The enemies within: How the pandemic radicalised Britain

Editor’s note: For the first time, we are joining forces with our sister titles in Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham to publish a joint piece that tries to explain the violence we have seen in the past fortnight, perhaps the most widespread far-right disorder since the Second World War. It draws on the reporting we have done over the past few years, as well as our eyewitness accounts of some of the worst riots since the Southport stabbing. 

By Jack Walton (in Liverpool), Dan Hayes (in Sheffield), Kate Knowles & Josh Sandiford (in Birmingham) and Ophira Gottlieb & Joshi Herrmann (in Manchester)

In February 2023, a few days after an ugly riot outside the Suites Hotel in Knowsley left a police van torched to a burnt husk, a young mum of two called Connie stood on the porch of her friend's home near the hotel and explained her issue with the asylum seekers living in her town. “When we go on holiday, we don’t go away to molest their kids,” she said. “When they come here, they’re taking over our jobs, our houses, taking over our country. Now they’re trying to do stuff to our kids.” 

Connie’s fears, and the fears of others in the town, stemmed from a video of an asylum seeker who had been placed in the Suites Hotel by the government, albeit briefly. In the video, he approaches a 15-year-old girl in nearby Kirkby and asks for her number. “You don’t do this in this country. You go to jail if you do this,” the girl replies. The video was widely shared online, the Knowsley rumour mill went into overdrive and before anyone had the chance to take stock, a large cloud of acrid smoke had risen above the streets of Kirkby and missiles were raining down on the police. 

The view from inside the hotel was one of horror. “From my room, I just heard the sound and saw fire,” a 30-year-old man from Iran told us at the time. Outside his window, 400-odd people jostled and screamed; some smashed the windscreen of a police van with stolen riot equipment, others spray-painted the word “nonce” onto the vehicle’s side. Overhead, he could hear the rhythmic beat of helicopter blades.

Another man, from Sudan, explained the effect of the riot on his life in Knowsley. “Before that, I was walking around without fear, but now and after what happened I am afraid to go out alone. I am afraid for my life,” he said. For several weeks afterward, asylum seekers in the town were randomly attacked, one by two men armed with batons on electric bikes, and another while drawing money from an ATM. All the asylum seekers we spoke to condemned the man in the viral video but couldn’t understand the collective punishment. “Of course I was angry at him,” the Sudanese man said. “I did not accept what he did, and he should be the only one punished, not all of us.”

It wasn’t just the video that had set things off though. Word had circulated of other incidents, stories we struggled to verify: attempted abductions in the nearby woods, worrying stories about women being followed in supermarkets, stares that seemed to last too long for comfort on the bus. “I’ve never known anything like this until they got shipped into the Suites,” Connie said. “You can’t walk around now. What happens if you get snatched?”

The warning shot 

At the time, the riot barely held the attention of the national media and local leaders didn’t seem in the mood for introspection. Instead, they pointed the finger outwards, towards dedicated extremists from elsewhere. Appearing on the BBC, Wigan’s MP Lisa Nandy said: “What I want your viewers to know most of all is that in the North of England, in places like Knowsley, this is not who we are.” She referred to a “small number of far-right activists who whip up hate and hostility in this country” and said they “do not speak for people in Knowsley”. Steve Rotheram, Liverpool’s metro mayor, said “the disturbing scenes in Knowsley aren’t representative of our area or its people”. But the riot should now be seen for what it was: an urgent, highly visible warning of what was to come.

It’s true that several known far-right activists were present outside the Suites Hotel, including James Costello, a bombastic racist who was prominent in the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative and calls himself the Pontifex Maximus of the white supremacist Creativity Movement. But when we went door to door in the days after the riot, interviewing people who had taken part, it became clear that this was largely a local affair. The participants included people like Connie, who lives down the road, and a man on the same street as the hotel who said he awoke one night to find someone breaking into his home (he suspected the intruder was an asylum seeker but had no evidence for that claim). 

In stark contrast to this week’s quick-fire justice, the bulk of the rioters caught by police were only sentenced in March this year. Of the eight men handed jail terms, one was from nearby Liverpool and the remaining seven from Kirkby itself. All lived within a ten-minute drive of the hotel. 

