Leeds ‘Roma Riots’: A Story of Racialised Deprivation Eclipsed by Far-Right Hate Mongering
05 August 2024
On Saturday, West Yorkshire Police announced that 27 people had been arrested in Leeds in connection with the rioting that swept the inner-city area of Harehills on 18th July 2024. Amidst far-right vitriol, scapegoating, and wider disorder in the UK, the underlying causes for the rioting in Leeds have been obscured with few talking about the Romani people at the centre of it.
The spark that set the community alight
Harehills in Leeds is one of the most deprived areas in England. Years of chronic underfunding, austerity measures, and the previous government’s vandalism of public services has left behind a community with high levels of unemployment, health deprivation, and crime. For decades, there have been sporadic periods of unrest and rioting in the area, often in response to what are seen as incidents of police ethnic profiling towards the largely British Asian residents.
On 18th July 2024, over a thousand people took to the streets in what soon became an out-of-control riot with a double decker bus set alight, a police car overturned, and fires fuelled by rubbish and wooden palettes set in the street. Earlier that day, five Romani children were taken into protective state care by social workers accompanied by the police after they had received information the family were intending to take the children out of the UK in contravention of a court order. A video filmed at the time of the removal shows a police officer dragging a child who looks around the age of ten from his home while he cries, grabs the doorframe, and fights against the officer.
An interview with a family member, and later reporting by the Guardian, stated that the court order was related to an incident in which a baby was brought by the family to hospital with a head injury that was deemed to be non-accidental. The exact circumstances of the injury to the infant are not public. Also, the reasoning and proportionality of an immediate, forcible removal of all five children cannot be reasonably judged either. However, the way in which children are disproportionately removed from Romani families across Europe is relevant to the context of the situation.
Disproportionate removals of children from Romani families
Across Europe, Romani children are removed from their families in staggeringly high numbers compared to the majority population, and even in comparison to other racialised minority groups. According to research by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), Romani children account for more than 80% of all children in the state care system in Nográd County, Hungary despite Roma only making up 20% of the local population. Care professionals in Serbia estimated that 60% of children in care were Roma, despite Roma being 2% of the country’s population. Slovakia’s care system is at least 63% and at most 82% populated by Romani children according to the ERRC (while Roma make up 6 – 8% of the Slovak population). In Bulgaria, more than 50% of children in care are estimated to be Roma by care workers and NGOs (despite Roma representing around 10% of the population). In the Czech Republic, where just over 2% of the population are Romani, approximately 24% of all children placed in early childhood care institutions for children under 3 years-of-age are Roma. And in Romania, where the family in Harehills are allegedly originally from, NGOs estimate that around 65% of all children in state care are Roma, despite accounting for less than 10% of the country’s population.
Institutional racism in the care sector breeds distrust
A combination of racial stereotypes and biases from care workers, institutional racism in the care system, and the illegal removal of children on the basis of poverty has led to this situation around Europe. In some countries (notably in Central Europe) children are removed from their families to be placed in children’s homes, rather than family environments. Children who grow up in such institutions are damaged, in one way or another, for life. They leave institutions both with the stigma of being ‘an institution child’ as well as being Romani, while no longer being part of a Romani community they can rely on for support.
In many countries the ERRC works in, the threat of child removal has frequently been leveraged as a form of coercion over Romani communities by police officers (usually accompanied by torture) to extract confessions. Other times it is a threat deployed by politicians who seek to exert control over Romani suffrage during election times.
And it's not just Eastern Europe – ERRC research in 2018 found that Romani and Traveller children in England are three times more likely to be taken into care compared to the rest of the population. The causes for the discrepancy were familiar: stereotypical views held by care professionals leading to oppressive and coercive practices relating to placement of Romani and Traveller children in state care. This is especially true for Roma from the European Union who have emigrated to the UK, often from severely marginalised and segregated communities lacking basic infrastructure and provision of services in their home countries.
While all child assessments are individual, there is a clear trend in England towards escalating cases towards removal quickly when it comes to Romani and Traveller families. The Roma Support Group have pointed to Romani experiences of direct and indirect discrimination from Children’s Services in England, as well as a lack of training and knowledge of Romani culture and specific challenges from the side of care workers as contributing factors. They also highlight that most child removals from Romani families are cases of neglect, stemming from families living in material deprivation in poor housing with poor access to services.
All this does not excuse the riots of the 18th of July, but it goes some way to explaining the reaction of a community pushed to the brink by institutional racism, material deprivation, and a very real threat of persecution by state authorities.
When tensions inflame, the far-right blame
The Harehills riot, as local Green Party Councillor Mothin Ali said, “was inevitable at some point”; a consequence of tensions reaching break point, a community neglected, and people feeling let down by authorities. It was first and foremost an outpouring of tensions in a multiply deprived area by people of differing ethnicities and faiths (including white, working-class residents).
England’s far-right instead took the opportunity to paint this public disturbance as a ‘race riot’ led by Islamist extremists. Far-right grifters hijacked photographs of local councillor Mothin Ali being present at the riots as evidence of some sort of Muslim uprising in Leeds. Councillor Ali was in fact filmed alongside another local councillor, Salma Arif, calling for calm before the riot spread, and was later seen preventing rioters from setting more fires and helping to put out flames with water. This did not stop the football hooligan and former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) from posting misleading pictures of Ali to imply he was joining the rioting. Britain First leader Paul Golding also posted the same images as evidence that Muslims “will never integrate or assimilate.” Even the newly elected MP and leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, described the riot as “the politics of the subcontinent…playing out on the streets of Leeds.” For Farage, it’s easy to get things wrong when you are thousands of miles away on a GB News funded tour of the United States, supporting the opposition leader of another country, instead of doing your job as a Member of Parliament at home.
Despite the problems of the Harehills neighbourhood being attributable to decades of austerity politics, and the direct dismantling of public services by 14 years of Conservative rule, far-right internet commentators were quick to paint the riot as an example of the failures of the two-week-old Labour government. The fact that the far-right completely ignored, or else denied, that the spark for the unrest came from within the Roma community proves that their problem is not with Islam being incompatible with Western society as they often claim. Instead, it is simply the sight of brown faces on English streets that draws them out, spitting with rage. In this sense they have once again shown their fascist face, and the deeply seated white supremacy and hatred that fuels their movements. It doesn’t matter whether the targets are Muslim or Christian, Pakistani or Romani, the English far-right still holds the same values that their progenitors espoused in Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood.
Only through working class community-organising between people of all ethnicities and faiths can such divisive politics be effectively challenged. British Roma and British Muslims must not let the far-right set the tone of ‘who is to blame’ but rather work to organise in their mixed communities to address the fundamental neglect and racism they both face, together.
