What do the riots say about Britain?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 8 August 2024
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The past week of brutish, hate-filled riots has been a disturbing time for Britian’s minority communities. What started as a protest against the murder of three little girls in Southport has swept the country for days, fuelled by the spread of mis-information on social media.
The cause of the anger is starkly contested. For some, they are racist far-right agitators and opportunist thugs, whipped up by populist politicians and commentators. For others they represent a deeper unease about successive immigration and social policies which have left people feeling ignored, marginalised, even despised by politicians and mainstream media. The ideological divide is between those who see ‘diversity as strength’ and those who think unlimited tolerance breeds its own intolerance.
For all the images of burning cars, racist graffiti and violent looting, there is another side to the story: those who help in the clear up, who show solidarity with their Muslim neighbours, and who make clear their opposition to racist hatred.
What should we make of the riots? And, if there is more that unites us than divides us, what should we be doing to improve relations between communities?
Producer: Dan Tierney Assistant Producer: Ruth Purser
Chair: Michael Buerk
Panel: Ash Sarkar Konstantin Kisin Mona Siddiqui Tim Stanley
Witnesses: Matt Goodwin Ashraf Hoque Adrian Hilton Kieran Connell
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening, the brutish rioting that's metastasised across the United Kingdom over the last week |
| 0:10.2 | has put a torch to the idea that we live in a country where peaceful tolerance of multiculturalism |
| 0:15.4 | is somehow guaranteed. To be sure, the worst attacks have been committed by a relatively small minority that's always up for recreational violence and a chance to loot. |
| 0:25.9 | And social media have turned out again to be a hosepipe of poison that's both fuelled and directed the anger. |
| 0:32.4 | But what is undeniable is that a large slice of the population are worried that immigration, more than a |
| 0:38.4 | million people came in last year and the asylum system are out of control. Polls suggest it's |
| 0:44.3 | voters' biggest concern after the economy, more important even than the state of the health |
| 0:49.0 | service. And yet those that articulate that concern say they're ignored, marginalized, even despised by governments of all colours, the establishment generally and the mainstream media, including the BBC. |
| 1:01.3 | Few issues are more divisive, have two such contrasting views of a successful society. |
| 1:06.7 | The one side thinks multiculturalism a boon, an affirmation of our common humanity, sees strength in diversity. |
| 1:14.5 | The other sees a country undergoing profound change it had never agreed to and losing social |
| 1:19.4 | cohesion and the assumption of common values in the process. |
| 1:23.4 | What should we make of the riots and what do they say about us? |
| 1:27.3 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:28.5 | The panel, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interridden, |
| 1:31.1 | Studies at Edinburgh University, Ash Sarker from the Navarra Media Group, |
| 1:35.1 | the historian Tim Stanley, and newcomer to the panel, |
| 1:38.6 | Constantine Kissen, the political commentator and comedian and author, |
| 1:42.7 | usefully enough, of a best-selling book titled An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. Have the events of the last week caused you to fall out of love with Britain at least? Not at all, but they have made me very concerned for the direction of travel, for sure. Mona, Mona, Siddiqui. Yeah, I think for the first time my life, and I've lived in Britain most of my life, I feel anxious, and that's not a nice feeling. |
| 2:07.1 | Ash, that's Sarka. |
| 2:08.3 | When we were having our production meeting where we go over what we're all going to say, I received an anonymous DM on Instagram saying, |
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