The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has pledged that rioters who caused chaos across England this weekend will face “a reckoning”, saying thugs will be getting a knock on the door from police.
Cooper said all those involved would “pay the price for their crimes” across a full range of offences from looting, arson, disorder and violence to incitement on social media.
She told Sky News: “So we should be clear, there will be people who were thinking they were going on their summer holidays this week, and instead they will face a knock on the door from the police.”
On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Cooper said: “We have seen truly appalling criminal violence and thuggery in some of our cities and towns – it is a total disgrace. These people do not speak for Britain.”
Police would pursue the “full range of prosecutions and penalties” including prison sentences, long-term tagging and travel bans, she said, adding: “Keir Starmer has made clear he is prepared to take whatever action is needed to keep streets safe.”
Noting that most of the disorder took place this weekend, she said hundreds of arrests had already been made, with additional prosecutors in place, and courts on standby to ensure “swift justice”, similar to after the 2011 riots.
At an emergency Cobra meeting on Monday, ministers would be “making sure the criminal justice system is ready to deal with this”, she added.
Cooper said there had been a strong policing response so far, with significant additional numbers of public order trained police still available to be deployed if needed, though she acknowledged it had been a “complex issue” due to the “changing patterns of disorder and threat in different locations”.
Social media put the situation “on rocket boosters”, she said, adding that there was evidence of crimes committed on social media, in particular encouraging and promoting violence, which police would pursue. “If it’s a crime offline, it’s a crime online,” she said. “We can’t just have the armchair thuggery of people being able to incite and organise violence and not face the consequences.”
She said social media companies had a responsibility to tackle the “shocking misinformation” and “deliberate organisation of violence”. There were clear requirements for them to remove criminal material and a responsibility to remove misinformation, but “sometimes they take too long”, she said.
The shadow home secretary, James Cleverly, told BBC News that he had visited tech companies in New York and San Francisco to clarify the previous UK government’s expectations in relation to preventing disinformation. “There is action that’s being taken, but more needs to be done,” he said.
He also said the government “should have been quicker” and taken “key decisions” faster in its response to riots taking place across England, including calling off Starmer’s holiday sooner and scheduling a Cobra meeting much earlier.
He told Sky News: “These are the actions of people who are clearly responding to disinformation online, but are obviously motivated by racism. We’ve seen people with swastika tattoos and giving the Nazi salute, attacking people that have had no link at all with the terrible instance that we saw in Southport last week.”
