The Belfast Riots Are an Anti-Migrant Pogrom - and the British Media Has Serious Questions to Answer
In his first column for Zeteo UK, acclaimed journalist and author Owen Jones looks at how the lie about immigrants pushed by British media and political elites is fueling the violence we see today.
A note from our Editor-in-Chief:
I am delighted to welcome Owen Jones to Zeteo UK as a weekly (from our launch in September onwards) columnist. He is one of the most original, distinctive, passionate, fact-filled and humane voices in the UK media. His pieces for Zeteo UK will sit behind a paywall, but we are making his first column, below, on a topic of huge importance, free to all readers. And, of course, as part of the Zeteo UK expansion, he and I will continue to co-host our video podcast ‘Two Outspoken’. Support independent journalism and become a paid subscriber to Zeteo UK today.
- Mehdi
An attempted beheading in the street. Yet no incendiary front pages followed. No politicians issued statements inciting fury. There were no riots, no pogroms.
This was a terror-related attack by a white neo-Nazi, Alina Burns, against a Kurdish barber last year. Similarly, when two teenagers stabbed to death a random British Asian father as he delivered groceries to his mother in Wales, Nigel Farage did not demand “pure, cold rage.” When a white British man raped a Sikh woman, believing her to be Muslim, the Daily Telegraph did not ask if the UK had “descended into anarchy.”
And when a white man stabbed a Saudi student to death in Cambridge, GB News didn’t host a segment headlined, ‘British people are fed up!’ Indeed, there’s no evidence it covered this hideous murder at all.
Belfast burned this week. The direct culprits were racist thugs who set fire to homes they believed migrants lived in. Families with little children had to be rescued from the flames. Businesses and cars were burned. Vehicles were stopped so the mobs could search for migrants. We have a word for this: it is a pogrom.
None of this can be divorced from Northern Ireland’s own history. In the summer of 1969, loyalist thugs burned one in 20 Catholics out of their homes in Belfast – the biggest act of ethnic cleansing in Western Europe since World War II. Perhaps some of their grandchildren continued this hateful tradition.
But there is another context for this pogrom. For years, British media and political elites have portrayed Britain as descending into violent mayhem because of immigration.
That’s all based on a lie. There has unquestionably been a huge increase in immigration over the last two decades, and it has made Britain far more diverse than it was. Yet by any measure you pick, violence in Britain has plummeted over that same period. Overall surveyed crime is about a third of what it was in 2002. The murder rate in England and Wales is nearly half what it was in 2003. In London – the UK’s most diverse city – it is at its lowest ever recorded level. Hospital admissions caused by assault, knife assault, bodily force, blunt objects and firearms have all fallen sharply.
Detailed research by the Oxford Migrant Observatory finds no significant relationship between immigrants and crimes. Foreign nationals are underrepresented when it comes to violent offences and robbery.
Yet commentators and politicians have whipped up hateful hysteria in defiance of the facts. For example, the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson told GB News that 44% of the 116 accused in pending sexual assault and violence cases in Dorset were asylum seekers. “There is no truth in the 44% figure,” said Dorset Police.
The Times published claims by the Tories that Channel migrants were 24 times more likely to go to prison than Britons – which were debunked by Full Fact. Meanwhile, GB News presenter Patrick Christys declared: “They have seeded rapists, murderers, violent criminals and thieves all around our country.”
We were already warned where this could lead. In July 2024, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana attacked a dance studio full of little girls in a horrific knife attack, killing three of them. It was reminiscent of the Dunblane massacre of 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton slaughtered 16 primary school pupils and one teacher. Except, after Dunblane, there were no riots.
This time, there was a national pogrom. Asylum seekers were almost burned alive in hotels, while shops, cars and mosques were attacked. The private homes of people believed to be minorities or migrants were targeted. Victims were dragged from cars.
This should have been a bucket of ice-cold water thrown over our heads. Instead, the violent summer of 2024 was scrubbed from our national memory. No lessons were learned. Why? Because it implicates a media and political establishment that has spent years whipping up bigotry and division.
Notice, too, that politicians and commentators demand that peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide are banned as “hate marches”. Yet many of them have nothing to say when families are burned out of their homes in Belfast because of anti-migrant hysteria. The morning after it happened, Farage posted about cracking down on flytipping.
Now, any time a hideous crime is committed by someone who is not white, violent riots and pogroms become a possibility. It may not even take that. There has already been so much incitement by politicians and media outlets that a summer of turmoil may be coming.
The most frightening aspect of all of this is that it is difficult to see a way out. So few politicians and media outlets are willing to push back. After all, our Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has exploited anti-migrant bigotry, too, declaring that mass migration has done “incalculable” damage to our country. The government is introducing one of the harshest asylum regimes in Europe.
The Green Party’s Zack Polanski stands almost alone – and he has been on the receiving end of an unrelenting smear campaign.
That’s why the launch of Zeteo UK is such a relief. We have a media ecosystem which has normalised hateful lies and brought our country to the edge of the abyss. We need far more pushback. Otherwise, a bleak future awaits this country.
Owen Jones is a columnist, Zeteo UK contributor, co-host of Zeteo’s ‘Two Outpoken’, and author of The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It.
Learn more about Zeteo UK:
Zeteo UK and Owen Jones are a gift to all reasonable people.