The racial violence in Ballymena repeats a pattern that's blighted Britain for years. We must wake up to that

The Guardian

6 days ago

In early June, the violence began. Rumours of a foreigner assaulting a local woman resulted in groups roaming through a small British town, breaking windows of homes belonging to 'outsiders'. A few days later, the police attempted to stop mobs from reaching another nearby multiracial area. Eventually they broke through, ransacking shops and burning down a house, while local media reported that the violence had developed into 'something like a fever'.
Sound familiar? This isn't Ballymena, the County Antrim town in Northern Ireland that has seen several nights of unrest in which immigrant homes were attacked after reports of an alleged sexual assault on a local girl by two teenagers, who had a Romanian interpreter read them the charges. These incidents actually took place more than a century ago, during the summer of 1919, as racial violence spread throughout south Wales, eventually reaching Cardiff and the diverse district of Tiger Bay.
Back then, a number of things were blamed for the violence, among them a lack of jobs and housing for returning white servicemen, many of whom were disgusted by the relationships between local women and black men who had served in the merchant navy and made Wales their home during the first world war. The media also played their part. The South Wales Daily News claimed that it had never seen 'so black a blot on an otherwise fair and thriving town', before suggesting a fire like the Great Fire of London 'would be a godsend' that could cleanse Tiger Bay (now known as Butetown).
In Ballymena, the spark was the alleged attempted rape, coupled with the recent influx of immigrants who rioters said have 'invaded', 'infested' and 'ruined' their community. In the 2001 census, just 14,300 people, or 0.8% of the overall population of Northern Ireland, belonged to a minority ethnic group. By 2021, it was 65,600 people, or 3.4%. Still small numbers compared with England (18%), or Scotland (11%), but each of those countries saw a similar outburst of racial violence when immigration was at a comparable level.
England also witnessed riots in 1919. There was violence in North Shields and Liverpool, where a sailor called Charles Wooten drowned after being chased by a mob. Liverpool again saw Ballymena-esque scenes in 1948 when a seamen's hostel was assaulted and in 1972 when a racially mixed housing estate was attacked by skinheads. (Housing is still a flashpoint; last year, at least eight African families – half of them including nurses – were forced to flee an estate in Antrim town.) In between those incidents in Liverpool there were the race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in London in 1958, followed by the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in the capital by teddy boys a year later.
Throughout the 1970s, the rise of the far-right National Front, which had 12,000 members at its peak, created a dangerous environment in England: the historian Peter Fryer estimated that between 1976 and 1981, 31 people had been murdered by racists in Southall, Brick Lane (both in London), Swindon, Manchester and Leeds. Politicians also inflamed the issue: in 1978, in an attempt to outflank the NF, Margaret Thatcher claimed in an interview that 'People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.'
There's a much more recent history of violence in England too: last summer, mobs attacked mosques, hotels housing migrants and the homes of 'foreigners' in Hull, Hartlepool, Manchester and Liverpool after the murder of three children in Southport.
Scotland also had its, albeit delayed, racial reckoning. Although Glasgow saw race riots in 1919, it wasn't until 1989 and the murder of Somali student Axmed Sheekh that a group of activists and Black Scots forced a conversation about racism north of the border, which until then had been presented as an 'English disease'. Anti-racist activists were told that there wasn't a problem because there simply weren't any black or brown people in Scotland. In 1991, ethnic minorities accounted for 1% of the population, but a Runnymede Trust report showed that there had been a huge spike in racist assaults north of the border as these tiny communities became more visible.
There's an established pattern that Ballymena is a part of: an influx of immigrants, hostility to their presence, a denial that there is a problem with xenophobia, then a spark followed by indiscriminate violence. But many people in Britain can't see this pattern – or choose not to.
The years 1981, 2001 and 2011 linger in the memory and are what many people think of when they hear the phrase 'race riot' in a British context. Each one of those years saw unrest in black and brown communities triggered by policing (1981), far-right activity (2001) and the killing of Mark Duggan (2011), followed by hand-wringing and commentators wondering where Britain went wrong on race. The events of 1919, 1948 and 1972 dissolve quickly into the forgotten past, footnotes at best; they are certainly not woven into the national story of racial violence.
These incidents – of white violence – are presented in isolation. In Ballymena, it's impossible to understand what's happening without engaging with the recent history of Northern Ireland. The fact that most of the people attacking immigrants and the police were Protestants whose own families emigrated to Ireland generations before places the violence not just in the context of the Troubles, but also British colonialism. But they're also part of a continuum, one that links different eras and parts of the United Kingdom.
This history of violence is part of an established pattern that isn't inevitable but instead manufactured by a combination of political failings, distorted media coverage and opportunism by the far right.
It is this context that made Keir Starmer's 'island of strangers' speech so offensive. That language isn't benign; it helps set the stage for another inevitable spate of attacks. Less than a month after the speech, Ballymena exploded. Now the rhetoric doesn't just seem opportunistic but dangerous, a shameful decision that now sits alongside Thatcher's 'swamped' comments as a political intervention that further causes divisions for short-term gains. The NF collapsed in the 80s, but today Reform – led by a man whose political hero is Enoch Powell – is pulling Labour to the right.
What happens next in Northern Ireland is crucial. History shows that in the UK it's often the victims of racial violence who are blamed. After 1919 in Wales, there was a voluntary repatriation scheme, while authorities installed a new piece of draconian immigration legislation, which forced all seamen to carry an identity card, known as a 'certificate of nationality and identity issued to a British Colonial Seaman'. It was a measure that treated them like criminals.
Immigrants have already started to leave Ballymena but, as in Cardiff, many will stay. Their lives will be shaped by whether or not political leadership learns the lessons of Britain's history of racial violence.
Lanre Bakare is an arts and culture correspondent for the Guardian. He will be discussing his new book, We Were There, at the Southbank Centre in London on 11 July