The Brits who oppose immigration are not the rioters for whom immigration is as good an excuse as any to riot

«A poll last year by the British Election Study found that among members of social grade A (high-level managers and professionals) 23% wanted much less immigration, compared with 42% of those in grade e, who hold low-level jobs or live on benefits. Yet there is little sign of an elite with distinctively liberal views, if that term means people with elite jobs. All the middle-class groups,  A, B and C1, think similarly (see chart).

Working-class white people are more opposed, but there is a wrinkle. The C2 group, comprising skilled manual workers, is more opposed to immigration than people in group d (semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers). That matches a poll taken after the general election on July 4th by Ipsos, which found that people in the C2 group were the most likely group to have voted for Reform uk. Skilled manual workers might feel more threatened by immigrants because they have more to lose.

If social class shapes attitudes in complex ways, age does so powerfully and reliably. Every age group is more opposed to immigration than younger ones. The differences are huge: people over 65 are more than

The evolution of Britain’s extreme right

 three times more likely to want much less immigration than 18- to 25-year-olds. Age may explain some of the class pattern: social group e is older than the others. Nigel Farage, Reform uk’s leader, boasted before the election that youngsters were flocking to his party. In the end, they were less likely to vote Reform UK than any other age group. 

If the streets and the polls tell slightly different stories, it is not the first time. After Enoch Powell, a Conservative mp, railed against immigration in his “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, many working-class Britons marched to support him, with London dock workers and meat-cutters especially prominent. Then opinion polls appeared, showing a different pattern. One, by nop, found that 67% of people in the A, B and C1 social groups, 71% of people in the C2 group and 63% of people in the d and e groups agreed with his views. Powell had appealed to almost everyone.

Today Britons differ in their attitudes to migration but not in their attitudes to the riots. Polls by YouGov show that only 7% of people support the unrest, and just 4% think the rioters should receive unusually lenient sentences, with scarcely any social differences. Hardly anyone likes a thug,»

[Are Britain’s rioters representative of views on immigration?]