Right-wing protesters in the English town of Rotherham have set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers, as demonstrations against immigration and Islam continue across the country. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed that the rioters will “face the full force of the law.”
Hundreds of people gathered outside the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham on Sunday afternoon, pelting police officers with wood and bottles and chanting “get them out,” referring to the 130 asylum seekers housed in the hotel since 2022.
South Yorkshire police said at least ten officers were injured in clashes with the rioters, who broke windows and set dumpsters ablaze outside the building, before setting a fire inside the hotel’s ground floor.
Multiple arrests were made, and the fire was extinguished shortly afterwards.
Dozens of British towns and cities have been rocked by right-wing protests and riots since Monday, when a British teenager of Rwandan descent stabbed three children to death and injured ten others in the town of Southport, near Liverpool. Although initially sparked by a false rumor that the knifeman responsible for the stabbings was Muslim, the demonstrations have since grown into a wider backlash against Islam, mass immigration, and the perception that political leaders are more concerned with suppressing right-wing dissent than tackling immigrant crime.
More than 150 people were arrested after riots in Liverpool, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and other cities on Saturday. Similar riots took place in locations including Middlesbrough, Blackburn, and Tamworth on Sunday. Mobs of Muslim protesters, some armed with knives and machetes, have been seen in some cities, including Bolton and Stoke.
In a speech on Sunday, Starmer warned that more arrests would follow. “Those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law,” he declared, warning that those responsible “will regret taking part in this disorder.” In Sunday’s address and in a similar speech earlier this week, Starmer did not discuss any of the root causes of the unrest. Instead he pinned all blame for the violence on “far right hatred” and online “misinformation.”
Rotherham is infamous for its Muslim ‘grooming gang’, a group of predominantly British-Pakistani men who sexually abused around 1,400 young girls between the late 1980s and 2013. Three separate reports published in 2013, 2014, and 2015 found that local politicians and police covered up the gang’s crimes, partly out of fear that identifying and punishing the perpetrators would be seen as “racist.”