Britain hands out prison terms for far-right riots in swift crackdown

LONDON - More than 1,000 arrests. Almost 600 charges. And every day, more and more prison terms are handed out, all just weeks after far-right riots erupted across Britain.

“We told you justice would be swift and we wouldn’t tolerate this type of criminality,” the National Police Chief’s Council, a government body that helps British law enforcement, wrote on X on Tuesday as the number of arrests crossed the 1,000 threshold.

This swift justice has been a test for Keir Starmer, barely a month into his job as prime minister after a landslide election victory. Starmer was formerly chief prosecutor for England and Wales, granting him valuable experience in the mechanics of criminal prosecution.

Across the country, courts have been handing out significant prison terms in response to the riots. The BBC reported Tuesday that at least 120 people have already been convicted. Charges range from assaulting a police officer and violent disorder to online offenses, with one woman on Wednesday sentenced to 15 months in prison for calling for attacks on a mosque.

The violence erupted after a stabbing attack on July 29 in Southport, North West England, in which three children were killed. Misinformation about the identity of the assailant spurred riots after online posts wrongly identified him as an asylum seeker, with an Arabic name, who had crossed the English Channel illegally. The actual suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Britain to parents from Rwanda.

Police officers were assaulted as they clashed with rioters, shops were looted and mosques were attacked with bricks. Cars were torched. Anti-immigration demonstrators stormed a hotel housing asylum seekers, throwing bricks and chairs at the building.

Protesters marched through the streets, some demanding, “We want our country back,” stoking fear among people of color and minority groups.

On Aug. 4, as riots swept the country, Starmer condemned the violence as “far-right thuggery” and vowed that charges and convictions would follow. The government said last week that hundreds of extra places are being opened in Britain’s overcrowded prisons to make room for rioters.

Starmer was Britain’s top prosecutor from 2008 to 2013. During that time, he oversaw the first British prosecution of al-Qaeda terrorists and brought forward charges against Tory and Labour politicians caught up in an expenses scandal.

Also during that period, Starmer brought charges for those involved in London’s 2011 riots, sparked by the police killing of a Black man named Mark Duggan. Almost 4,000 people had been arrested within about a month of Duggan’s death that August, according to a government report.

British prosecutions can move at considerable speed. The Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol prompted the largest investigation in U.S. history, but by three years later, only half of the roughly 1,200 people charged had been convicted, according to a Washington Post analysis from January of this year.

The convictions kept coming in British courts Wednesday. A 53-year-old woman was jailed for 15 months over a Facebook post she published amid the unrest on Aug. 3. “Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it,” Julie Sweeney wrote, according to the Press Association.

“So-called keyboard warriors like you must learn to take responsibility for your disgusting and inflammatory language,” Judge Steven Everett told Chester Crown Court as he issued the sentence.

Others convicted include a 26-year-old man who was sentenced to three years in prison for kicking a police officer. An 18-year-old who threw bricks at police was jailed for a year and a half. A 38-year-old man who hurled racist abuse at police was sentenced to two years and eight months.

The vast majority of those charged have been adult men, including many with criminal histories and links to football hooliganism. But the widespread violence also swept up children, women and the elderly, including a 13-year-old girl who was found guilty on Tuesday at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court.

The girl, who cannot be named in media due to legal restrictions in Britain, was among a crowd that attacked a hotel in Aldershot that housed asylum seekers, the BBC reported.