If there were riots every time the victim of a violent crime was black or brown and the perpetrator was white, this country would already be burned to the ground. If there were riots every time a woman was violently killed by a man, the country would also be a pile of ashes, but that is not the case because such violent reactions are not productive and do more harm than good.

However, what we are seeing in recent incidents of violent crimes committed by black and brown individuals is an automatic violent backlash that has been manufactured by the far right.

The most recent case is in Belfast, where, following the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie by a 30-year-old Sudanese man, Hadi Alodid, what many are describing as a pogrom has broken out.

A pogrom is a violent riot incited to massacre or expel an ethnic or religious group. While typically associated with attacks on Jews, the riots we are seeing in Belfast have undeniable alignments with the definition.

Several reports from the riot state that ethnic minorities were being hunted down.

​According to a BBC report: “Crowds of masked thugs were knocking on doors and asking people which of the houses [were] occupied by foreigners and by ethnic minorities”.

LBC’s Lewis Goodall reported that there were bands of armed thugs going door to door using fire and petrol bombs, trying to burn anyone with a black or brown face and bring them out of their homes, including children, many of whom had been born and raised in Northern Ireland.

​ITV News spoke to a Ugandan student nurse who was forced to flee her home after racist thugs attacked her neighbourhood.

​Worshippers had to be locked in’ as balaclava clad men ‘marched on mosque’.

​All of this shows that we are living in a climate where violence committed by one black or brown individual is being met with the collective punishment of the racial group they belong to, and this is a story we are seeing over and over again.

Just last week, similar riots took place in Southampton, following the murder of Henry Nowack. These riots were largely incited by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who sinisterly encouraged people to respond with ‘pure, cold rage’ directly against the wishes of Nowack’s family.

​As well as this, he framed this issue as one of “a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”.

This framing and scapegoating of ethnic minorities is the Reform leaders’ bread and butter. He has been integral to manufacturing these violent responses that appear to be lost fragments of the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s renowned 1984. These riots and violent outbreaks have essentially become a ritual for channelling the anger, frustration and hatred at wider society into the chosen scapegoat– immigrants and ethnic minorities—as an individual’s criminal behaviour is seen as permission to blame and attack an entire group. Instead of directing anger towards the actual sources of their problems and declining material conditions, an ethnic group is seen as the culmination of all the problems, so not only do they share the collective guilt of the individual who committed the violent crime, but also for the wider issues in society.

​Less than two years ago, what was dubbed the ‘Farage riots’ took place across England and Northern Ireland following the mass stabbing of girls at a dance class in Southport, in which three children were killed.  

Like we are seeing now, what was masked as a demand for accountability and grief at the tragedy was actually a race riot, fuelled by anti-immigrant, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric that had been exploited by the far right, as misinformation about the British-born murderer, Axel Rudakubana, was spread online.

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This disorder included several racist attacks that had to be condemned by the Prime Minister: “People in this country have a right to be safe, and yet, we’ve seen Muslim communities targeted, attacks on mosques, other minority communities singled out, Nazi salutes in the street, attacks on the police, wanton violence alongside racist rhetoric,” Starmer said at Downing Street.

“So no, I won’t shy away from calling it what it is: Far-right thuggery,” he added.

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This all serves to show that the rise of the far right is creating the conditions for fascism; these are not unfortunate violent responses that we can view in isolation, but rather a manufactured one. They are orchestrated by far-right figures who have great influence and can play with the genuine emotions and frustrations of people, as the initial violent incident committed by an individual is held up as an example of all the issues that people are facing in society. They then craft the violent incident as an attack not just on one individual but on the entire nation– a nation in which black and brown people do not belong.

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Elon Musk, who was also a crucial player in the spreading of misinformation during the Southport riots, is again fanning the flames of hatred for the far right following the Belfast stabbing.  

On X, he posted, “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” He had shared a post from far-right activist Tommy Robinson, listing dozens of locations where people could protest”.

