Murder, machetes and mobs in Britain The deeper issue is a corrosive breakdown of trust, social order and cohesion Melanie Phillips
Hardly had we managed to digest the horrific news of the massacre of small children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class yesterday in a northern English town than we were looking on appalled at what followed.
At a school in Southport, three little girls aged six, seven and nine were murdered by a random attacker wielding a knife. Five of the eight other children who suffered stab wounds as well as two adults were left in a critical or serious condition.
The suspect who was captured was the Cardiff-born, 17 year-old son of Rwandan immigrants. At time of writing we know no more hard facts about him than that.
But throughout yesterday X/Twitter and other social media were heaving with claims that the attacker had an Arab name, that he was a Syrian Muslim asylum-seeker and that he was on an MI6 watch list.
None of these claims was remotely verifiable at the time, and today we have learned they were all untrue. There are reports that some of these claims originated from Russian bots or AI. Yet they were recycled all day yesterday by commentators and known influencers, demonstrably inflaming already heightened fury online.
The police made a point of announcing during the day that the attacker had been born in Cardiff. If this was an attempt to calm passions by showing that he wasn’t a Syrian asylum-seeker, it failed. The police announcement was treated with scorn.
After all, went the thinking, being born in Cardiff proved nothing. Plenty of Islamists had been born in Britain. The police were obviously lying. Again. This train of thought was clearly on display all day.
The result was that, hours after a vigil was held in Southport for those killed and injured in the attack, mobs in the town rioted, attacked a local mosque and left more than 50 police officers injured. Tonight, more such protesters clashed with London police outside Downing Street.
As has now been demonstrated once again, social media has a pernicious impact in spreading falsehoods and inciting disorder and violence. It enables tragedies which inflame public anger and horror to be exploited by agitators, thugs, conspiracy theorists, political opportunists and others with assorted agendas.
There are deeper reasons, however, why such falsehoods gain traction among the general public. Many are prepared to believe them while refusing to believe factual statements made by police and other authorities. And that’s because there’s been a widespread and catastrophic loss of trust in such public bodies.
For an increasing number of people, there’s now an automatic presumption that the authorities aren’t telling them the truth. That’s because there’s such a dislocation between what people can see with their own eyes is happening and what they are told or not told about it and what they can see is or is not being done about it.
The rioting in Southport has received considerable and disapproving publicity. That’s because those rioters could be described as “right-wing” — that is to say, white, male, working-class and therefore axiomatically bad.
Yet people can see that violent disorder by people who aren’t obviously white, male and therefore “right-wing” is often downplayed, excused or ignored.
On the same day as the Southport massacre and subsequent rioting, gangs of youths slashing at each other with machetes ran amok on the seafront at Southend. They were apparently part of a large influx of young people from outside the town. There was also violence in the town centre. Several people were seriously injured.
The machete is not a signature weapon of the white working class.
Earlier this month, after four children from a Romanian Roma family in Leeds were forcibly taken into care for their own safety, severe rioting broke out involving first Romanians and then other communities who piled in. A mob of about 1,000 people pelted police with bricks and bottles before torching a police car and a bus. A Roma community leader claimed that social services and police had showed “systemic racism and discrimination” in their handling of the family’s case.
What was instructive was the difference in reaction by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. While she vented unalloyed fury at the Southport rioters over “thuggery” which she called “a total disgrace”, she adopted a softer tone towards the Leeds rioters when she talked about their “audacious criminality” and “some issues around misinformation about the police having to respond to a complex child protection incident” — while about the Southend machete-wielders, she appears to have had nothing to say at all.
Such double standards over ethnicity are noticed, and have a deeply and dangerously demoralising effect. These and other such incidents have led many to believe that their country is being effectively taken away from them.
People believe they are being systematically ignored, gaslighted and trashed over their palpable anxiety about neighbourhoods that are being transformed in front of their eyes and public services overwhelmed by uncontrolled immigration.
People have been horrified by the Hamas-supporting demonstrations on British streets, in which Muslims scream with impunity for jihad and the murder of Jews while those in their sights are threatened by the police with arrest even though they have done nothing wrong. People are appalled not only by the failure to uphold law and order but the failure to distinguish between victim and aggressor, right and wrong.
Central to all this is the widespread and profound anxiety and alarm about threatening or intimidatory behaviour by members of the Muslim community, which people believe is being ignored by the authorities and effectively erased from public discussion through hurling the accusation of “Islamophobia” at anyone who raises such issues.
This stands to be seriously exacerbated by the new Labour government, whose plans to crack down on “Islamophobia” are likely to be further weaponised by the disorder over the Southport atrocity.
The more these crackdowns on public debate take place while illegal immigration is indulged and excused (as the Labour government intends to do), and the more people are gaslighted over legitimate concerns that are thus suppressed and ignored, the more anger and resentment will be created, the more unsavoury will be the political opportunists taking advantage of these developments and the more thuggishness, disorder and violence will result. This is the way a society fractures into warring tribes, and eventually disintegrates.
I discussed some of these issues on Times Radio’s breakfast show this morning with my Times colleague Hugo Rifkind. We also discussed the implications of the assassination in Iran of the Hamas terrorist boss Ismail Haniyeh, and the performance of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.
You can listen to the show here:
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