How does a horrific knife attack by a UK-born teenager that killed three little girls morph into a week of far-right violence against the police and the British state?
The message that has been repeated again and again is that it is because people are angry. Of course they are. Three innocent children are dead, murdered at a Taylor Swift dance class, and eight more are injured, along with two adults. That fact should fill anyone who is not a sociopath with cold, hard fury.
But anger on its own does not start a riot. It does not drive people who feel the sharp stab of horror and fearsome compassion with the bereaved families to travel for miles to descend upon a traumatised town, tear up the streets, target a mosque, throw bricks at police and turn the most horrific of tragedies into a political crisis. To use the anger we all feel at this appalling event as an excuse for civic violence is not just “hijacking” a stricken community’s attempt to grieve, as the Prime Minister put it last week, but a sickening insult to the families and a betrayal of the British values the rioters purport to champion.
So, no. The despicable scenes we have seen in recent days, which have led to over a hundred arrests, are not about anger. Or rather, they are, but not anger at the murder of those little girls. It’s a manufactured kind of anger, reminiscent of the football hooliganism of the 1980s, of men (and it is always men) spoiling for a fight and seeming almost jubilant to have found a cause that appears worth their rage.
We can and should talk about the driving factors. The sense of alienation across Britain, that something somewhere has gone wrong, that the status quo is broken and those in charge either do not have the ability to fix it or are actively making it worse. We have just had an election campaign where the ruling party was booted out in the most brutal fashion as punishment for 14 years of failures, replaced by a new government whose main call to arms was that it would be slightly less bad. People are frustrated and desperate – whether about their precarious economic circumstances, the dire state of public services, or the mass immigration over three decades that the country is yet to fully process. When the problems are easy to articulate but the solutions are difficult, messy and expensive, the result is rising populism.
Keir Starmer knows this. At the New Statesman summer party, the Prime Minister spoke against “populism and nationalism in all its forms”, warning: “Don’t think that it couldn’t happen here.” The Labour government is painfully aware of the limits of a technocratic approach to Britain’s challenges, and the risks if benefits do not emerge quickly enough. The violence that began in Southport and then spread across the country was a taster.
But we also need to talk about the diverting process itself. Why did the murder of three girls with a knife last week start such violence, but (to take a recent example) the murder of three women with a crossbow last month did not? The answer is that one of them was immediately – and wrongly – linked to some of the most incendiary issues in British politics: illegal immigration, multiculturalism, tension surrounding Muslim communities in the UK.
It is worth taking a moment to look at how the misinformation that the Southport killings had anything to do with Islam or small-boat crossings materialise and spread, when the suspect was born in Cardiff to parents who came here from Rwanda – a Christian country – decades ago. The Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a think tank dedicated to tackling extremism and disinformation, has tracked down the initial the source of the false claim – a fake LinkedIn post shared on Twitter – and mapped how it was seized upon by social media accounts claiming to be news outlets, and then amplified by the platforms’ algorithms which ensured it was seen by millions of people.
No one knows the origin of the adage that a “lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on” – some say Mark Twain, some Winston Churchill, some trace the sentiment back to Jonathan Swift. Whoever it was could not possibly have imagined how terrifyingly apt it would prove in an era where a fake LinkedIn post can spread a malicious rumour that sparks days of violence. None of this is organic. Some of the biggest accounts, of both individuals and ersatz news organisations, sharing the lies are ones that monetise engagement – they quite literally profit off the outrage and grief and the resulting violence of spreading a narrative that is false but will be compelling to their audience. The platforms themselves – Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook – have a financial interest in fuelling the discourse and letting viral misinformation spread, if it keeps people clicking on their sites for longer.
And that was only the start. Far-right actors used social media to mobilise at short notice, with fresh accounts and videos springing up to ensure a vigil morphed into a riot. Though many social media platforms do have policies in place for accounts that incite violence, we can see in the footage of burning cars and clashes with police how inadequate the enforcement of those policies is.
This has turned into a conversation about the far right in Britain, about immigration, racism, populism and the frustration of the disenfranchised towards what they see as a state that has failed them. That conversation is vital. But we also need to acknowledge that this did not happen by accident. The violence was whipped up by individuals with a political agenda and a financial incentive to turn a tragedy into an opportunity. It was turbocharged by social media companies that claim no responsibility their users posts, but make money off them nonetheless.
Taming the internet may be too large a challenge for any one government to take on, at least in the immediate term. Those casting around for easy answers about tech regulation should consider why no country has yet managed to strike the right balance and bring the likes of Google, Meta, TikTok and Twitter to heel. But understanding the internet – how it shapes us and exploits us and serves up content we instinctively react to regardless of its veracity – surely is within our grasp. So let’s start by being honest about how this manipulation trick works. Because we are all angry that those girls are dead. And we should be just as angry at those trying to capitalise on their deaths.
[See also: The teenage Messiah is no more]
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