Sitting having a coffee, absent-mindedly scrolling through social media, I was confronted with a video, a screen recording of an Instagram livestream, showing a man with a St George’s Cross emblazoned across his chest leading a mob of young men and women in surrounding a car, as one individual jumps on the windshield and others attempt to pull the driver out. Shouts of “kill him” can be heard as a cloud of black smoke engulfs the scene, lending a further sense of dystopia to an already profoundly disturbing sight. The justification given for the depraved violence was that the driver was a Muslim. 

Clicking away from the video, I went to the caption to see where the video had been taken. The quiet, creeping fear that had settled in was confirmed: it was in my own home town, Hull. Earlier in the week, social media posts had circulated advertising far right protests, and to my dismay Hull had featured amongst them. The scene of the attack on the car was one of many depicting similar acts of violence and disorder in the city: a Shoezone looted and set alight, burning bins, bricks launched at the police, a local hotel purported to house asylum seekers besieged and windows smashed in.

Troubles flares in Hull (Image: Photo by Ioannis Alexopoulos/Anadolu via Getty Images) 

I left Hull five years ago, when I moved to Glasgow for university. Truthfully, as a teenager,  I couldn’t wait to go; I wanted to live in a bigger, better connected, I suppose cooler, city. My feelings towards my home town have since been mixed - undoubtedly, I enjoyed the increase in freedom that Glasgow represented to me - the luxury of Uber, for example, and not queuing at a taxi rank for an hour and a half after a night out. The ease with which I could take direct trains to Newcastle, Manchester, and Leeds where my friends were also studying, rather than spending several hours and making multiple changes to get to a city an hour's drive away. The shining array of nightclubs, a marked improvement on the three run-down nightclubs myself and my friends used to frequent on a rotational basis. 

Despite the affinity I felt for my newfound home in Glasgow, I also felt fiercely defensive of Hull, and more importantly the people in it, and would regularly find myself making spirited defences of Hull against criticisms by peers who would repeat low level disparagements of the city, its infrastructure, outward appearance and lack of opportunity. Without straying into the territory of overdone, hackneyed clichés about the heart of northern community spirit, there genuinely is a lot of that going around in Hull, an innate friendliness that the city is certainly not exceptional in possessing, but that enriches the experience of living there exponentially.  

What happened on Saturday was a sinister display of bigotry, ignorance and violent, even murderous intent towards minorities. If we’re being completely honest with ourselves, I don’t think anybody who knows the city can credibly claim that it was entirely surprising. I love Hull. It’s where I grew up, and I have met some of the best people in my life there. But for a long time an undercurrent of anti-migrant rhetoric has bubbled under the surface of the city’s collective consciousness.

A man holds up a placard in Hull (Image: Photo by Ioannis Alexopoulos/Anadolu via Getty Images) 

In 2015, at the height of UKIP’s electoral success, Hull was a key area of support for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration party. UKIP came second in all Hull constituencies, after the Labour party, gaining a peak of 22.4% of the vote share in Hull West. This summer, the Reform party enjoyed a similar level of success in the city, once more coming second behind the Labour party in all constituencies, peaking at 30.6% of the vote share in Hull East. Expressions of support for the right-wing politics of UKIP and Farage aside, political engagement in Hull is minimal. Voter turnout this summer was as low as 42.3% in Hull East.

The writing has been on the wall for years now. If more of us had paid attention to the political disengagement of Hull’s residents we might have anticipated the mutation into violent antisocial behaviour we’ve seen this week.

In 2017, the theme for our successful bid for city of culture was of a “city coming out of the shadows”. Seven years since we were celebrated nationally for our cultural past and exciting future potential, Hull remains one of the most deprived cities in the UK. Index of Multiple Deprivation data from 2019 placed Hull as the fourth most deprived local authority in the country, and the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities identified in a 2023 report that people in Hull are dying younger than they should, with wide inequalities in life expectancies between Hull and the rest of the UK. As far as I can see, lack of investment and engagement continues to cast a long shadow over the living standards and quality of life in the city. 

My first instinct upon seeing the turmoil was to declare that this wasn’t a Hull I recognised, and didn’t represent the city I know and love. Others have taken to social media to suggest the same. But I think we let ourselves off too lightly when we say this isn’t a Hull we recognise. Five years since I left as a teenager, I want to claim the behaviour of rioters is not representative of Hull, but maybe I need to open my eyes. It’s too easy to let a defensive sentimentality about our much-maligned and often criticised home obscure the grim reality of tangible racism that pervades. 

I don’t live in Hull anymore, and don’t plan to any time soon. Maybe it’s complacent of me to make these assertions from over 300 miles away in Glasgow, a city that certainly isn’t immune to far-right agitation. But the scenes of the weekend were both heart-breaking and deeply disturbing and I feel the longer we avoid having these conversations the more the issues fester; poverty and deprivation cannot justify unconscionable and racist violence but it’s becoming clearer that it might go a long way in explaining it, and that is a reality we have to start making sense of.

Hull can be the welcoming, tolerant place I want to remember and describe it as - but the rising demonisation of migrants in areas with stagnating living standards won’t go anywhere if we don’t confront it.