Has Keir Starmer turned the tide after week of riots?

The prime minister is warning against complacency after a second riot-free day on Britain's streets.

Telling police chiefs that "we need to maintain high alert", Keir Starmer was "clear that the country is not out of the woods yet", said Sky News. 

"Clearly", Starmer "won't want to brand this a victory over 'far-right thuggery' prematurely", but some are praising him for turning the tide against the violence.

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What did the commentators say?

When "thousands of anti-racism campaigners turned out" on Wednesday night, the far-right was "largely absent", said the BBC. Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, one of the UK's most senior police officers, said that this was a "turning point".

It "appears the huge number of riot officers on standby", combined with "stiff sentences of up to three years in prison already handed out by the courts", have been "an effective deterrent", said the broadcaster.

A "number of factors contributed to the facing down of the Far-Right," tweeted Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges, and "one of them was the deterrent effect of the swift, hard sentences that started to be handed down". The disorder was "billed" as Starmer's "first major test as Prime Minister", added Hodges, and "he's passed it".

But what will happen next? One scenario is that the unrest "peters out", said The Economist, but another is that it will "continue, or mutate". After a riot near an asylum hotel in Knowsley on Merseyside in 2023, "similar events continued for six weeks".

Either way, Starmer's government now has "an opportunity to craft a narrative around migration" that "eschews the simple binaries of 'bad' and 'good' that have become so commonplace", said the Financial Times.

His policies for dealing with the asylum system are "broadly quite sound": Labour has vowed to hire 1,000 more caseworkers to process the backlog of more than 80,000 asylum cases, and to end the use of costly asylum hotels that have "become a lightning rod for people in deprived communities".

Starmer should also "use the breathing space afforded by the trajectory of falling net migration to articulate a credible and hopeful message" about how migration can support the British economy at a time when the government's "fiscal belt is fastened tight". 

The PM "has to find a way of ensuring that such events are less likely in the future", said Martin Kettle in The Guardian, and "this is a much longer term challenge". 

He must "start the process of doing what few western governments have managed to do", which is "reducing rather than fanning public anxieties about migration, but without legitimising either the rioters or their hatred". No one "pretends that this will be easy". 

What next?

Britain now heads into the weekend hoping the "civil unrest has come to an end", said Politico, but the PM insists his government is "not complacent and the threat is still alive".

Questions now "inevitably turn to how Starmer can stop the broader currents of right-wing populism and extremism". But he "may have the perfect man for the job" in his aide Morgan McSweeney, who "cut his teeth in Labour politics by defeating the far right" and will have a "key role in formulating a political strategy after this month's civil unrest".

McSweeney's "formative" experience in defeating the far right on Barking and Dagenham council "moulded his view of how to win back working-class voters by addressing concerns about community decline".