‘A feeling of deprivation and being left behind': The truth behind last summer's riots

ITV News

21-05-2025

On 29 July last year, three young girls were stabbed to death while attending a Taylor Swift dance class during the summer holidays.
Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, were killed by Axel Rudakubana, who has since been jailed for a minimum of 52 years.
A day after the attack, riots broke out on the streets of Southport and within six days violence had spread to more than 30 towns and cities with more than 1,000 arrests in the weeks that followed.
The protests were fuelled by false claims on social media that the perpetrator of the Southport attack was a Muslim and an asylum seeker.
It triggered widespread disorder - including racist attacks and anti-immigration marches - leading many branding the protestors far right and racist.
Now, a leading expert, who has analysed the outbreaks of violence, has revealed what he believes to be the true underlying cause of the disorder.
Professor Paul Whiteley, who specialises in government and social science at the University of Essex, told ITV News: 'Our research shows fundamentally what's underneath this, is a feeling of deprivation that people have, a feeling of being left behind.
'Because it was very clear, from census data that we looked at, that the places where the serious violence occurred often had a lot of poverty, a lot of deprivation.'
Despite finding that deprivation was a driving factor behind the unrest, he said that discontent didn't actually erupt in some of the poorest areas of the country.
Professor Whiteley explained: 'Funnily enough, it wasn't the most poor constituencies that rioted but ones that are a little above poverty.
'If you're really poor it makes you apathetic - people don't vote, they don't get involved.
'You need to be a little bit more, have a greater sense of efficacy- a feeling that you can do things - and a little bit more money in the community for this to happen.
'Riots don't occur in really poor areas but in areas that have been downwardly mobile - losing jobs, losing places.'
Professor Whiteley and his team said they looked at four possible hypotheses behind what might have triggered the disorder across the UK last year.
They considered a correlation between increase in Reform voting, recent immigration, anti-muslim sentiment, and deprivation in areas where rioting had occurred.
He added: 'And of those four possibilities, the one that really stood out was deprivation.
'People feeling deprived, ignored, no jobs, poor prospects, poverty, low wages etc, builds up to create a sense of anger which can spill over if it's triggered - it needs to be triggered - but it can spill over into riots.
'And the trigger was unfortunately provided by the terrible crime as we know and false information, fake news on the internet, that this was a recent immigrant - that triggered it too.'
Asked if it was too simplistic to say what we saw last year was just racism, Professor Whiteley responded: 'Yes. There's a racist element, as the analysis showed.
'But there's a funny thing about immigration which is this: recent arrivals can cause problems in a community, but the evidence shows that if you track it for a long period 10 years, 15 years, people integrate.
'The racist dimension of having a lot of people come in from other cultures, other societies goes away, gradually goes away.
'But, if there's an influx for a short period - a year or two - that can cause problems. I think it was one of the triggers in the riots, but it wasn't the most important trigger.'
Professor Whiteley said that taking to the streets to protest and riot was nothing new.
'It's a phenomenon - the Urban riot - that's been with us for centuries and at one stage it was very very common,' he said.
'Democracy and giving people a voice has made it much less likely to occur. But nonetheless if governments do things which people really don't like you will get riots.
'So the possibility of violence as a form of political participation still exists, it's got much less over time, but it still exists.
Asked if we could see a repeat of last year's riots, he replied: 'A repeat is certainly possible. It's not inevitable, but it's certainly possible.
'[Last year] they just got carried away and all the anger came out and it became really irrational in a way.
'But the underlying causes were deep-seated and certainly the trigger event then allowed the pressure cooker to blow for a period.
'The government handled it very well by cracking down on it because you had to do that immediately but then subsequently you've got a step in and try and deal with these issues.'