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 genuine 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 those with dogs, were deployed in Hartlepool, County Durham, while separate demonstrations have taken place as far afield as Manchester and Aldershot, Hampshire. Further events are expected this weekend.
The right to protest is paramount in our democracy. But Britain feels on the cusp of serious disorder. Why do increasing numbers of people seem only too eager to take to the streets to make their views public?
17-year-old Axel Rudakubana attacked a class of young girls dancing to Taylor Swift in Southport on Monday
On Tuesday night in Southport, a mob threw bricks at a mosque – even though there has never been a shred of genuine evidence to suggest the perpetrator is a Muslim – and 53 police officers were injured in the fracas
Whatever Sir Keir Starmer might like to think, most are not necessarily ‘far-Right’: instead, many will have legitimate concerns about mass migration, the breakdown in law and order and what they see as ‘two-tier’ policing, whereby some protesters are treated more leniently by the 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 recent example of violence 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. In the end, eight people were arrested and several weapons were seized.
Also this week, in a park in genteel Ipswich, Suffolk, a man in his 20s was left with ‘potentially life-changing’ injuries after being stabbed, while a bus driver in his 50s was stabbed to death on his way home from work in 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 here. 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 born in Cardiff had been arrested.
Floral tributes left at the scene of the attack where three children were murdered and others injured
It was not until much later that more information about this young man’s family background belatedly emerged.
We learned his parents had moved to Britain from Rwanda, while only on Thursday 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/Twitter ‘stating or speculating that the attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner’.
Elon Musk’s social media giant has become a sewer of disinformation recently, even as Musk himself has repeatedly criticised the accuracy of the ‘mainstream media’ — which he has apparently suggested ‘brainwashes’ people.
Unhappily for him, an EU study last year found that more fake news was carried on the platform than on five comparable sites, including TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Twitter has proved a perfect platform for professional troublemakers, such as the misogynistic alleged pimp Andrew Tate and the rabble-rousing agitator known as ‘Tommy Robinson’, to weaponise public discontent.
Riot police, including those with dogs, were deployed in Hartlepool, County Durham, while separate demonstrations have taken place as far afield as Manchester and Aldershot, Hampshire
Southport, after all, is only the most appalling recent example of violence carried out on our shores, writes Dr Rakib Ehsan
Other accounts on the site spread openly racist ‘memes’, many with millions of views, and often without censure.
No surprise, then, that the Southport rioters attacked a mosque on Tuesday night. They might not have done so if they had understood that the suspected perpetrator reportedly came from a Christian family.
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 protesters there and in London, while Home Secretary Yvette Cooper issued a statement bristling with rage and condemnation.
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 who suffered a broken nose.
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. 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 protesters 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.
Between March 2023 and March 2024 alone, 233 people were stabbed to death in England and Wales, 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 was 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 — has only served to deepen people’s distrust.
Left unchecked, I fear it is leading us to a very dark place.
Dr Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance.