British police revealing suspects’ ethnicity will embolden the far-right

There has been growing pressure on the police to release the ethnicity and nationality of suspects in what are deemed “high-profile cases”. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has called for official guidance so that changes can be made allowing police to release this information, claiming that there should be greater transparency “on issues around nationality, including on some of those asylum issues”. This call has been met with minimal critique or challenge despite the risk and dangers it poses to Black and Brown people across the country.

Last summer, after the horrific Southport killings, police took unprecedented steps to release the name and image of the perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana. A move criticised by one victim’s family as “completely irrelevant” and as “kowtowing to the likes of Farage”.

We know what happened next. In August 2024, six days of racist rioting spread across UK cities. Asylum seeker centres were fire bombed, Black and Brown people were subject to pogroms, pulled out their cars and attacked on the streets. It was multi-racial communities, coming out in unity and self-defence, that put an end to the violence - not the police or politicians.

Appeasing the far-right

With this proposal by Cooper, racialised communities are being put at risk again. This same warped far-right vigilante justice continues to inform the current wave of anti-migrant protests we’ve witnessed since July. Undoubtedly, this call to release the ethnicity of suspects comes from a desire to appease the far right in their latest strategy to justify their attacks on asylum seekers and people of colour across the country.

Calls for transparency and more data seem innocent enough at a glance. However, how we decide what is important or high-profile is rarely delivered to the public without an agenda or narrative driving it. What does it mean for a case to be “high profile”? Who directs our attention and for what reason?

When a driver slammed into Liverpool fans during their celebratory parade, far-right figures like Joey Barton and Lawrence Fox put out desperate pleas for any information on the suspect, and in a string of tweets, Fox revealed the underlying bias of what they had imagined (hoped) the suspects race would be - “you cannot hate them enough”, he tweeted. In the hours following the incident, the police were forced to release a statement, explicitly stating that the suspect who was in custody was a white male. Unsurprisingly, the far right and media alike quickly lost interest in 53-year-old Paul Doyle and his victims.

Similarly, when Police officers were implicated in the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal, with five victims also accusing three police officers of raping them, this horrifying aspect of the grooming gangs case suspiciously fell under the radar.

Rather than address the underlying causes of sexual violence – a culture of patriarchy that makes abuse rife – the seriousness with which cases are treated by the government and police seems to rely heavily on the race of the perpetrator. A premise we should never accept if we want to meaningfully end sexual violence and protect all victims.

Weaponising sexual violence

For decades, the far right has sought to bolster stories of “Pakistani grooming gangs” to justify its hate, bigotry, and violence towards people of colour. This narrative has been further amplified after two men were recently charged in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton.

A government-commissioned review into abuse by grooming gangs in England and Wales revealed a lack of reliable data, failing to capture the true scale of the problem, with Baroness Casey claiming in her report that data was “not good enough to support any statements about the ethnicity of group based sexual exploitation at the national level”. Yet the issue is still framed through narratives already established by the right: ones that treat crimes carried out by white people as exceptional and the crimes of Black and Brown people as pervasive and inevitable.

Regardless of data, whether it exists or not, misinformation remains the cornerstone of the far-right playbook, and they will continue to weaponise it for as long as we let them.

The truth is that there is no evidence to suggest that people seeking asylum are disproportionately sexual offenders or violent criminals. We cannot, however, say the same about the far right. Two in five people arrested for participating in last year’s racist riots had previously been reported to police for domestic violence and abuse.

Nigel Farage proudly posts images with Conor McGregor, who was forced to pay damages to a woman for rape after losing both a civil case and an appeal. And it should come as no surprise that Farage’s close ally, Donald Trump, notoriously carries a long string of sexual misconduct allegations.

This selective outrage reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of far-right politics. The right routinely weaponises the spectre of sexual violence as a proxy for racist narratives - painting migrants and refugees as threats to “their” women - while turning a blind eye to the perpetrators within their own ranks.

Why is it that victims of sexual violence are only recognised when their suffering can be exploited to serve a racist agenda? And why does the right consistently refuse to confront and address the abusers in their midst?

Legitimising racism

Just last week, a Black man innocently playing with his white family members in a park was incorrectly labelled as a paedophile by far-right figures and became the target of racial abuse and threats. This sadism is directed towards any person of colour as narratives constructed around ethnicity, nationality and crime suggest that they have an innate predisposition to crime, particularly implicating them in crimes related to sexual violence.

This logic situates all Black and Brown people within the wider consciousness of their white counterparts as guilty until proven innocent. Placing a target on all of our backs.

The state, rather than challenging these narratives about crime and ethnicity, legitimises them. Each right-wing riot is framed as a group of people responding to what the government deems a “legitimate concern”. And with each incident, the government doubles down and legitimises the violence we see, with policies and proposals more racist and more harmful than the last.

In the past month alone, since the anti-asylum seekers protests began outside of hotels, the government have announced £100 million in extra spending to “stop the boats”, and this recent announcement from Cooper calling for the nationality of suspects to be released follows suit.

People in the UK are suffering, crushed under soaring living costs. In the world’s sixth richest economy, 4.5 million children live in poverty. The arguments that asylum seekers are usually single men who commit crimes and that an unjustifiable amount of resources is spent on housing and supporting them, is nothing more than a desperate attempt to strip support from the most vulnerable. And the claim about resources is deliberately overstated to inflame resentment rather than reflect reality.

This new proposal to report on ethnicity and nationality is driven by these far right arguments and must be rejected for what they are: smoke and mirrors. It is a racist distraction, designed to capture the imagination of red wall constituencies and by institutionalising this practice, the state gives far right narratives greater currency and lets the government off the hook for systemic failures.

The painful reality is that sexual violence occurs across all racial and ethnic groups, and in most cases, it is perpetrated by someone the victim already knows. Yet, rare but sensationalised incidents that fall outside this pattern are often exaggerated and weaponised, fuelling moral panics targeted at particular communities.

What is consistently absent from both government and media narratives is a genuine commitment to protecting and supporting survivors; but such protection was never their primary concern. Instead, as history repeatedly shows, Black and Brown people — and asylum seekers in particular — are turned into scapegoats for the failures of a broader capitalist system.

The mistrust, fractures and ultimately violence that such a proposal will breed against racialised communities cannot be understated and it will continue to be a source of violence rather than reconcile our communities against the many issues we face.

Black Lives Matter UK is a national, member-led, anti-racist organisation fighting to end systemic racism.

Follow BLM UK on X: @ukblm

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.