The far-right rioters have their details flawed

White Britons are the majority ethnic group in all but 15 neighbourhoods in England and Wales, analysis shows.

It follows a week of violent riots which have plunged Britain into crisis, with far-right thugs wreaking havoc in Manchester, Birmingham and beyond.

Yobs behind the mayhem were incensed by lies peddled online almost immediately after the sickening knife attack in Southport, which claimed the lives of three young girls. 

Social media posts wrongly claimed the suspect was an asylum seeker who arrived to the UK on a small boat, fuelling thugs to spout anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slurs as they clashed with police and looted. 

Angry mobs even tried to torch a Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham housing migrant families, chanting ‘our streets’ before smashing windows on the hotel’s bottom floor.

Similar sentiments have been shared widely on social media over the past few years, with some accounts having claimed that they hate being a ‘white minority’.

Around three-quarters of people in England and Wales are ‘White British’, according to the 2021 census.

In East Ham and Brent West, two constituencies in London, this proportion is below 10 per cent. 

 

Bangladeshis are the biggest ethnic group in East Ham, in the east of the capital – 21 per cent, compared against 8.9 per cent White Britons. 

Indians, meanwhile, make-up 35.2 per cent of Brent West, a settlement that covers Wembley in North London. By comparison, just 9.4 per cent of its residents identify as White British. 

More than 85 per cent (493) of England and Wales’ constituencies have over 50 per cent of a ‘White British’ population. 

Two-thirds of those are above 75 per cent.

Whitehaven and Workington, in Cumbria, is the area with the highest percentage of White Britons (96.9 per cent).

Demographic data only dates back to the last census in 2021, so does not account for those who have entered the country since then.

The riots first started outside a mosque in Southport last Tuesday, near to where three girls were killed by a knifeman at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. 

But civil unrest spread rapidly across the country because of false speculation online that the teen suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat.

It was widely repeated by far-right social media activists such as Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. 

Nearly 500 arrests have been made so far in conjunction with the disorder, including multiple counts of theft and attempted arson. A baying mob attempted to set fire to a refugee hotel in Rotherham.

Yobs have also threatened to target immigration centres, refugee shelters and visa lawyers’ homes, with some joking about killing anti-racism campaigners.

The rioting has been stoked by leading figures of the far-right movement on social media and messaging platforms. 

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, a founding member of the English Defence League, has been regularly posting messages to his hundreds of thousands of X followers warning of supposed dangers of Islam to Britain.

Last week, MailOnline broke the news that 41-year-old Robinson was hiding away in a Cyprus resort on holiday with family, stirring the pot back home with inflammatory posts on social media. 

Dr Elizabeth Pearson, a senior lecturer in criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London, told MailOnline the misinformation circulating was the perfect opening for far right thugs to exploit. 

She said: ‘What happened in Southport is the type of event, with the level of emotion it produces, that can be quite easily manipulated. 

‘The narrative that the English Defence League have always mobilised around is strongly gendered; women and children are vulnerable to immigrant men and the state does nothing to help, so they take up the reins and are the protectors of British women and children.’

Dr Pearson, who has previously interviewed Robinson, claimed the stigma that the EDL were ‘far right knuckle draggers’ always ‘stung’ him and that he wanted people to take the movement more seriously. 

Whether the rioters actually have legitimate concern about Britain’s demographic make-up is unclear, she said. 

Dr Pearson added: ‘But once you are in a mindset of us and them, you stop believing what you are told by the “them” and it becomes something much more intuitive – people will not believe the data because they say it’s coming from the wrong person.’

Britain’s crackdown over the riots continued yesterday.

Thugs including a bingo fan bitten on the backside by a police dog were jailed. 

Ryan Sheers, who yelled ‘I pay your wages’ at embattled officers before a police dog nipped him, wept in court as he was jailed for more than two years today. 

The 28-year-old and his boyfriend Steven Mailen, 54, had spent the day at the bingo together before walking into the middle of the disorder that rocked Hartlepool on July 31.

Each received sentences of two years and two months in prison by a judge who told them the public were ‘rightly outraged by the behaviour seen on the streets of this country.’

Elsewhere, two rioters who were both ‘at the forefront’ of violent disorder across Britain last week were jailed for a total of more than five years.

Britain’s oldest rioter William Nelson Morgan, 69, and gas fitter John O’Malley, 43, were jailed for two years and eight months each in the first televised sentencing of the riots.

Morgan, a semi-retired welder, was armed with a wooden cosh as he took to the streets with a group of about 100 thugs who damaged businesses and buildings and threw missiles at police on County Road, Liverpool, on Saturday night.

He was sentenced alongside O’Malley who rioted outside a mosque in Southport last Tuesday in a crowd of 1,000 people, was told that he was ‘at the front of what was essentially a baying mob’. 

Some cases have been fast-tracked through the courts as the government looks to send a message to anyone involved in the civil unrest.