Sunday Times 2
2024 riots: Englishmen drifting in confusion
View(s):By RubenThurairajah
It was in the summer of 2024 that the riots began in England. One of the first victims was a man called Chanaka Balasuriya. His shop, Windsor Mini Mart, was looted by rioters in Southport, near Liverpool where it all started. Yet already, barely a year later, it is hard to say what exactly the riots were for. Or against.
Those riots were not revolts of the hungry, nor crusades of the oppressed. They were not political in the traditional sense. These were pantomimes of rage, performed in the empty theatres of England’s forgotten towns, such as Southport, Hartlepool and Rotherham, by men shouting of England in places where England had long since withdrawn.
Police deployed to control anti-immigration riots in England in 2024
Their enemy was the immigrant. Specifically the non-white immigrant. But their real grievance was vague: a longing for an England that no longer exists, and perhaps never did.
The Englishman, ordinary and white, remains trapped in the aftermath of his country’s vanished Empire. His rulers, once lords of half the globe, have fallen into managerialism and abstraction. The new elite speaks not of duty or destiny but of “equity” and “sustainability”. They no longer even pretend to explain the country to itself.
Into this vacuum has entered confusion. The English working man, once the celebrated cog in the imperial machine, now finds himself displaced, economically by automation, socially by immigration, and spiritually by a history he does not understand and is no longer permitted to admire.
He sees the immigrant not just as a foreigner, but as the symbol of his own cultural redundancy.
The immigrants, meanwhile, many from South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, have built their lives around an England that is real and pragmatic, not nostalgic. They came for opportunity, not belonging. The promise was work, not kinship.
And even for the second generation immigrants, English by birth, the idea of “becoming English” holds little appeal. For what does it mean to be English now? To share in a guilt-ridden past? To be tolerated in a society that no longer demands assimilation?
England, in its effort to be post-racial, post-colonial, post-imperial, has forgotten to define itself at all. In this absence, the immigrant builds his own enclave, linguistically, religiously, economically. He integrates only where necessary. He is a citizen by passport, but not always by sentiment.
The Englishman resents this. But he never asks the immigrant to become his brother.
What unfolded in the riots of 2024 was not the beginning of a civil war, but the airing of a very English kind of grief: a grief without funeral, without honesty, without end.
The imperial fantasy, of Englishmen as civiliser, as trader, as global arbiter, lingers in the imagination, if not in policy. The nation that once ruled seas now fears dinghies. It once governed Calcutta and Colombo; now it cannot even govern Birmingham without mistrust.
And the political class? They have retreated into a cosmopolitan fog. They host summits on diversity, draft policies on cohesion, but never once speak plainly about what kind of country they wish to build. They are ashamed of the past, nervous of the present, and evasive about the future.
In their silence, during the riots, the streets spoke. But they said nothing coherent.
From the vantage point of a former colony like Sri Lanka, this English unease is familiar and faintly ironic. Here is the imperial power, now caught in the contradictions it once exported: racial anxiety, class confusion, cultural disintegration.
For generations, it was the London elite that lectured brown and black people all over the world on integration, modernity, and civility. Now it finds itself unable to integrate its own contradictions within a small island.
The English riots of 2024 were a symptom, not a cause. They solved nothing. They changed nothing. But they did expose something essential: that England, post-Empire, post-Europe, post-confidence, is no longer sure of itself. Not to its citizens. Not to its immigrants. Perhaps not even to its rulers.
And that may be the real crisis, not the anger, but the confusion. Not the flames in the street, but the silence in the soul.
In the end, what is left is estrangement. Between races. Between classes. Between myth and reality. England has become a country of parallel lives: one increasingly unable to forget the past, the other unwilling to live in it.
There is no war coming to England though. No revolution either. Only drift. Only the quiet erosion of meaning.
And perhaps that is the final irony of the British Empire—that it has left its former rulers as uncertain of who they are as those it once ruled. Tragedy indeed.
(The writer is a doctor based in Yorkshire, England)