The rioting which took place across five days in July and August were the most significant episode of public disorder since 2011 and the most concerted effort at organised racist violence for decades. Attitudes research about this was published shortly after the riots, including by YouGov and by More in Common. This shows broad public disapproval of the disorder and violence, with 85% of people disapproving, according to YouGov. Some 7% of people said they were in favour of the disorder and 10-15% of people expressed tacit sympathy for those involved in violence and rioting.
Beyond that toxic, pro-violence fringe, there has been a contested political and media debate about the causes and responses to the riots – and particularly about the role of immigration politics and policy. Did this disorder bubble up from simmering frustration about how politicians were too afraid to debate immigration, and anger that governments had failed to take action to reduce immigration? Or was the violence stoked up by some of the incendiary language of those who rarely seem to talk much about anything else?
One significant focus of debate has been about the legitimacy of talking about ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration in the wake of the riots. This argument risks becoming a further source of polarisation, where those with different views talk past each other. Whatever the language chosen to express it, getting this distinction right – between legitimate concerns and those without legitimacy – is important in principle and practice.
So how should politicians and the media, those in civic society and the broader public think and talk about the role of both legitimate concerns and illegitimate prejudices?
1. There are legitimate concerns, which people may hold, about handling immigration well in a democratic society. To talk about ‘legitimate concerns’, legitimately expressed, governments need to set out clearly what is illegitimate in our democracy too.
Properly understood, legitimate concerns are a two-way street. It is important to clarify what must be permitted as legitimate speech and to set out what must be excluded too. That means navigating at least two competing types of concern about putting the boundaries in the wrong place. One is that legitimate debate might be closed down too quickly, so that mainstream views are stigmatised as extreme or racist. The other is that politicians could pander to racist violence and prejudice – giving respect to illegitimate views instead of legitimate ones – if we do not set out firm boundaries to exclude hatred, racism and xenophobia.
So it is important to be clear that the violence and disorder of the summer of 2024 was an orgy of illegitimate concerns. Thuggish racist violence is not political protest. It must be appropriate to challenge not only violent acts but language that dehumanises people – such as “invaders” and “men of fighting age” – and which clearly offers moral oxygen to those seeking to socialise people towards the kind of shocking violence seen in attacks on Muslims and asylum seekers.
It is not xenophobic to favour reductions in the overall levels of immigration – unless the arguments made are rooted in prejudice. Nor is it off-limits to worry about immigration levels, the pace of change, the pressures on housing or public services and what is going right or wrong on inclusion and integration. These concerns, about the pressures of migration and how to manage it fairly for those who come to Britain and the communities they join, can also be widely held by those who combine them with pro-migrant views.
It would be a strategic error for politicians and civic voices who want to build coalitions of public support for refugee protection and anti-racism in Britain to characterise all concerns about migration as a foil for xenophobia. This would put confirmation bias ahead of the evidence of what people think and why – characterising public audiences who are engageable and persuadable as unengageable rejectionists.
2. Legitimate concerns are expressed through legitimate means.
Legitimate concerns are expressed democratically, not through violence or threats of violence.
It is not plausible that the angriest, violent fringes are amenable to the real-world policies that governments could or should actually implement. “Give me my manifesto or we will be attacking the police and an asylum hotel,” is a threat to be policed and prosecuted, not something to be listened to with respect.
This is widely, if not universally, recognised. YouGov reports that one in six people do consider those involved in the disorder to have ‘legitimate concerns’ while a majority of the public regarded racism and a penchant for violence to be among the main motivations. A broader minority of over a third of people (35%) said they supported protests (as opposed to disorder), while 54% said they were opposed to these too. Six out of ten people said that immigration policy had played some role in the protests and disorder.
The government should engage and respond to legitimate concerns, legitimately expressed – not because of the disorder and violence, but as a way to combine policing and prosecutions of those who break the law with clarity about the scope for lawful and democratic voice on immigration.
3. Legitimate concerns address future policy choices, not those of the past.
Legitimate concerns are about the future of policy, not past policy. The scale and pace of immigration is an important part of the contemporary democratic debate. The crucial boundary is that all constructive debate is about future policy and future migrants. The 2021 census shows that ten million people – one in six of the population – were born abroad and have made a life here. It is not legitimate to contest the settled presence of past migrants.
Every mainstream political voice recognised that principle after the 2016 EU referendum. Ending free movement for a new points-based system after Brexit was a legitimate choice on future policy – as long as the more than 3 million Europeans here were welcome to stay.
This is an argument rejected by the extreme far right fringes of the debate, who continue to contest the immigration of 1948 to 1968, seeking to legitimise debates about the repatriation of settled migrants and even British-born minorities, making arguments like “we were never asked” about the settled fact of Britain as a multi-ethnic society.
