The fire that gutted Larne Leisure Centre last night (11 June 2025). A shelter for migrant families fleeing the Ballymena riots. Wasn’t just the act of a dozen hooded men. It was more than tht. It was the end point of a narrative long nurtured by Britain’s right-wing press: a steady drip-feed of suspicion, hostility and dehumanisation. The Daily Mail and the right wing mediascape didn’t throw the Molotov cocktail. It just made sure everyone knew where to aim it.
The Mail’s coverage of the violence is a masterclass in incitement by insinuation. The piece mourns shattered windows and disrupted yoga classes, but still manages to mention—twice—that the accused in an alleged assault “required a Romanian interpreter.” That detail. Irrelevant to the charge—became the matchstick. It was never about justice, only identity. The mob didn’t wait for facts. It saw skin colour. And the press, instead of diffusing the tension, helped crystallise the narrative: that a crime by any migrant is guilt by association for all. A licence to burn homes, terrorise families, and call it community defence.
There’s a sick familiarity to it all. A Czech mother, Blanka Harnagea, pastes a union jack to her window in the hope it will ward off attackers. A Polish man, here fourteen years, surely long enough to call a place home, barricades the front door with a sofa as rioters set his living room on fire. Families tape signs to their homes—“Filipino lives here”—as if pleading not to be chosen. It is the logic of fascism in miniature: the demand to prove allegiance, to assimilate or suffer. And even then, as Ballymena proves, it might not be enough.
This isn’t just about the far-right fringe. Labour is in government now. And what do we get? Mealy-mouthed condemnations. Starmer and his Ministers will “utterly condemn” the violence. Then says nothing of the narrative that enables it. Nothing about the hostile environment that Labour quietly pledges to maintain. Nothing about the hotels Labour MPs called “magnet policies.” Nothing about Rachel Reeves parroting tabloid lines on immigration in Parliament.
They may not speak like Farage, but they govern in his shadow.
And the Mail plays its part. It performs concern, while stoking fear. It packages racist violence as tragedy, never responsibility. The mobs are always “thugs” or “yobs”never citizens shaped by years of anti-migrant scapegoating, years of politicians and newspapers making foreigners the problem. There’s no introspection. No acknowledgment that maybe, just maybe, years of publishing terms like “foreign squatters,” “invasion,” “fighting aged males,” and “unvetted men in hotels” might have had consequences.
You don’t have to throw a petrol bomb to be part of the riot. You just need a printing press and a hatred you’re willing to monetise. And a government too cowardly—or too complicit—to say: this ends now.
