Here’s what far right told me at Rotherham riots

Katie Edwards, The Independent

What comes to mind when you think of a hero? Someone noble? Courageous? Someone willing to put themselves at risk to defend and protect others? Someone with a moral compass who won’t just accept injustice? Well, if you’d been at Sunday’s riot in Rotherham you’d have been spoilt for choice.

You might have got the wrong end of the stick from seeing the footage of the trouble and thought you were watching mob violence — a bunch of vigilante vandals intimidating and terrorising a minority group, as well as the broader community — but, according to the people I spoke to, you’d be wrong.

They weren’t just smashing up the hotel, threatening the safety of those inside, setting fires and damaging the property of homeowners. No. These people were moral crusaders, fighting to save their country from “invasion”. Standing up for the freedoms for which their fathers and grandfathers had fought. The rioters were freedom fighters. Patriots. People with the courage of their convictions, speaking truth to power. Protecting women and girls from sexual predators. Wow.

I should feel grateful, one man admonished me as he adjusted the neck fastening of the St George’s flag he was wearing as a cape. “Or”, he asked as he swigged from his can of lager, “do you want to be raped?” That conversation had taken a dark turn. I have to say, for someone claiming to protect and defend me, he wasn’t half making me feel uneasy. If that’s the response to the people they’re purporting to defend then I was genuinely fearful for the people they were targeting. “Enough is enough, love,” he said. “Enough is enough. Something needs to be done. This is a start.”

“Enough is enough of what, though?” I genuinely didn’t understand. I went to secondary school in Wath during the Nineties and my family live on the Manvers estate, the site of Sunday’s violence, and I still live nearby. My encounters with residents of the hotel have only ever been pleasant and polite. My teenage niece and nephew have gone to watch residents play cricket many times and they have nothing but good things to say about the people they’ve met. My own experience of the hotel’s residents is similar. On two occasions, young men from the hotel have helped me to get my mentally challenged mum into the car when we were struggling. So I was surprised to hear one rioter’s claim that women on the estate are scared to go out because of harassment by the residents. Apparently, girls who go to Manvers Lake are approached “constantly” by the residents. “They need sending back,” he concluded. I said that my teenage nieces, who’ve lived on the estate for years and regularly meet friends at the lake, say they’ve never been harassed or approached by residents at the hotel and never seen that happen to anyone else either. “What about the Rotherham physical abuse then? All them girls, raped,” he countered. But what’s that got to do with the residents of this hotel I wondered aloud... “Listen, leave, love,” he said. And that was the end of that conversation.

I went to what was advertised, disingenuously in my opinion, on social media as a “‘peaceful protest”. I knew it would be anything but peaceful. Apparently, the organisers were “devastated” that the demonstration had turned nasty — but it didn’t seem that unexpected to me. In the current context, when mosques are being targeted on the pretext of “protesting” the appalling deaths in Southport — perpetrated by a British-born Christian — it seems like it’s any excuse for racists to attack anyone they think is Muslim. But no, I was told: the rioters were definitely, absolutely not racist. Someone’s aunty was black so they were definitely, absolutely not racist. In fact, it was racist of me to bring up the issue of race. This was said while racial slurs were shouted up at the shattered windows of the hotel.

What, then, makes someone decide to spend their Sunday outside a hotel full of strangers they’ve never met, with no knowledge of their backstories or what they’re going through, to shout and scream about how much you hate them, how much you wish they’d leave, accusing them of rape and child abuse, smashing windows and doors to get into the hotel and attempting to set fire to the building? The answer, I was told, was that the hotel is “full of nonces”. Right.

There were little kids in that hotel. Families. So much for protecting the children, eh?

My sense was that the riot felt more like a hooligans’ rather than any form of protest. The atmosphere was febrile and the hatred was almost tangible.

I’ve read reports that the riots are an expression of legitimate anger about social injustice. I know that people in my local area are angry. I’m angry.

It’s 40 years since the miners’ strikes and we’re still reeling from the social violence of the pit closures. We’ve got unemployment, substance abuse issues, poverty and town centres that have more boarded-up shops than ones that are trading. I get it. The deprivation of the area stems from the closure of the mining industry and the government’s failure to create any meaningful employment in its place. We see the results of that neglect all around us every day.

It’s ironic, then, that the Manvers estate, where Sunday’s riot took place, is built on a former colliery, while some of the staunchest defenders of the violence have claimed to be ex-miners involved in the strikes of 1984, attempting to compare the two as morally equivalent protests. But the riots of 2024 couldn’t be more different. Forty years ago, local miners risked poverty and repossession to fight against governmental power for their livelihoods and their communities. That was courageous.

In 2024, masked rioters attack a hotel because they think it houses some people who are Muslim. And don’t get me started on the sudden desire to protect women and girls from sexual violence — that’s just an attempt to give the violence a veneer of moral respectability. The grooming scandal gives the rioters what they consider to be moral justification for attacking immigrants. Where’s the anger about the epidemic of sexual violence we’re currently facing? Oh, that’s right. Because it’s not really about protecting women and girls at all.

As one of the residents put it: “Me and my daughters have never felt unsafe here with the people in the hotel but the English protesters made us feel very unsafe. I felt absolutely ashamed to live here.”