Understanding Post-Riot Anger: Why Voices Remain Unheard
The rat man from the council has just turned up. He is back at James and Oscar’s home laying more poison that the rats keep eating. “I woke up the other night at three in the morning and one was biting my nose,” James says. It’s the stuff of nightmares but it has become James and Oscar’s everyday struggle. A nearby building has the words “rat city” daubed on one of the walls. “There was a fire next door,” Oscar explains. “The rats came out of there and now there’s problems with them in the drains.”
He showed us around their overgrown garden. “It’s like a rats’ playground,” he says, thoroughly fed up with it all. The pair are friends and neighbors – and invited us in to discuss the riots that erupted across the UK in early August, including in their home city of Hull.
Roots of Unrest: Immigration, Racism, and Anger
They were there on the fringes of the trouble but not directly involved. It was a “kick back,” James tells us, over the UK’s failed immigration policies. When Keir Starmer described the riots as “far-right thuggery,” James believes he failed to grasp what was happening. “I have seen people crying in doorways… they are cold, and they are hungry… who is helping the English-born people?” he asks. “What I am not is a racist person… I just look at the pain in people’s eyes sometimes and you think, ‘What the hell? What is going on?'” Their (migrants’) problems are getting solved but nobody is solving the problem of the people who are living on the streets.
Neither Oscar nor James work due to poor health and spend their days watching YouTube channels dedicated to investigating Britain’s immigration problems. They are both angry about immigration, really angry. While they ultimately blame the government, they resent the way asylum seekers are put into hotels while their claims are processed. “Get rid of them, I just think it is wrong,” Oscar says. “I ain’t got a problem with being in other people’s countries and I haven’t got a problem with them being in mine. But when it’s taking away all our necessary needs – hospitals, dentists, hotels… housing. It is just pfft…” He throws his arms up in the air in despair.
The pair watched as rioters surrounded a hotel next to the station in Hull on 3 August. It’s currently home to dozens of predominantly young men waiting to hear if they will be allowed to stay. James acknowledges there was appalling racism that day and says he has sympathy for genuine asylum seekers. “I don’t think everybody thinks like me and goes, ‘God bless them, they’ve got problems too’,” he says. “They have been through hell, they have been through warzones but… people felt a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, like, you know, people living on the streets, who are not getting looked after.”
Voices of the Forgotten: The Homeless and the Unheard
Oscar later takes us to meet Donna – who sits outside a nearby shop with a sign that reads “JOB WANTED”. She used to run her own cleaning business but after the death of her daughter in a car accident her life fell apart. For the past two and half years, Donna has been homeless. She purposefully hides herself away under a road bridge most nights so nobody can attack her. “Where I am it’s so dark that nobody is going to be able to see me,” she says. “Every time you think you are getting back up… there is something or someone who kicks you back down again.” England is the place that has got a big sign for people that says ‘Freebies’, come in and we’ll get you in a hotel – that is the way it comes across to people.
“They (the government) want to sort their own problems out first and this is one of them,” says Donna, gesturing to the gloomy underpass she calls her bedroom. It’s a problem they see most days at a community interest company called Adapt Resettlement further along Anlaby Road. Every day, Danny and Lisa lead a small team dedicated to trying to get a roof over people’s heads. “If you’ve got drug problems, mental health problems, even just living on the street, it’s a war every day for them,” says Danny. “They can pitch up somewhere when a gang of kids will go and kick the tents, will kick their head in, it is a war daily for them.
Post-Riot Fallout: Reflections on Anger and Injustice
“So, I get what they’re saying, that they (asylum seekers) are fleeing wars, but ours are fighting in a daily war,” adds Danny. “Not everybody was in that riot for the same reason. There will have been people in that riot because they are homeless, they haven’t had help. But that doesn’t make them racist. They just wanted to get their point across.” Danny has served time for violent offenses in the past – and has also been homeless himself. He pins the blame for the riots squarely at the door of politicians.
“The government laid the bomb. And it’s just exploded,” he says. “It is down to the government to sort it… The only way that they will do it, in my eyes, is that they give them equal opportunities. If they’re going to allow them in then so be it. But please look after ours as well. Otherwise, it’ll just continue, and it will.”
We joined Danny’s final home visit of the day, where we meet Carl. He’s trying to stabilize his life, improve his health, and eat better, but needs ongoing support. He’s finally got a roof over his head thanks to the project. “You can shout so loud can’t you and they don’t listen,” Carl tells us. “It is just one of those things it boils over sometimes.” There’s a lot of tension in the air, there is a lot of aggression, and a lot of animosity.
The police and courts have clamped down hard on those who were involved in the riots on 3 August. Earlier this month the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “There is no place for such appalling, senseless violence on our streets, and this government is determined to stamp out the scourge of serious violence wherever it is found.” Meanwhile, the anger, animosity, and jealousy that helped fuel them still exists. The roots of the riots run deep.
