How did we get from three little girls being hideously killed at a Taylor Swift dance class to boozed-up, far-right thugs rioting on the streets of Southport? The senseless killing of children understandably conjures up a very specific kind of revulsion and grief. But this was not what was on display close to the Southport mosque last night amid flying bricks, burning cars and anti-Muslim chants.
Attention must be paid to Twitter, now called X: it always had problems, but under Elon Musk’s watch it has become a cesspit of disinformation and far-right talking points. Social media spread unverified and indeed false claims – for instance, that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived by boat. In fact, he is a Cardiff-born Briton with “no known links to Islam”, in the words of the BBC. Indeed, the police are increasingly focusing their inquiries on the suspect’s mental health.
But the toxicity of social media is just one ingredient here: poisonous rumours are only effective if there is a receptive audience. First of all, it is important to remember that there has been a homegrown far right on these islands for decades. In the 1930s, the main flag bearer was Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, while from the 1970s onwards it was John Tyndall and the National Front, and then the British National Party (BNP) in the 2000s. Today, convicted fraudster and thug Tommy Robinson has the greatest prominence, but he left the English Defence League more than a decade ago, and it has since disintegrated. The far right now is fragmented and lacking coherent organisation, but it can draw from a wide pool of sympathisers and makes adept use of social media and messaging apps for coordination.
Crucially, there is also a much broader rightwing populist ecosystem which was lacking before, stretching from some Conservative politicians to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. Yesterday Farage fanned the flames by using X to ask if the “truth is being withheld from us” in this case, with a slimy attempt at plausible deniability by stating he did not know the answer. He now has “member of parliament” added to his name, granting respectability to this dangerous rhetoric.
That there was an audience eager to believe the suspect was Muslim tells its own story. In the age of the “war on terror”, Islamophobia became a pervasive and respectable bigotry. At the end of the 2010s, more than a third of Britons – equivalent to about 20 million adults – believed Islam was “a threat to the British way of life”.
Today’s far right has latched on to this widespread and mainstream bigotry. This has synthesised with the broader anti-migrant and anti-refugee frenzy whipped up by rightwing media and politicians. Having devastated Britain’s social fabric with ruinous economic policies, the Tories sought to distract and redirect discontent on to the Other. Interestingly, polling suggested a marked overall softening on public attitudes to immigration. Not so for a hardcore, and here is why the “stop the boats” campaign was so dangerous: it whipped them up into a frenzy – Suella Braverman spoke of an “invasion on our southern coast” – as the boats still came. That drove a vengeful and conspiratorial mindset, encouraging a sense that an unpatriotic elite is exposing the nation to danger.
There appear to be profound similarities between what happened in Southport and the riot in Dublin last November, which followed another knife attack on children. But the English far right is bigger, with a longer active history – and receives more encouragement from the mainstream. The arrival of a Labour government – however inadequate it is for those of us with progressive inclinations – will enrage rightwing conspiracists further. Indeed, the scenes in Southport might only be foreshadowing something much darker to come.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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