LONDON — Britain was tense Wednesday as police and anti-racist campaigners, fearing a possible outbreak of the right-wing rioting that erupted across the country in recent days, flooded into several neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.
The handful of anti-immigrant demonstrators police encountered in north London neighborhoods like Finchley and Harrow were vastly outnumbered by hundreds of counterprotesters carrying signs that said “Refugees Welcome” and “Racists Out, Refugees In.”
And in the east London neighborhood of Walthamstow, an even larger gathering of more than 5,000 anti-right protesters chanted “Love, not hate” while hundreds of police officers kept watch.
There were also large and peaceful protests in support of refugees Wednesday in the cities of Birmingham, Sheffield, Southampton, Liverpool, Newcastle and Bristol.
“We put thousands of officers on the street and I think the show of force from the police and frankly the show of unity from communities, together defeated the challenges that we’ve seen,” Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the city’s Metropolitan Police Service said in comments to the BBC early Thursday.
“It went off very peacefully last night. A couple of locations we had some local criminals turn out and try and create a bit of anti-social behavior and we arrested a few of them,” he said. “But it was a very successful night and the fears of extreme-right disorder were abated.”
London's Mayor Sadiq Khan also thanked "those who came out peacefully to show London stands united against racism & Islamophobia," and praised the "heroic police force."
Overall, 10 people were arrested in Croydon, the south London town, including one person accused of assaulting an emergency worker and four accused of violent disorder, police said. Four people were also arrested in Waltham Forest, including two accused of weapons offenses that included a knife and a golf club, while another person was arrested in Hounslow and accused of possessing a weapon, police said.
“I’m here to stand up for human rights,” Jones Percival, 25, a plumber, said in Finchley. “I don’t believe in fascism. People of all colors and creeds are welcome.”
While Percival spoke, like-minded protesters began chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!”
One of the anti-immigrant protesters in Finchley was carrying a St. George’s Cross flag, England’s national flag, which is regularly flown by far-right groups.
Another anti-immigrant protester, who identified himself as Paul and said he was 55 and from north London, said "I think this country is at boiling point" and blamed the French for not stopping asylum-seekers from reaching the British shore.
"I don't care what color you are, but this country has become a soft touch," he said. "We pay the French to stop the migrants, but they turn a blind eye to the asylum-seekers coming to this country. We need to stop them. We voted for Brexit to stop this, and it hasn't happened."
Violence broke out across the country last week after three young girls were killed in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, in northwest England.
Fueled by false rumors that the suspect was a Muslim asylum-seeker, right-wing mobs attacked hotels housing asylum-seekers, as well as mosques and libraries, resulting in hundreds of arrests.
The suspect in the deadly stabbing attack, Axel Rudakubana, 17, was born in the Welsh capital, Cardiff, and lived for years in a village near Southport, police said.
Some north Londoners said they felt trapped between competing political currents.
"My problem here is you have two things that have been hijacked," said a 44-year-old resident who said his name was Isaac and described himself as a “proud” British Jew. "The far right has hijacked the deaths of those poor little girls."
But some of the people who are sticking up for the migrants are also antisemites who equate Zionism with racism, Isaac said.
"They said in advertising for this event that they wanted to get rid of Nazis, fascists and Zionists," he said. "That scares me a little."
The actions of the police in London mirrored the security operations taken over the weekend elsewhere in Britain.
Thousands of officers, many in riot gear, were sent out into the streets to deter protesters from showing up. More prison cells were made available in case they were needed. And law enforcement readied its surveillance and facial recognition technology to identify suspects.
In the meantime, courts adjusted their hours to make sure judges would be available in case the system was flooded with freshly arrested suspects.
In Merseyside, near Southport, three men were jailed Wednesday and accused of taking part in what police called a violent disorder, and several hundred more people were arrested.
Police said many of the actions were being organized online by shadowy far-right groups, who are garnering support online with phrases like “save our kids” and “stop the boats,” referring to small vessels, often rubber dinghies, carrying asylum-seekers across the English Channel from France.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, further fanned the flames by claiming that the U.K. was on the verge of “civil war” after more than a week of right-wing riots.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office quickly rebuffed Musk’s remarks, saying in a statement that such comments had “no justification.”
The riots have become one of the first major challenges for Starmer, whose center-left Labour Party took power last month in a landslide election victory, ousting the Conservative Party after 14 years.
While the U.K. is one of the richest nations in the world, it faces a cost-of-living crisis, and its public health service is struggling to meet demand. And despite being the world’s sixth-largest economy, it has the highest levels of child poverty among richest countries, according to UNICEF.
While the Labour Party was successful in the general election, at least part of its success was due to a far right galvanized by a surge in support, which split the right-wing vote, causing many Conservative lawmakers to lose their seats in Parliament.