Additionally, X, the app owned by Musk, is a misinformation machine; there have yet to be sufficient fact-checking mechanisms in place, as Musk is often the one sharing false information.

The reaction is simply not the same when the perpetrator is white or when the victim is a woman. We can see this in the hypocrisy of Nigel Farage, whenever there is a black or brown perpetrator, and the victim is white or a man, he is quick to condemn it, stoke fear and frame it as proof of his racist and xenophobic talking points. When the situation is anything contrary to this, he is quick to change his tune.

​For example, when Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was murdered outside her constituency surgery during the 2016 EU referendum campaign by a far-right terrorist who shouted ‘Britain first’ as he shot and stabbed her, Nigel Farage was nowhere to be seen. He was the leader of UKIP at the time, the party that spearheaded the Brexit campaign and crafted the narrative that migrants were invading the country, hence creating the conditions for groups like Britain First. When he did eventually resurface, all he had to talk about was the momentum of his campaign: “I think we had momentum before this terrible tragedy,…When you are taking on the establishment, you need to have momentum.” In his victory speech following the outcome of the referendum, he boasted about doing it “without a single bullet being fired”. This was eight days after Cox’s murder.

Another example is when Sarah Everard was tragically raped and murdered by a serving police officer in 2021, all Farage had to say was: “We must not allow the tragic murder of a young woman to turn into attacks on men and attacks on the police”. This is such a stark response that shows he only cares about violent crime if it benefits him politically.

Since 2020, 30 women have been violently killed in Northern Ireland, typically by men well known to them, and there have been no violent riots in response.

In more recent news, following the growing tensions across wider British society, there has been an increase in hate crimes. In 2025, it was found that religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims rose by 19%. There was a spike following the Southport murders and riots that followed in 2024, according to the Home Office.

In 2025, John Ashby raped a sikh woman in her home while subjecting her to a harangue of religiously aggravated abuse, because he thought she was muslim. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party are self-proclaimed ‘protectors of women and girls’, yet nothing was said, there was no encouragement for the community in Walsall—where the attack took place—to protest or take to the streets violently.

​In fact, the crime was celebrated by a Reform councillor, Stuart John Prior, who went on to win the Sweyne Park & Grange seat in Rochford, Essex, at the local elections. He has since quit following backlash from social media and multiple MPs.

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Nonetheless, there is a clear disparity in the responses among the far right to violent crimes, wholly dependent on the race of the perpetrator. Black and brown individuals are immediately accused of being immigrants, the far right points to it and runs the line: ‘immigration and open borders are destroying our country’, so it then becomes a fight against immigrants, which consequently turns into anyone who is not white. As a result, a whole group of people are collectively punished because these riots also put psychological fear into black and brown communities.

This makes it clear that the scapegoating of ‘immigrants’ can very quickly morph into attacking people based on race; it becomes the only identifier in the collective consciousness for who is or isn’t an immigrant. In all of these attacks, we weren’t seeing people having their documentation checked; these rioters and aggressors were not demanding proof of citizenship. Instead, they are targeting anyone who looks like they don’t belong, anyone who isn’t ‘one of them’ and at the end of the day, that comes down to race.

British Journalist, Kevin Maguire, put it best on Good Morning Britain: “After the attack on the Liverpool football parade, and it was a white guy, middle class, former royal marine, no one went after other white, middle class former marines and said this person represents the entire group”.

What we are seeing in Belfast is an entire group being punished for the actions of one individual, something that simply does not occur when the perpetrator is white.

These riots more often than not go against the wishes of the victims’ families and fail to actually address the issues and failures that lead to such tragedies, which harm more people.

​They are the clearest displays of racism, plain and simple, and we can’t afford to call it anything else because black and brown people will continue to be collectively punished if we don’t adequately address and condemn these violent backlashes orchestrated by the far right. This harm will eventually come for everyone, not just ethnic minorities, because fascism thrives off the destruction of individual rights, and the inevitable slope we fall down is the goal posts being shifted on who belongs to the nation.