It is not legitimate to call someone racist or xenophobic if they sincerely want a constructive debate about future immigration policy. But it is entirely legitimate to not accept racist arguments being legitimised. It is a legitimate concern to have your status and rights respected by the state – which did not happen to the victims of the Windrush scandal. There are legitimate concerns that politicians need to be fair to those coming to Britain and also to the experience of the communities that they join. There are legitimate concerns about being recognised as equally British, as a citizen of the country where you live. And it is a legitimate concern to expect democratic governments to recognise racist violence as racist, in order to have an ethical and effective response to it.
4. Legitimate arguments about immigration in 2024 should be capable of resonating with, rather than only being about, members of ethnic majority groups.
A fair test of legitimate concerns in the Britain of the 2020s is that arguments about how we handle migration and integration should be voiced in ways that are capable of appealing to white, Asian and Black British people alike. Many sceptical arguments about immigration – about the pace of change, pressures on services and the rights and responsibilities to get integration right – succeed in doing this.
But there are arguments about demographic change that fail this test, if they regard a rising ethnic minority population as in itself a danger or an existential threat. The Great Replacement theory, which posits an elite conspiracy to displace the white majority population, is one virulent example, deployed by extreme groups as an effort to radicalise people. Some political voices fail this test by conflating ethnic diversity with migration and integration – for example, making arguments that cities like London, Manchester or Birmingham have become unrecognisable to British people if the white British share of the population drops below a 50% majority. This argument makes little sense to those from ethnic minority backgrounds, in those cities and beyond, who regard themselves as equally British.
Misinformation about the suspect in the Southport murders being Muslim or an asylum seeker fuelled efforts to mobilise a violent response. To focus on this being inaccurate – and hatred being misdirected – misses the point that violence targeting groups of migrants and minorities would have been equally wrong had those false rumours been true. The murder of children is a deeply shocking and rare event – whether carried out by the school caretaker in the Soham murders of 2002, or the Welsh-born son of migrants who came to Britain from Rwanda a generation earlier (the background of the individual charged with the Southport murders). Those who posit that this shocking crime demonstrates a broad failure of integration or multiculturalism in Britain, with little information yet in the public domain before the trial, do not seem to have explained why this exceptional case reflects the reality of a multi-ethnic Britain. Any proper assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of integration in Britain should depend on overall patterns, not exceptional cases.
5. Legitimate concerns are about your right to a voice in the democratic debate, not the right to be given everything that you demand.
A government that seeks to bridge, rather than polarise, on immigration should commit to engaging in good faith with arguments made in good faith – including those that it agrees and disagrees with. What it can also ask of those seeking to get a hearing for their ‘legitimate concerns’ is that they recognise that there are different views of immigration – and that not everybody agrees with their perspective either.
The findings from the British Future/Ipsos Immigration Attitudes Tracker demonstrate why the claim that a persistent public demand for lower immigration is simply ignored by political and economic elites is too simplistic.
Most people do now want lower overall immigration but there are significant disagreements about this too. Almost four out of ten people would like to see large reductions in the numbers, but a similar number doubt the need to reduce overall numbers at all. Those who want reductions are reluctant to reduce the flows that contribute most to the high numbers. Contested political arguments reflect public attitudes, rather than being an elite repudiation of an imagined overwhelming public consensus.
A useful, practical way to signal a democratic openness to the debate about legitimate concerns would be to introduce more visible opportunities for public voice and parliamentary accountability in migration policymaking. A yearly, Budget-style debate on an annual government immigration plan could be a centrepiece of such efforts.
The elected government should listen with respect to its democratic opponents, including the Conservatives and Reform, the Lib Dems, Greens and others. But it does not have to agree with or accept the proposals from opponents’ manifestos that were rejected at the ballot box. This would help to communicate that ‘legitimate concerns’ are about a right to have your voice heard, not a right to get everything you want.
Engaging with ‘illegitimate concerns’
It is important to be clear about the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate concerns when it comes to the democratic debate about immigration policy. Yet the government also needs a strategy to address ‘illegitimate concerns’. The initial focus has been on rapid and visible prosecutions and sentencing of those breaking the law. That should be augmented by a long-term strategy concerning the one-in-ten people who supported or sympathised with the riots, providing the moral oxygen of tacit consent for violence.
This is not a challenge that can be addressed through changes to immigration policy. If net migration does halve next year, it would be naïve to think that this would make any difference to those chanting Tommy Robinson’s name outside the local mosque to intimidate those going to pray there. Nor would reducing net migration to the tens of thousands, whatever the pros and cons of that immigration policy for other reasons.
While misinformation played a role in the targeting of both asylum seekers and Muslims, the reason that misinformation is shared and believed is primarily due to threat perceptions – driven by fears and prejudices towards the groups being targeted, as well as efforts by extreme actors to stoke those prejudices. Tackling the causes of violent disorder requires a stronger effort to unpack the causes of fear, hatred and prejudice, to underpin a sustained effort to tackle racialised grievances and illegitimate concerns.
This is an extract is from a piece by Sunder Katwala in ‘Restoring trust in polarised times: Immigration in the new parliament’, the latest report on the findings of our Immigration Attitudes Tracker. Download a copy here.
