How to respond to the riots on Britain’s streets

livemint.com:

anti-immigration protests have flared across England. Mosques and police officers have been attacked. In Rotherham criminals tried to set fire to a hotel they thought was housing asylum-seekers.

Town centres up and down the country have been marred by street battles. Disturbances of this sort occasionally disfigure British cities. Many of the troublemakers over the past few days have been youngsters drawn by the thrill of mindless violence rather than by a sinister political ideology.

Anti-immigrant protesters have sometimes been heavily outnumbered by anti-fascist counter-protesters. Britain is an increasingly liberal country; it has not suddenly become a racist one. Yet even if this bout of violence fades away, as the London riots did in 2011, the disorder has illuminated three concerns.

The first centres on the state of Britain’s criminal-justice system. Mistrust of the police has grown in recent years: less than half of people now think their local force is doing a good or excellent job, down from 63% ten years ago. Britain’s judicial machinery has been badly gummed up since the covid-19 pandemic.

Prisons are overflowing and unable to cope with an influx of new inmates. A system that does not command the confidence of the public is more liable to see bad behaviour. Another concern is the prevalence and power of misinformation.

The spark for the first riot, which took place in Southport the day after the murders, was a lie on social media, claiming that the girls’ attacker had been a Muslim who had arrived in Britain illegally on a small boat and who was on a terror watch-list. In fact, the 17-year-old charged with the crime was born to Rwandan parents in Britain. Many of the wild claims that fire up anti-immigrant