At the time, we wrote that an “uncomfortable truth” was being ignored: that the Knowsley riot showed the authorities were now confronted by an enemy within communities, not outside of them. Politicians had reached for a comforting diagnosis, perhaps one learned during an earlier phase of far-right violence. Then, organised groups of thugs associated with the National Front turned up in places Oldham spoiling for a fight. But what happened at the Suites Hotel felt different. Here was an unusually effective mobilisation of local people who were mostly not members of any formal nationalist groups, against a local target that had been endlessly demonised online. 

Something had changed about the information people were receiving and the online networks they were part of. And an event that took place just over a year before the riot — and just a few miles down the road — provides a clue to what that was. 

Two worlds collide 

In January 2022, a march moved through Liverpool city centre. It was called “Worldwide Rally for Freedom: Mass Non-Compliance” and it was the latest in a series of protests against the government’s response to Covid-19. 

We attended the protest with a man called Lewis, who ran the Merseyside Resistance channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app popular with people who feel the mainstream social networks are too censorious. He started the channel in 2020 to challenge the government’s narrative about the pandemic, but against Lewis’s wishes, it became a gathering point for people who rejected the ‘official account’ of other events, including the Holocaust. Before the march, Lewis was nervous that far-right activists might attend, which to him was not what Merseyside Resistance was meant to be about. His fears were well-placed: a man handing out leaflets advertising For Britain (a far-right party that wants to ban all Muslim immigration) moved through the crowd and Lewis also spotted a former member of the British National Party (BNP).

Lewis’s group had moved across to Telegram after his attempts to organise small-scale in-person activism were being thwarted by Facebook, part of what he describes as a “mass exodus” onto less regulated platforms (he says his original Facebook group, Liverpool Fight for Freedom, was taken down three times). He describes himself as one of many people who were effectively radicalised by the pandemic, a time when people suddenly spent much more time on the internet. Previously, during shifts at his night-time security job, he had begun to watch videos that he now recognises as promoting outlandish conspiracy theories. When Covid-19 hit, he became one of the most active organisers in the local anti-vaccine scene.  

Michael Marshall, co-founder of Merseyside Skeptics Society, which challenges conspiratorial thinking, is another who noticed the trend. During the pandemic, he saw lots of posts from figures like Tommy Robinson pop-up in anti-vaxx Telegram channels. “I don’t think that’s because Tommy Robinson had been up until that point an avowed anti-vaxxer,” Marshall says. “I think it’s because he and the people that he worked with realised that there’s a lot of disaffected people out there looking for easy answers, and if he fed them easy answers on the vaccine then they would start to trust him on other things.”

It wasn’t just about how much time people were spending online. Lewis now recalls that period as a moment when he could feel the presence of the state up close. “It was the first time in our lives we’d seen the government say: ‘You’re gonna do what we tell you to’”. He says his group included lots of young mums who were frustrated by the lockdowns, cooped up at home watching their bored children “playing up”. To people like that, neat theories about who was to blame were appealing. Ordinary people were being drawn into online networks that they would never have been part of before the pandemic, spaces that very quickly filled up with messages that had nothing to do with lockdowns or the much-hated Rule of Six. 

One online influencer who expanded her following during the pandemic was Bernie Spofforth, a 55-year-old managing director of a clothing company in Cheshire who enjoyed little public profile before the lockdowns began. As the journalist David Aaronovitch has noted, Spofforth was banned from X (then called Twitter) for posts spreading Covid-19 misinformation and in early 2022 she appeared on Talk TV to tell viewers that the vaccine policy was not based on science but represented a form of social control. 

On the day of the mass stabbings in Southport, Spofforth seems to have been the first person to spread the false claim that the attack had been perpetrated by a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the country on a small boat and was on an M16 watchlist. That claim spread quickly around the internet, boosted by figures like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. This week, a person matching Spofforth’s description was arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred and false communication. 

Sunder Katwala, who studies attitudes to immigration and integration at the British Future think tank, noticed a “collision” between a new breed of pandemic activists and the online far-right, both groups that are very small but “imagine themselves to be quite broad”. The merging of concerns about vaccines and lockdowns into more hateful messages introduced people to ideas and influencers who they previously may have considered weird and extreme. “People can spot a far-right that has swastikas, but normal mainstream people will struggle to spot these more diffuse forms of extremism,” Katwala says.

The theory — popular in many of the Telegram channels — that the first lockdown would lead to a permanent police state proved inaccurate. Lewis noticed that some of the most active accounts on Telegram started being deleted — as though their owner's pandemic activism was just a strange blip in their lives. They returned to their jobs, pubs and yoga groups. That included Lewis, who began to accept that the pandemic was real, and distanced himself from the anti-vaxx world. But others stuck around.

“The minute lockdowns lifted they moved onto the anti-Drag Queen stuff and then the stuff about immigrants and the invaders,” Lewis says. He explains that at this point a theory started going around that the immigrants being housed in hotels around the country would be used by the UN as a kind of army. “They had to keep the Ferris Wheel of hate going,” Lewis says. “They had to switch to something else.”

The hotel playbook 

In July 2020, a few months into the pandemic, Nigel Farage approached a 4-star hotel in Bromsgrove, 13 miles southwest of Birmingham, in a chauffeur-driven car. The now-leader of Reform UK didn’t plan to stay in the hotel — he knew from calling in advance that it was booked out, “for months and months it would seem”. Feigning ignorance, he threw his hands in the air and smirked to the camera. “I wonder why?”

The visit was a stunt. Farage knew he would be turned away as soon as he got into the hotel’s lobby, as he duly was. But the visit — filmed and posted on his YouTube and Facebook channels — served a purpose, showing that the hotel was occupied by asylum seekers, a handful of whom the video captures on camera in a slowed-down shot so their faces are visible. But Farage went much further than that, speculating at the end of the film that the people in the hotel might be terrorists.

“We've no idea who some of these people are,” Farage says to the camera. “We've no idea whether some of these might be ISIS”. Despite presenting no evidence to support that notion, the tag stuck. Elsewhere in the video, Farage’s words foreshadow the words of the Knowsley residents three years later. He relays reports of “young women” who are scared “because there are gangs of eight or ten and they’re being wolf-whistled”. 

The video went viral, attracting 1.6 million views on YouTube (his third most viewed video ever) and 3.9 million on Facebook, where it was shared thousands of times in all manner of Facebook groups. It was so successful that it spawned a series: in another video a month later, Farage pointed out the “lovely swimming pools and spas” at a different hotel, by which time he had turned it into a campaign to identify hotels housing asylum seekers. "Thank you, all of you, you've given me the addresses of these hotels,” he says in one video. In the comments under the videos, viewers referred to “an invasion” and made sinister remarks like “bullets are cheaper”.

The policy to house asylum seekers in hotels was expanded in 2020, an attempt by the government to deal with the increased numbers of small boats crossing the Channel (this reached 45,000 crossings in 2022, but was down to 29,000 in 2023). While many of the people in the hotels will have entered the country this way, some are also Afghans offered the right to settle in the UK. In April this year, the previous government announced it had reduced the numbers in these hotels by 20,000, down from 56,000 the previous September. 

As a policy solution, it was full of holes: extraordinarily expensive compared to the use of specialised facilities and always liable to give anti-immigrant activists a focal point for their protests. On top of that, the hotels used were mostly in more deprived areas of the country (where rooms are cheaper) including many of the areas that rioted last week. 

Farage presented his visits to the hotels as an attempt to ask reasonable questions on behalf of the British public, but soon a series of overtly racist influencers were mimicking his videos. In early 2022, The Mill investigated the trend of what by then was known as “hotel monstering”, counting 76 instances of the practice in the preceding 12 months across the country. An activist referring to herself as Yorkshire Rose began turning up at hotels in July 2021, sometimes heading to the same places Farage has already been. In one video, she visited a hotel in Didsbury in South Manchester, shouting at supposed refugees as she films them. “Why is it all so secretive?” she asked, “How do we know the Taliban, the jihadis are not coming? Anybody could be coming in on those dinghies.” Others followed suit, including a man calling himself Active Patriot (real name Alan Leggett). 

Around Christmas 2021 activists from Britain First, a far-right party whose leader Paul Golding was jailed for anti-Muslim hate crimes, turned up at the Victoria Hotel in Oldham. In the following weeks the news that migrants were in the hotel filtered into the News for South Chadderton Facebook group. “Filthy maggots,” reads one comment. “We do not need their wars or primitive practices in our country,” reads another. 

Roughly two and a half years after Farage posted his first hotel video, far-right activists from the group Patriotic Alternative showed up at a different hotel: the Suites in Knowsley. They were armed with leaflets — “Migrants are being given the red carpet treatment with no expense spared” one of them read. After the viral video of the asylum seeker approaching a 15-year-old girl first went online, it soon found its way into Telegram channels and a flyer promoting a protest was created. The likes of Yorkshire Rose and Active Patriot pledged to attend.

It took just a few days to go from the creation of that flyer to the bombardment of the hotel on a cold Friday night. The scenes on the night appeared to be indicative of a deep, pent-up hatred, not just of the migrants but also of the police, who many accused of “protecting paedophiles”. As the police van burnt, a chant of “Get them out! Burn it down!” rang out. One man called the police officers “nonce protecting cunts”. Another shouted: “I’ll fucking take ya right out. Get them rapist ISIS bastards out that hotel!”

The Suites Hotel protest wasn’t the first time the right had demonstrated outside one of these hotels. Britain First organised small protests outside hotels in Southport, Worcester and Essex in 2021 and a similar protest occurred in Chesire in 2021. In Ayr in Scotland, you can date this trend back as far as 2015, when 30 people turned up at a protest organised by the Scottish Defence League. But the Suites was the first to attract a significant turnout, mostly drawn from the local community, and the riot created a playbook: how to turn your grievances into action. 

From his room inside the hotel, the 30-year-old Iranian man sat on his bed and listened. “I hardly slept that night,” he said. A man from Yemen told us recently his whole perception of the country changed at that moment. “It left a negative impression on us about the people in the UK in general,” he said. “Most [of the] asylum seekers think that people will not welcome them anymore in any place.” Nonetheless, he moved on with his life, and after earning certification at a hospital in the North West will soon begin work as a surgeon.

But the conditions that created the Suites Hotel — the online connections forged during the pandemic and their exploitation by anti-immigrant voices — never went away. They just needed another incident to set things off. Then last Monday, a man walked into a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class in Southport set up for children during the summer holidays holding a kitchen knife. He stabbed three of them to death, leaving a further five, plus two adults, in a critical condition. 

The return of the riots 

Through the upstairs window of the Holiday Inn Express, Rotherham, a boy aged roughly seven could be seen looking out. As The Tribune wrote earlier in the week, he wore the “confused stare of a young boy who has no idea what’s going on and why these people seem to hate him so much.”

The frenzied knife attack in Southport had set off a chain reaction of mass rioting across the UK. It started with a false rumour spreading online that the perpetrator was a recently-arrived Channel migrant. It’s now been reported that Bernie Spofforth was the first to share that rumour. The violence began when a crowd targeted a mosque near where the stabbing took place, pelting it with bricks and bottles. We were in the crowd and this time there could be no doubt that most of the voices were local to Merseyside, if not Southport itself. 

Why a mosque and not a hotel? Katwala thinks the answer is simple. “This group was keen to target asylum seekers,” he says. “But in the end, they end up going for a mosque simply because there isn’t an asylum hotel in Southport they can find”. 

The evening’s protest had been organised on a Telegram channel called Southport Wake up, which reached around 12,000 members and was a key force in promoting riots across the entire country. Before the pandemic, when thousands of people migrated to platforms like Telegram, riots of this nature would have been “much, much harder to pull off,” says Katwala. 

One of those riots was outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the boy was staring out of the window. A 1000-strong crowd hurled rocks at the hotel, chanting “save our children” and at one stage set fire to a bin that was leaned up against the hotel — seemingly in an attempt to burn it down. “You’re protecting them,” one woman shouted police. “They are raping and killing our kids.”

