We will not mourn: Reflecting on starmer’s britain

To many people, the resignation of Keir Starmer is unsurprising. He was plagued by controversies, from the Mandelson affair to his resolute support for Israel withholding electricity and water from Gazans. Ultimately, his departure leaves little room for public mourning; instead, it offers a stark opportunity to reflect on a deeply turbulent and divisive premiership.

 For Muslims in Britain and minority communities, Starmer’s leadership will be remembered for the government’s capitulation to the far right amid a terrifying surge in racially motivated violence. Ever since Labour’s landslide victory in 2024, the societal security of these communities has grown increasingly precarious, leaving them uniquely vulnerable to being scapegoated in the wake of public tragedies. This dangerous cycle of reactionary violence has repeatedly escalated over the last two years. The race riots in summer 2024, following the attack in which three girls were killed by Axel Rudakubana, led to nationwide protests against ‘illegal immigrants’, resulting in rioters burning down hotels housing migrants.

 Following the murder of Henry Nowak, we saw unrest in Southampton and violent disorder, with car windows smashed and political leaders, Nigel Farage, calling for ‘pure, cold rage’ for the alleged two-tier policing, where white Britons are treated unfairly in comparison to ethnic minorities. The statement reflects a growing suspicion that non-white groups are given preferential treatment and leniency in comparison to white people, a claim which is both false and farcical. As the charity Maslaha has shown, the criminal justice system is structurally racist, especially when we consider the disproportionate uses of terrorism legislation against Muslim communities. The recent designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, and the sentencing of the Filton 4 with a ‘terrorist connection’ for damaging military equipment, demonstrates just how swiftly the language of terror attaches to causes, and the communities behind them, that the state finds politically inconvenient.

The Belfast events of June 2026 laid bare exactly how lethal this misinformation ecosystem has become. On 8th June, Stephen Ogilvie, a 44-year old disabled man, was attacked with a kitchen knife in north Belfast by a Sudanese man. Despite the horrific attack, what followed was something altogether more manufactured. Within hours, false claims spread across social media, with posts wrongly stating that Ogilvie had died from decapitation, misidentified the attacker’s nationality, and used a fabricated photograph of a stranger to illustrate their claims. Ogilvie’s own family were forced to issue a statement to police confirming he was alive and urging the public not to use the attack to ‘divide people or fuel hostility’. This was the architecture of a riot, which was fuelled by instigators like Tommy Robinson calling the attacker ‘a Sudanese invader’ and the rioters as ‘patriots’, who were standing against ‘the treasonous lot in Westminster’.

Then came Edinburgh. On the evening of 19th June, five Muslims were attacked with a machete by a Scottish man, who when arrested, was shouting that he was ‘protecting the country from Muslim bastards’. This idea of ‘protecting the nation’ against immigrants and Muslims has floated for decades now but has certainly become more prominent as social media has grown. This rhetoric is no longer confined to the fever swamps of far-right online spaces. It is now processed into shareable formats, often AI generated, complete with misinformation, yet amplified by figures with enormous platforms. We are increasingly seeing the convergence between big tech and fascism, especially with the rise of AI and algorithms in boosting false narratives for clout.  What was once the fringe is now the foreground. And the consequences are being borne not by those who stoke the fires, but by the people whose homes are burned, whose children are taunted at schools, and whose bodies are attacked.

This is Starmer’s inheritance and his failure. A government that promised to clean up politics and restore trust in public institutions instead spent its final months consumed by the fallout from appointing Peter Mandelson as ambassador, a man subsequently revealed to have had undisclosed ties to Jeffrey Epstein. A government which lost over a thousand council seats, watching a Reform UK surge. And through it all, Muslim and minority communities felt not protected but exposed, left to absorb the violence that erupts whenever a crime committed by a migrant or a person of colour, is weaponised by those who have long wanted to make Britain hostile to anyone who does not fit the narrow parameters of belonging. Starmer condemned the Edinburgh attack in the expected way. Four days later, he resigned. No new legislation. No emergency debate on the rising violence against Muslims or on algorithmic accountability. No reckoning with the infrastructure of hatred that made Belfast and Edinburgh possible. Just a statement, and then a departure.

A government that fails to reckon seriously with the algorithmic amplification of hatred, that allows AI-generated incitement to spread freely under the banner of ‘free speech’, and that responds to each new eruption of racial violence with condemnation rather than meaningful structural change, is not protecting those within the nation. It is simply waiting for the next atrocity and auto-generating the next statement. Britain is now onto its seventh prime minister in a decade. Whoever succeeds Starmer will inherit not just a fractured political system, but a fractured social contract, one in which a significant portion of the population has been told repeatedly and loudly, that their Muslim and minority neighbours are a threat to be expelled rather than fellow citizens to be protected. Reversing that will require far more than a change of leadership. It will require honesty about how we arrived here, and the courage to say plainly that misinformation is not merely a nuisance of the digital age. It is a weapon being used globally today.

This escalation of violence and danger leads me to conclude that space really is shrinking for Muslims, that we must forgo claims of ‘belonging’ and ‘integration’. A win most definitely for the growing far-right parties seeking to govern this island, but a loss for those who have spent years building homes in a place which violently rejects us. I remain somewhat unenthused by the idea of a new prime minister and have little conviction that much will change at all for the future of racialised communities in the UK. The appetite for change is well and truly lost.