It has been one year since the Southport attack and the subsequent riots that spread throughout UK towns and cities in the summer of 2024. What began as an isolated violent attack quickly escalated into an anti-immigrant moral panic, the racialised scapegoating of minoritised, largely Muslim communities, and the relegitimation of far- and populist-right politics. In the days after the attack, there were far-right marches, online misinformation campaigns and everyday hostility toward Muslim communities. For some, these responses symbolised the continual failure of state-led multiculturalism; for others, they were signs of resurgent English and British nationalism. However one interprets these reactions, one thing is clear: far-right demonstrations through city centres, vandalised mosques and populist politicians speaking in absolutes about internal dangers, external threats and reclaiming national identity all reflected an overt, explicitly racialised politics.
These responses weren’t isolated to a single event. They revealed deeper conditions of late-modern society: ontological insecurity and risk. Zygmunt Bauman writes that living in late modernity is like ‘being on board a flight where all the passengers are painfully aware that the pilot… has long since evacuated the cockpit’. In other words, people feel no one is in control of major social problems. This instability generates a deep craving for certainty. The racialised backlash after Southport can be understood as an attempt to restore that certainty – by drawing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, identifying scapegoats and reclaiming national identity to produce order in an increasingly insecure world.
From ‘solid racism’ to ‘liquid racism’ and back again
In our new book, Liquid Racism, we argue that racisms of late modernity are best understood through the metaphor of glaciation. Just as water freezes into ice – expanding, solidifying and then melting when conditions shift – racism also moves between these phases. It may appear diffuse and fluid, then harden into more visible, violent and aggressive forms. These transitions are shaped by broader social, cultural and political forces.
The aftermath of Southport marked such a moment of solidification. ‘Mixophilia’ – Zygmunt Bauman’s term for the embrace or consumption of cultural difference to reduce anxiety – gave way to ‘mixophobia’: the fear of cultural mixing and the call to defend imagined boundaries. After Southport, the stranger was no longer to be assimilated or managed, but instead expelled or controlled. What emerged wasn’t a liquid racism, but a hardened, more ‘solid’ form – marked by clear boundaries, essentialist narratives and demands to protect identity.
This wasn’t a return to older ‘solid’ racisms. Rather, it illustrates a recurring late-modern pattern: solidification–liquefaction–resolidification. Racism in late modernity doesn’t disappear; it adapts, freezes and melts in response to society’s shifting political, social, emotional and cultural temperatures. In perceived crises, it returns in solidified, dangerous forms – because the root causes of insecurity remain unresolved.
Risk and ontological insecurity
The resolidification of racism after Southport can be understood through ontological insecurity – a concept developed by Anthony Giddens to describe the deep anxiety people feel when their world no longer seems stable or predictable. In today’s fast-changing context, often described as liquid modernity, individuals must constantly redefine themselves and their relationships. This includes navigating unfamiliar encounters with others where no shared history or expectations exist – often the result of growing individualisation and weakened social bonds.
These conditions have produced a society built around risk and uncertainty. Institutions – governments and welfare systems – once trusted to offer stability are now seen as unreliable, or even complicit in the changes they once managed. Migration is framed less as a social reality and more as a manufactured crisis. Rather than calming fears, institutional responses often deepen them, fuelling a sense of existential threat – particularly around national identity.
In this context, many retreat to what feels solid or familiar to regain control. Tragically, targeting migrants and Muslim communities becomes a way to channel fear and frustration into a simplified narrative of blame. The figure of the ‘migrant’ and the Muslim ‘other’ becomes a vessel for displaced anxiety – allowing complex global forces to be reduced to a question of who belongs and who doesn’t.
Populist narratives and the politics of blame
The Southport attack became the backdrop for a broader political script. Populist politicians and far-right social movements framed it as proof of national decline, failed integration and the erosion of ‘traditional’ values. Online platforms amplified this narrative, linking the attack to sweeping, misinformed claims of a demographic threat by specific minoritised groups.
The racialised responses to Southport weren’t just reactionary sentiments. They reflected what Zygmunt Bauman called a ‘retrotopia’: a nostalgic politics of return to a national geography of purification, free of late-modern ambiguity, secured through cultural sameness. Racism is central to this fantasy because it promises order. It draws lines, builds walls and reasserts control over who belongs.
The appeal of far- and populist-right politics lies not only in economic promises or cultural anger, but in offering reassurance. These movements tell people who they are, where they belong and who they should fear. They simplify late-modern uncertainties.
Towards a sociological response
To respond seriously to moments like the riots following Southport, we must understand racism not only as violent antagonism toward minoritised groups, but as a way of coping with insecurity – one that must be unlearned, not only resisted. That means challenging not just the explicit racism of the far- and populist-right, but also the insecurities that make those narratives appealing. We must construct alternatives to belonging, based on shared vulnerability and an ethics of care, not boundary-making and fortressification. It also requires addressing the social conditions that produce the craving for certainty in the first place.
One year on from the Southport attack and the riots that followed, we must be clear about what is happening: racism is undergoing a resolidification – not just in politics, but in everyday life. And that tells us something urgent about the deep insecurities of our time.
Nathan Kerrigan is Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University.
Liquid Racism by Nathan Kerrigan, Damian Breen and Yusef Bakkaliis available on Bristol University Press for £24.99 here.
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