What the Immigrant Revolt in England Shows

On Thursday night, July 18, the Harehills area, a neighborhood with a large ethnic minority population and one of the poorest areas in England, saw five children of a Romanian family who had migrated from Bulgaria forcibly removed from their families by the police, and the neighborhood erupted in riots. After the images of the children trying to escape from the hands of the workers, screaming and crying, neighbors and, especially Romanians, who came to support the family took to the streets in anger. The police’s removal of the four children resulted in fierce resistance from the neighborhood residents, leading to street riots that lasted until late into the night.

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The incident that led to the children being taken took place in April. The parents, who worked a 12-hour shift at a meat factory, left their children with their aunt and went to work. The 8-year-old of the children, who was playing with their nephew, caused his 2-year-old nephew to fall while playing with him. The child, who did not cry despite falling, was taken to hospital the next day when his head started turning purple. The children were first placed in their sister’s house without their statements being taken, on the grounds that he had been violent towards his children. Later, without any specific justification, the police forcibly took the 14-year-old boy, who was handcuffed, from his sister’s house in Harehills, and dragged him into a police van, supposedly to protect him. Public officials who ignored the statements of the family, neighbours and children triggered anger. The family says that many in the Romanian community are afraid to take the children to hospital in case the same thing happens to them.

Immigrants are subjected to prejudice and extrajudicial killings by police and state institutions; The fact that the state acted with the assumption of guilt unleashed the anger of the immigrant masses at being treated unfairly. It is no coincidence that poor immigrant worker families who cannot find a place to leave their children face this problem. In British society, where social rights are destroyed by a market-oriented logic, immigrants are pushed to live in much worse conditions. The real problem behind the society's shift to the extreme right since the 2008 crisis, which is marketism, impoverishment, the destruction of public rights and the destruction of vested labor rights, is the basis of the anger that is attempted to be manipulated by directing it at immigrants. Yet immigrants experience these problems much more deeply than anyone else and we frequently encounter outbursts of anger and ghetto riots. In the US, France, England... it works the same way everywhere. If you are an immigrant, you are wrong, you cannot defend yourself, you are guilty, it is inevitable that you will be killed by a police bullet on the street or treated like a potential criminal. The residents of the neighborhood, who did not accept this treatment, set cars, including buses and police vehicles, on fire. It did not pay for the police, who had to flee the neighborhood in the face of the people's anger, to withdraw; There was a riot in the neighborhood. The mother and father had declared that they were on a hunger strike until they got their children back.

In immigrant neighborhoods where social injustices are intense, the anger directed at the system and its law enforcement forces is distorted by the far-right, and racism and Islamophobia are being consolidated. After the riot, the police and other authorities reviewed the situation and returned the children to their families.

Leeds City Council is forced to re-evaluate the removal of the child from the family. This shocking event in England is remarkable, especially in these days when the immigration issue is brought to the agenda as a main issue by the leading actors in European politics.

This riot, which took place in the neighborhoods of the Romani, a Christian community, was a reaction to social injustice, cruelty, impoverishment and the approach of the British state, but it turned into a campaign against Muslim immigrants, which was completely unrelated to the issue. Harehills is one of the 3% poorest areas of the United Kingdom. For many decades, the British Empire has been providing cheap labor from immigrants who come from poor countries, especially Pakistan and India, and who work for cheap. Far-right manipulators, Muslims living in the neighborhood; despite trying to calm the incidents, were targeted by portraying them as if they were the ones who burned the vehicles. Far-right extremists, who are carrying out an open campaign of lies and manipulation, are trying to channel British society in this direction.

On the bourgeois political front, Labour Party government officials have shown that they are completely uninterested in radical uprisings or change. The new government, which has recently been celebrated by some on the left, has also made insensitive and even condemnatory statements on the subject. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the incidents as "shocking and shameful" and thanked the West Yorkshire police force for their "swift intervention". He was heard to say, "There is no place for this kind of chaos in our society." Nigel Farage, the right-wing populist leader of the party, which was founded in 2018 as the Brexit party and became the Reform Party after a referendum that voted for Britain to leave the EU, tweeted about the Harehills riots: “The politics of the subcontinent are being played out on the streets of Leeds right now, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The term subcontinent refers to modern-day India. Farage’s use of deeply racist and colonialist language and veiled threats are nothing new. Immigration has been a major topic in Britain, which has just come out of a general election on July 4. Rishi Sunak, the conservative and ultra-rich former prime minister of Indian origin, launched the campaign with the slogan “Stop the Bots”.

The Workers' Party, which has said nothing but deploying police in neighborhoods after the explosion of public anger, calling the laws and the established order to duty, and has competed with everyone in condemning the people, has not expressed any solution other than being proud of the establishment of order. It continues at full speed with anti-Roma propaganda and anti-immigrant sentiment, especially on social media. It is not possible to solve the injustices experienced in immigrant neighborhoods right next to the city center within capitalist relations. The struggle that workers will give against the rich and their governments, the hand of class brotherhood that will be extended to immigrants, will be the only way to end these policies of hostility and discrimination.