However sickening Monday’s attack in Southport was, and however outraged we are that a 17-year-old could allegedly butcher his way through a class of young girls dancing to Taylor Swift, there is no excuse for the violence and thuggery unleashed in response.
On Tuesday night in Southport, a mob threw bricks at a mosque – even though there has never been a shred of evidence to suggest the perpetrator is a Muslim – and 53 police officers were injured in the fracas.
Then, on Wednesday night, the so-called ‘Enough is Enough’ protests outside Downing Street resulted in 100 arrests amid calls to ‘save our kids’. Riot police, including dogs, were deployed in Hartlepool, County Durham, while separate demonstrations have taken place as far afield as Manchester and Aldershot, Hampshire.
The right to protest is paramount in our democracy. Nevertheless, I hope that every last one of the idiots responsible for any criminality receives an exemplary prison sentence.
Police cordon off Hart Street in Southport after a 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana allegedly stabbed three children to death and left more injured on Monday
Why do increasing numbers of people seem all too willing to take to the streets to make their views clear? Most are not necessarily ‘far-Right’: instead, many have legitimate concerns about mass migration, the breakdown in law and order and what they see as ‘two-tier’ policing, whereby some communities are treated more gently by authorities than others. They want to protect their families, their communities and their nation. Millions probably agree with them, even if they would never attend a protest, still less take part in a riot.
Southport, after all, is only the most appalling example of unspeakable violence recently carried out on our shores.
On Tuesday, masked young men slashed at each other with machetes on the seafront in Southend, Essex. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people ran away screaming – while officers were filmed standing by, seemingly doing nothing to stop what could easily have descended into a bloodbath. Eight people were arrested and multiple weapons were seized.
On Monday, in a park in genteel Ipswich, Suffolk, a man in his 20s was left with ‘potentially life-changing’ injuries after being stabbed. Also this week, a bus driver in his 50s was brutally killed in a stabbing on his way home from work in Stoke Newington, North London. These last two incidents raised barely a squeak in the national media, so inured have we become to violence that used to be so rare in Britain.
For as long as these attacks keep proliferating, many ordinary people will grow increasingly angry. Some will be willing to take the law into their own hands. What, then, should the authorities be doing to stop the mob from spiralling out of control?
The answer is that they should be candid with the public about the facts of specific cases.
Southport is a case in point. In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, the police and Home Office were reluctant to release any concrete information about the killer, except hurriedly to assure the public that this was not a terrorist attack (how did they know so quickly?) and to stress that a 17-year-old male from Cardiff had been arrested.
Social media footage shows men with machetes swinging at each other on the Southend coast in Essex on Tuesday
It was not until much later that further information about this young man’s family background belatedly emerged. We learnt that his parents had moved to Britain from Rwanda, while only today was the alleged child-murderer finally named – as Axel Rudakubana.
In the absence of genuine information about this massacre of the innocents, social media – whipped up by bad-faith actors both here and abroad – inevitably stepped in.
Within hours, baseless rumours began circulating online that the culprit was an illegal Muslim immigrant from the Middle East – an Arabic-sounding name was bandied about – who had arrived in the UK on a small boat from France and was ‘known to MI6’. According to academic Marc Owen Jones, there were at least 27 million views of posts on X (formerly Twitter) ‘stating or speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner’.
Professional troublemakers, such as the misogynistic alleged pimp Andrew Tate and the rabble-rousing agitator known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, weaponised public discontent online.
No surprise, then, that the Southport rioters attacked a mosque on Tuesday night.
The second thing the authorities can do to win back ordinary people who are appalled at the direction Britain seems to be taking is to avoid any suspicion of a ‘two-tier’ approach to the law.
After the Southport attacks, the police cracked down hard on protestors in Southport and London, while Home Secretary Yvette Cooper issued a statement bristling with rage and condemnation.
Fire blazes in the streets of Southport as disorder breaks out following the deaths of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class
But when intimidating protests took place outside Rochdale police station in Lancashire as recently as last week, fuelled by social media footage of police action during arrests of young British men of Pakistani heritage at Manchester Airport, Labour ministers were swift to insist they understood the Muslim community’s anger.
Senior police and BBC journalists appeared anxious to underplay the critical fact that the arrests came after a shocking brawl, in which several officers had been hospitalised – one a woman whose nose was broken.
A similar trend was seen two weeks ago in the Harehills area of Leeds in the ugly aftermath of social services removing children from a Roma family two weeks ago in the Harehills area of Leeds. Officers were pelted with missiles and saw one of their cars flipped over. A double-decker bus was set ablaze. Yet police were filmed running away from the disorder.
To appear to treat some groups of protestors differently from others is a recipe for division and disaster. Playing favourites flouts the rule of law.
The third factor increasing public anger is, I would suggest, the behaviour of major news providers – especially the BBC, which has repeatedly disgraced itself this week. Anchorwoman Samantha Simmonds informed viewers: ‘Mass stabbings in this country are extremely rare’ – a highly misleading claim.
Just this decade, Britain has suffered multiple mass stabbings, from last year’s Nottingham attacks, in which two young students and a 65-year-old man were killed, to the June 2020 Islamist massacre in Reading, which saw three gay men hacked to death. In April 2022, four people were stabbed and killed at a property in Bermondsey, South London.
Dr Rakib Ehsan believes one factor contributing to recent public unrest is the behaviour of major news providers, namely the BBC for ‘disgracing itself this week’
Between March 2023 and March 2024 alone, 233 people were stabbed to death in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics – while nearly 3,900 people were admitted to hospital with knife wounds.
Instead of openly citing this important data, BBC home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford responded to Simmonds by comparing the Southport slaughter to what he grotesquely called the ‘infamous mass stabbing in Dunblane in 1996’.
I hardly need to remind you that 16 children and their teacher were of course shot dead – not stabbed – while another 15 were wounded on that terrible day 28 years ago. I have not seen any evidence that the BBC, or Sandford himself, have apologised for this mistake.
Could it be that the Corporation were so quick to reference Dunblane, however inappropriate, because its perpetrator was white and Scottish?
Terrified at the simmering forces of anger and alienation in the country, our leaders, our police and our state media remain unwilling to address matters openly.
This reticence – however well-intentioned it may be – has served to deepen people’s distrust. Left unchecked, I fear it will lead us to a very dark place.
Dr Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance