull riots, August 2024. Dom Fellowes/wikimedia commons. 

Online misinformation and anti-immigration sentiment have helped fuel the worst unrest seen in the UK for more than a decade. 

On 30 July, disorder erupted on the streets of Southport, in the north of England, not far from a peaceful vigil for three girls killed the previous day in a knife attack during a dance class.

The police arrested an individual from a nearby village in connection with this attack, but, given his age, reporting restrictions prevented him from being named immediately. False information about the identity and background of the suspect was shared online, and a large crowd later attacked a mosque in Southport. Dozens of police officers were injured in the chaos. 

In the days that followed these events in Southport, individuals and groups continued to stoke fears and spread disinformation online, including about the Muslim community and those seeking asylum in the UK. Disturbances involving violence, arson and looting broke out across England and Northern Ireland. In many places, mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers were the targets of violence. 

The UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer KC, condemned the violence as ‘an assault on the rule of law and the execution of justice.’ The UK last witnessed such civil unrest in August 2011 when violent disorder engulfed London over four days before spilling out to other cities. The 2011 unrest followed protests after the death of a man in Tottenham, north London, at the hands of police.

Starmer, then Director of Public Prosecutions, led an initiative to keep magistrate courts open 24 hours a day and gave them powers to pass longer sentences. In connection to the 2011 riots, almost 4,000 people had been arrested by early September 2011 and close to 2,000 faced prosecution. 

Given this background, Mark Stephens CBE, Co-Chair of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute and a partner at Howard Kennedy in London, says the most recent disturbances have fallen in Starmer’s ‘sweet spot of law’ and meant that the courts, despite ongoing backlogs, were able to hand down sentences quickly to quell the unrest.

Dozens have already appeared in court and been sentenced. As of mid-August, over a thousand people had been arrested and 575 charged across the UK in connection with this summer’s disorder, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

Although some have raised concerns that the desire for ‘swift justice’ to deter those planning similar unrest could lead to miscarriages of justice, many have pleaded guilty so far, meaning their sentences can be passed down quickly without the need to go to trial.  

Given the role of online misinformation in both inciting the disorder and allowing it to escalate, Stephens has been struck by how the courts have been handling this challenge in the absence of the Online Safety Act, which has yet to be fully implemented. ‘They’re relying on old laws like incitement to hatred or racial hatred and harassment,’ he says. ‘The sentences so far for people online have been as serious as those for people who were actually at the riots.’

The Online Safety Act was given royal assent in October 2023 but is being implemented in three phases as consultation continues over how to make the new rules workable in practice. The legislation is designed to provide greater safeguards for online users against illegal content including hatred, disorder, the provocation of violence or certain instances of disinformation. It’ll also require tech companies to assess the risks posed by such content within three months and take ‘appropriate steps’ to remove it from their platforms. 

The Act is expected to be fully in force by early 2025, but some commentators argue that the recent unrest could have been diffused more quickly if the legislation had already been put in place. ‘The difficulty is persuading the platforms to remove the material which is inciteful – that’s the lacuna,’ says Stephens. 

Ofcom, the UK’s regulator for online safety, says the new Act will eventually require the largest tech companies ‘to go even further – by consistently applying their terms of service, which often include banning things like hate speech, inciting violence, and harmful disinformation.’ 

Following the unrest, Ofcom published an open letter urging tech companies not to wait for the law to be fully implemented. Instead, Ofcom told them, ‘you can act now – there is no need to wait to make your sites and apps safer for users.’

The disorder took another ugly turn when, several days in, a list purporting to contain the addresses of dozens of immigration law firms and advice centres was circulated on social media to provide targets for further violence, alongside calls for people to ‘mask up’ and attend the addresses at specific times and information on carrying out arson attacks.  

Police deployed around 2,200 additional riot officers to protect those targeted on the list. David McNeill, Director of Public Affairs and Campaigns at the Law Society of England and Wales, praises the ‘strong response’ by the authorities to the threat. ‘They took it really seriously and very likely saved the lives of many of our members,’ he says. 

McNeill says it was also heartening to see members of the public support the legal profession, such as in Brighton, where hundreds of counter-protesters took to the streets after a handful of demonstrators gathered outside an immigration law firm.

McNeill says the threat posed by the list should act as a wake-up call of the dangers of anti-lawyer and anti-immigration public discourse such as that witnessed in the UK in recent years. ‘These solicitors and advice centres were targeted because they provide immigration law advice and representation to asylum seekers – no other reason than that,’ he says. ‘One of the lessons for us is these attacks on lawyers start small. They start with what looks like a grumpy, headline-seeking politician making a cheap jibe, but they can turn into something very nasty, very quickly. Other jurisdictions should be wary of this lesson.’