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A fresh outburst of violent disorder broke out in several English towns and cities on Sunday afternoon after dozens were arrested in clashes with the police on Saturday.
The protests are the most widespread eruption of far-right violence in the UK for years, and the first big test for the Labour government, which took office last month after 14 years in opposition.
The unrest has been fuelled by a torrent of Islamophobic and anti-immigrant misinformation spread on social media since a mass stabbing in Southport near Liverpool earlier in the week.
Far-right influencers falsely blamed the attack, in which three young girls were killed and eight other children injured, on a Muslim and used the incident to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment.
On Sunday, a far-right protest in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham turned violent as masked demonstrators stormed a hotel in the belief that it was being used to house asylum seekers.
The demonstration had begun several hours earlier but escalated as the crowd began pelting officers with debris and bottles. Footage posted online showed a bin being set on fire outside the hotel and demonstrators smashing their way inside.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper said the demonstrators had “deliberately” set fire to the building “with people known to be inside” and urged police to take “the strongest action against those responsible”.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the scenes across England this week were not protests but “violent thuggery” and that participants would face the “full force of the law”.
“This is not a protest, it is organised violent thuggery and it has no place on our streets or online,” he said.
Mosques across the country will be offered new emergency security measures, Cooper announced. The police, local authorities and mosques will be able to ask for rapid security to be deployed in the event of disorder breaking out.
In Bolton, Greater Manchester, police issued a dispersal order on Sunday afternoon as several hundred demonstrators and counter-demonstrators gathered in the town hall square.
Missiles were thrown as tensions escalated and the protests spilled out across the town centre, with the two sides confronting one another while police attempted to keep them separate.
About 300 protesters marched through Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire on Sunday afternoon before breaking through a police line in the city centre, throwing projectiles including pieces of slate and plastic bottles, and smashing up cars, police vans and buildings.
Ahead of the gathering, calls to stage a full-scale riot had circulated online. Cleveland Police said they were dealing with disorder in the town and had made a “number of arrests”.
More than 100 people were arrested on Saturday after violent gatherings in several towns and cities including Bristol, Blackpool, Hull and Liverpool, according to various regional police forces.
Starmer condemned the targeting of Muslim and other ethnic minority communities, including attacks on mosques. He said that police had been attacked, while “wanton violence” was carried out by individuals making Nazi salutes.
He added: “This violent mob does not represent our country and we will bring them to justice.”
Starmer said officials had held meetings throughout the weekend to ensure the necessary support and arrangements were in place to handle the disturbances and speed up the processing of arrests, charges and convictions.
He said that, after riots in 2011, the Crown Prosecution Service led the prosecutions of thousands of people involved. Starmer was director of public prosecutions at the time.
Judges were on Sunday considering keeping courts open all night to work through the backlog of cases, as they did in the wake of the 2011 riots.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council said 4,000 extra officers were in place across the country to deal with any further outbreaks of violence.
South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard called the scenes in Rotherham “brutal thuggery directed against some of the most vulnerable people in our society”.
Former prime minister and Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak said the violence had nothing to do with the tragedy in Southport. “This is violent, criminal behaviour that has no place in our society . . . [those involved] must face the full weight of the law,” he posted on X.
Shadow home secretary James Cleverly said there was no “justification or rationale” for the violence.
Cartography by Steven Bernard
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