British police arrested 33 people in Birmingham on Saturday, after a clash between Unite Against Fascism and right-wing groups transformed the city into a war zone.

Gary Nichols watched the disturbances from his city center flat and said he was unable to go outside for about 2½ hours. He told the bbc:

It started off with a group of white guys who were chanting, “England, England.” I thought they were just football fans, but then a larger group of black and Asian people turned up and it all kicked off. You had people burning the Union flag. People were being kicked—some of them weren’t anything to do with the protests. It all seemed to be very systematic—groups were arriving in cars and getting involved in the violence.

The riots began as two rival protests clashed. Groups calling themselves the “English and Welsh Defense League” and “Casuals United” gathered in Birmingham’s city center to protest militant Islam. United Against Fascism organized a counter demonstration with local Muslims, claiming that the other groups were racist and had links to the anti-immigration British National Party. The English and Welsh Defense League and Casuals United deny the accusations and insist that they are not against any race or religion, but oppose Islamist extremists and sharia law.

It is not clear who started the fighting, or how it started—but the violence forced families to flee as rioters attacked each other with placards, planks and bottles in streets filled with shoppers on a Saturday evening.

“It was chaos,” said Hannah Taylor, from London. “I had only come up to do a bit of shopping, and found myself in the middle of a full-blown riot. People with small children were running into shops for cover. The whole city center just descended into some kind of war zone.”

A lot of attention has been given to the potential for racial conflict in America recently. But let’s not forget Britain, where liberal immigration laws, adoration for multiculturalism and close living quarters have made the country ripe for racial conflict. Other demonstrations are planned. Although the groups involved may be nonviolent and non-racist, they do attract fringe elements looking for a fight.

Racially motivated crimes are relatively common in Britain. This past weekend, for example, a gang pinned down a 14-year-old boy while they allowed a snake to bite him in what the police suspect may have been a racial attack. Also on the weekend, an Asian man was attacked by a gang shouting racist slogans in Glasgow. Anti-Semitic crimes reached an unprecedented high during the first half of 2009—more than doubling compared to the first half of 2008.

Britain has had major race riots in the past, and the potential is there for them to break out again. For information on the biblical prophecy that race wars will become endemic in both America and Britain, read Chapter 4 of Gerald Flurry’s booklet Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet.