At 10.30pm on Monday night, a man was filmed attempting to decapitate a 40-year-old Northern Irish man on the streets of North Belfast. By Tuesday, a 30-year-old Sudanese immigrant had been charged with attempted murder. The blurry video — flung across Telegram, X and Facebook — was enough to ignite a night of fury.
By evening, houses, cars and buses were set alight by protesters. The familiar chant “foreigners out” rang through the streets, according to several reports. Near the burnt carcass of one bus, graffiti read “fuck Islam”. The leader of the Social Democratic & Labour Party described the events as a “race-based pogrom” on the BBC.
“A Sudanese national charged with attempted decapitation in Belfast triggers night of arson and anti-immigrant violence across Northern Ireland and England.”
The violence did not stop in Belfast. Protests erupted in Antrim, Bangor and Ballymena. In England, similar scenes played out in Southampton — just last week, the city saw unrest after the death of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, a case captured on bodycam footage that showed him handcuffed and dying on the pavement.
There is a dark symmetry at play. On 9 June 2025 — precisely one year ago — the streets of Ballymena, about 28 miles from Belfast, were mobbed and set ablaze for two days. That riot was triggered by the court appearance of two Roma boys accused of attempted rape of a minor. What began as a peaceful vigil soon descended into petrol bombs and brick missiles, until protesters were dispersed with a water cannon — a tool the PSNI has long known how to use.
This is not the sectarian violence of the Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought an imperfect peace to Northern Ireland, but could not stem a series of Republican-Loyalist clashes and attacks on police in 2001, 2005, 2011, 2012, 2018 and beyond. No piece of paper could exorcise that sectarian angst. But this new wave of unrest is different: inchoate, anti-immigration feeling spreading across England and the Republic of Ireland alike. The anxieties of the Falls Road and the contours of the Shankill have, for perhaps the first time in a long time, traded sectarian rage for a more straightforward form of ethnic conflict.
Political leaders have condemned the violence. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage held his first major news conference since the local and national elections, as Reform faces renewed scrutiny over immigration decisions made by some of its leading figures during their time in Conservative government. The battle for the narrative has only just begun.