What We Know About the UK's Wave of Racist Street Attacks

Agnes Peters, a care worker in Manchester, says she was walking home from a shift last year, still in her work uniform, when a car slowed beside her and its occupants shouted racial slurs, told her to "go back to her country," and threw objects at her as they drove past, according to an Al Jazeera report published Sept. 23. Her account is one of several in the report describing what advocacy groups call a normalization of racist harassment across the United Kingdom.

What did Agnes Peters describe happening in Manchester?

Peters told Al Jazeera that bystanders watched the incident and filmed it on their phones rather than intervening; only one person spoke up to reproach the men throwing objects at her, she said. "They feel like if they come out in public and embarrass me, a Black person, it gives them supporters," Peters said. "They're no longer sitting on the fence. They're out there actively trying to pull people down." She described the harassment as part of a broader shift in which perpetrators of racist abuse act more openly than in the past.

What are advocacy groups saying about racist violence in the UK?

Oxfam, Amnesty International and 152 other organizations issued a joint statement this month calling on the UK government "to act immediately" on what they described as the normalization of racist violence, Al Jazeera reported. "Levels of racist violence and intimidation that were once considered extreme are now becoming weekly occurrences across the UK," the groups said, attributing the trend to "the consequences of years of growing inequality, underinvestment in communities and public services, and political and media narratives that have normalised racism, anti-migrant sentiment and Islamophobia." The statement frames the harassment described by Peters and others as part of a pattern rather than isolated incidents.

Who is Daniel Thomas and what happened in the Channel?

The report identifies Daniel Thomas as a far-right activist whom UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has described as an "outright racist." Thomas filmed himself slashing an inflatable rescue boat in the English Channel while a rescue worker was still on board, according to Al Jazeera. He leads a group called Patriot Platform, which has organized anti-migrant actions at UK ports and has said it plans to bring "thousands" of black-clad members to demonstrations, the report said.

What is Patriot Platform doing at Dover, Portsmouth and Piddington?

Al Jazeera reported that Thomas's group has disrupted operations at the ports of Dover and Portsmouth and that Thomas has floated bringing large numbers of supporters to Piddington, an Oxfordshire village where residents are resisting government plans to house asylum seekers there. The report said other English towns have also seen anti-migration protests featuring crowds of masked men engaging in what it described as anti-social behavior, without specifying which towns or providing attendance figures.

How does the report frame the link between Brexit-era rhetoric and today's harassment?

Al Jazeera reported that the racism which emerged after the UK's 2016 vote to leave the European Union initially centered on people entering the country irregularly, but that other minorities have since been targeted as well. Nahella Ashraf, a Manchester organizer with Stand Up to Racism, told the outlet that participants in street protests near mosques often describe their own actions in narrower terms. "They'll say they're anti-immigration," Ashraf said, drawing a distinction between how demonstrators characterize their motives and how advocacy groups and Peters described the effects of the harassment on those targeted. Al Jazeera's related coverage, linked alongside the report, has separately tracked the growth of Reform UK, including one item noting that a second crypto-currency billionaire had donated a record $49 million to the party, and another examining conditions in Birmingham that the outlet said complicated the party's messaging about the state of the country. Al Jazeera did not report a direct causal link in its Manchester reporting between Reform UK's donations and the specific incidents described by Peters or Thomas; the connections drawn are contextual, placing the individual accounts of harassment within a wider period of anti-immigration political activity.

The full report includes additional voices and incidents beyond what is summarized here; readers can review the original account at Al Jazeera.