UK fears new summer of unrest, year after Southport riots

Police have arrested 16 people since protests flared last week outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in the town of Epping, northeast of London. In one demonstration, eight police officers were injured.

The unrest was "not just a troubling one-off", said the chairwoman of the Police Federation, Tiff Lynch.

"It was a signal flare. A reminder of how little it takes for tensions to erupt and how ill-prepared we remain to deal with it," she wrote in the Daily Telegraph.

Protestors shouted "save our children" and "send them home", while banners called for the expulsion of "foreign criminals".

Cabinet minister Jonathan Reynolds on Thursday urged people not to speculate or exaggerate the situation, saying "the government, all the key agencies, the police, they prepare for all situations.

"I understand the frustrations people have," he told Sky News.

The government was trying to fix the problem and that the number of hotels occupied by asylum seekers had dropped from 400 to 200, he added.

The issue of thousands of irregular migrants arriving in small boats across the Channel, coupled with the UK's worsening economy, has triggered rising anger among some Britons.

Such sentiments have been amplified by inflammatory messaging on social networks, fuelled by far-right activists.

Almost exactly a year ago on July 29, 2024, three young girls were stabbed to death in a frenzied attack in northwestern Southport.

The shocking killings stoked days of riots across the country after false reports that the killer -- a UK-born teenager whose family came to the country from Rwanda after the 1994 genocide -- was a migrant.

Nearly 24,000 migrants have made the perilous journey across the Channel so far in 2025, the highest-ever tally at this point in a year.

The issue has become politically perilous, putting pressure on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer's centre-left government, as the anti-immigrant, far-right Reform UK party rises in the polls.
'More unrest likely'
The Epping protests were stirred after a 38-year-old asylum seeker, who only arrived in Britain in late June, was arrested and charged with three counts of sexual assault.

Images from the protests have gone viral on social networks, mirroring what happened last July. But Epping residents have maintained that the protests are being fuelled by people from outside the community.

"These violent scenes ... are not Epping, and they are not what we stand for," the Conservative MP for Epping, Neil Hudson, told parliament Monday.

While calm was restored to Epping, a middle-class suburban town with a population of 12,000, tensions remain palpable.

"This is the first time something like this has happened," one local who lives close to the Bell Hotel told AFP, asking not to be named.

"The issue is not the hotel, but extremists applying a political ideology," he added.

Late on Thursday, the hotel, cordoned off behind barriers, was again the centre of a protest involving dozens of people, with police making one arrest.

With another protest expected on Sunday, the local council voted through a motion to demand the government no longer house asylum seekers at the hotel.

The UK is "likely to see more racist riots take place this summer", said Aurelien Mondon, politics professor and expert on far-right and reactionary discourse at Bath University.

Anti-immigrant protests have already erupted elsewhere, with demonstrations in the southeastern town of Diss in Norfolk outside a similar hotel on Monday.

Last month, clashes flared for several days in the town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland after two teenagers with Romanian roots were arrested for the alleged attempted rape of a young girl.
'Civil disobedience'
"It is well documented that many of the protests we are witnessing are not the result of grassroots, local movements," Mondon said.

"Social media plays a role and facilitates coordination amongst extreme-right groups," but it is "also crucial not to exaggerate" its power, he added.

High-profile far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who was blamed for stoking the Southport unrest, announced he would be in Epping on Sunday, before later seeming to scrap the plan.

The firebrand anti-Islam campaigner has just been freed from jail after spreading fake news about a Syrian immigrant, but faces trial on a separate issue in 2026.

"I don't think anybody in London even understands just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale," said Reform leader Nigel Farage.

"Most of the people outside that hotel in Epping weren't far right or far left," he said, they "were just genuinely concerned families".