As with the Suites last year, some of the rioters had links to far-right organisations. But as the cases playing out in the courts this week have demonstrated, many did not. This was an incident that attracted local people, some of whom had joined spontaneously after hours of drinking and some of whom were very young. 

The youth court at Sheffield Magistrates Court heard cases involving two boys who had been present in Manvers, aged 16 and 17. Both pleaded guilty to violent disorder and will be sentenced later this year. The 16-year-old admitted to engaging in threatening behaviour while the 17-year-old accepted he had waved a large plank of wood above his head before being bitten by a police dog. As the judge told the 16-year-old he was free to go, his mother told him to say thank you to the judge.

Rotherham wasn’t the only hotel that was attacked last weekend — in fact, it wasn’t even the only Holiday Inn Express. In the West Midlands market town of Tamworth, a crowd who gathered in the evening stuck around for three hours, throwing petrol bombs and assaulting police officers. 

When we visited Tamworth a few days later, staff at the hotel said they couldn’t speak to us, but a 68-year-old man called Michael Brennan was willing to chat, telling us he’s questioned authority since he read George Orwell’s 1984 in his twenties. Concerns about immigration in Tamworth aren’t new, he said, they’ve been brewing since the waves of Eastern European immigration during the New Labour years. 

His active interest in such matters is relatively recent, though. During the pandemic, he became an anti-vaxxer and admits to doing anti-vaxx graffiti around Tamworth. He started watching a fringe online channel called Brand New Tube and now thinks Tommy Robinson is “a hero”. He said he wouldn't get involved in hotel protests personally, but added: “If you squeeze a balloon it's going to pop”.

An old hatred 

Last Friday, we were back in Liverpool at the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque, a historic redbrick building to the north of the city centre, which was expecting a group of far-right demonstrators to show up at its gates. The mosque had been built by a Victorian Muslim convert, born Henry Quilliam, a Christian. When the mosque opened in 1889 it “immediately attracted Islamophobic vandalism,” according to Ron Geaves’ authoritative book on Quilliam’s life. “This began with stones being thrown at the back windows, scattering glass over the carpet upon which prayers were held,” he writes in Islam in Victorian Britain. 

Which is to say, violence of this sort isn’t new. Quilliam’s faith was considered heretical by many of his fellow Victorians. Eggs and stones were launched at many of his fellow converts in the street. Some 135 years later, the mosque remains. The Liverpool winger Mo Salah sometimes goes there to pray.

And yet, standing outside the mosque as counter-protestors massively outnumbered the protestors across the road, as the imam offered a conciliatory hug to a man on the other side, and as journalists and photographers stood around privately hoping for a touch more drama, it was hard not to reflect on the uniqueness of this current wave of hate.

Much of what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks feels like a culmination of the past four years: a black man surrounded and kicked to the floor in Manchester, a library set up for a deprived community torched in Liverpool, the hotel attacks in Rotherham and Tamworth, the fake rumours setting it all off in Southport, the Telegram channel urging so-called “English lads” to “rise up”, the ordinary mums, dads, aunts and grandads from all these communities marauding the streets and shouting about “nonce protectors” and “saving children”.

This new ‘far-right’, if you can call it that, looks very different. It’s much quicker to mobilise, bringing in people with no formal alliance with fascist parties. It’s managed to reach them using new channels — which were formed and bolstered throughout the pandemic. What happened at the Suites Hotel was a very clear warning sign as to what was coming, whether or not the authorities were listening.

Among the crowds of counter-protestors who had turned out to defend the Abdullah Quilliam Mosque, we suddenly spot a familiar face beneath a black and yellow cap: Lewis. The man who fell into a world of conspiratorialism during the pandemic is now standing on the opposite side of the road from the far-right and says he wants to respect the imam’s calls for peace. He agrees that immigration levels into Britain are too high at the moment but thinks that “violence is not the answer”. The asylum seekers “only want what’s best for their families — I would do the same,” he says. “We can talk about borders but I don’t understand the hate”.