Abstract Social psychological research has shown how far‐right leaders mobilize people by claiming that majority populations are threatened or silenced. This paper builds on this work to examine a related process in naturalistic interactions: how riotous actions are explained and justified through appeals to ‘British values’ in online forums. Using discursive psychology, we analyse talk surrounding the riots that followed the stabbing of three young girls in Southport, England—the UK race riots of August 2024. We show that invoking British or English values serves two key functions: it renders rioters' actions self‐explanatory and offers a competing account of rioters as the more authentic representation of Britishness and the British people than the government. This reframing of ‘British values’ offers up a challenge to those attributing riots to ‘far right’ motivations and instead portrays the riots as effortful and even ideal expressions of British citizenship. Thus, British values operate not merely as symbols but as rhetorical tools that can sanitize the ‘far‐right’ label linking the riots, immigration, state policy and national identity.
Sambaraju et al. (Wed,) studied this question.