How the Belfast attack played into the hands of Britain's far right

Young men in black hoodies and balaclavas throwing stones and firebombs and targeting cars and homes.

It's all so depressingly familiar, particularly in Belfast, where these scenes are playing out after disturbing footage emerged of a man, identified by police as a Sudanese asylum seeker, attacking another man with a kitchen knife in the north of the city.

The victim, Stephen Ogilvy, is reported to be in a serious condition with injuries to his eyes, face, neck and back.

He was saved by the intervention of bystanders, including a man wielding a stick used in the game of hurling.

A GoFundMe page set up for the "Knife Attack HERO" lauds him for his courage in stepping in "to defend his fellow Irish man".

Police have charged the 30-year-old alleged attacker, Hadi Alodid, with attempted murder.

Britain was a tinderbox even before this latest incident, with narratives about immigration, race and claims of a "two-tier" policing system dominating political debate in recent months.

While UK leaders have called for calm after the arrest, in many ways the Belfast attack has played into the hands of Britain's far right and its preferred talking points.

A brewing storm

During the country's three decades of sectarian violence, The Troubles, the targets of the casual violence of the kind witnessed overnight in the Northern Irish capital could be the police, British soldiers, alleged informers, or people from the other side of the bitter Catholic-Protestant divide.

Now the fury is directed towards immigrants.

Similar scenes erupted a year ago to the day in the little town of Ballymena after two Romanian teens allegedly sexually assaulted a local girl.

Months later, those charges were dropped.

A year on, the writing was on the wall well ahead of the horrific act of violence in Kinnaird Street, North Belfast.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is surging in the UK, with Nigel Farage's Reform UK party achieving record successes last month in local elections.

Ogilvy's family on Wednesday, local time, released a statement condemning the riot that broke out the previous evening.

"We want to make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome, and peaceful protest is the only way forward," their statement read.

"We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work."

Notwithstanding those words, the Belfast stabbing is exactly the type of violent incident the far right likes to pounce on.

Farage described the Belfast attack as "barbaric" and his party, Reform UK, said it was "a direct result of treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy".

Meanwhile, convicted criminal and far-right figure Tommy Robinson is seeking to capitalise on it.

He has put out a series of posts calling on people across the UK to take to the streets in the wake of what he called "another invader attack on our people".

The Belfast incident also comes as shock and anger over another vicious stabbing is still raw and, while different, the attacks have both sparked debates about immigration and asylum.

Just last week, police body camera footage was made public of the final moments of a young white man's life after he was stabbed in December last year by a British Sikh, Vickrum Digwa.

Digwa, who has been sentenced to life in prison, claimed he was the victim of a racist attack and police arriving on the scene took his word for it, cuffing the dying man, Henry Nowak, and initially dismissing his desperate pleas that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe.

The cries of "two-tier policing" reached fever pitch.

The term has been gaining traction in recent years, particularly in the UK, following the violent protests in the wake of the 2024 Southport attack.

It is the idea that police treat white people more harshly than ethnic minorities, and its proponents argue that those who took part in Black Lives Matter protests or pro-Palestinian rallies were treated more leniently than those taking to the streets in anti-immigration marches.

One of the term's biggest promoters is billionaire Elon Musk, who has amplified the anger over the circumstances of Nowak's death.

In one post, the world's richest man asked whether people knew that "official police policy requires them to be racist against Whites".

The Trump administration is also stoking the flames, with the State Department expressing condolences to Nowak's family in a post on X, while adding that "two-tier policing" was a glaring symptom of "civilisational decline".

US Vice-President JD Vance also weighed in on the Nowak case.

He said on X that Nowak would be alive "if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it".

Troubled legacy of violence and rioting

The violence in Belfast that erupted overnight has a particular Northern Ireland character to it.

The country's propensity to violence in the wake of The Troubles is well documented.

When I reported on the Ballymena riots for the Foreign Correspondent program, I lost count of the number of people who told me about how rioting was something of a way of life for young men growing up in housing estates still largely segregated along religious lines between Catholics and Protestants.

They almost affectionately call it "recreational rioting", and it tends to increase in the summer months.

The hold Protestant paramilitary groups still have over groups of young men is also a factor.

Ex-paramilitaries we spoke to last year categorically denied that loyalist (Protestant) paramilitary groups had any involvement in the Ballymena riots.

Veteran journalist Malachi O'Doherty was sceptical of that claim, telling us those groups "are the only people in that area that would have the authority to order young men onto the street to throw petrol bombs".

Anti-immigration sentiment in Northern Ireland is also fuelled by frustration that the internal Irish border, which runs between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, is largely unpatrolled.

Jim Allister, a Westminster MP and leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice party, told us last year that racial tensions in Ballymena were caused by "the government's failure to have any controls" on the Irish border.

He believed that meant migrants were able to enter Northern Ireland "at will".

News that the alleged Belfast attacker came to Northern Ireland via Paris and Dublin before claiming asylum will only fuel those sentiments.

Speaking in the UK parliament in the wake of the Belfast attack, Mr Allister asked what would be done "to stop the importation of an alien culture that thinks it's appropriate to try and behead someone in the UK".

Police, it should be noted, have not, at this point, alleged the attack involved an attempted beheading.

A summer of unrest?

The triggers of this latest unrest are being felt across the UK.

In addition to concerns over policing, cost-of-living pressure is widely felt and disillusionment with the immigration policies of mainstream political parties is growing.

And you don't have to delve very far into social media to realise that what's happening in Belfast is firing up right-wing figures far beyond Northern Ireland's borders.

Musk was quick to repost information Tommy Robinson shared about the UK-wide protests.

The billionaire then added his own message, actively encouraging people across the UK to take to the streets, saying "only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!"

As UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer fights for his political life, the country is bracing for what could be yet another summer of unrest.