On 29th July, a knifeman entered a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, 20 miles from where we are right now, and stabbed nine children and two adults. Three of the girls died – six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar. A community and a country was in shock. This doesn’t happen in the UK. People were angry, and they were scared, and they were sad. They planned a vigil to the memory of those three girls, in Southport, on July 30th.
Initially, information on the perpetrator was scarce. In the vacuum, rumours circulated. Channel 3 Now News released the name of the murderer – Ali Al-Shakati, a young Muslim who had recently arrived by boat. This was soon amplified far and wide, initially on Telegram, starting with a 55-year-old ‘social commentator’ who had appeared multiple times on GB News and Talk TV, called Bernie Spofforth. Bernie, aka Artemisfornow, is an influential conspiracy theorist, who has grown a following for her denial of the pandemic, her warnings over vaccine harms, her scaremongering about 15-minute cities, and all the usual stuff. At one point, she had 250k followers on Twitter.
The killer’s name was soon in every Telegram chat I’ve been following since the White Rose investigation. It came up multiple times in Tommy Robinson’s channel, the far-right former leader of the EDL, who grew a mammoth Telegram following during the pandemic, after pivoting to Covid conspiracism. It made it to Twitter, where people like Andrew Tate, Lawrence Fox, Tommy Robinson, Isabelle Oakenshot, and Darren Grimes started speculating about what had happened and who was to blame. Was the month-old Labour government too soft on immigration? Is this further proof we need to stop the boats? Had we been too accepting to people from other places? Were we undergoing an invasion, and was this the first sign?
Nigel Farage, the new MP for Clacton, had questions, so he took to Twitter to ask them, pointing out that the police hadn’t said anything about the murderer, so what aren’t we being told? What are they hiding?
People were angry, and now they had a name, a group to blame and a venue. They descended on the Southport vigil, some wearing hoods, many carrying cans of alcohol, many from outside of the region but plenty from within it. If things were struggling to remain peaceful, the next bit of news lit the tinderbox: spreading around Telegram and other online groups was an image of a man being arrested, apparently a Muslim with a machete who was stopped on his way to the vigil, intent on doing harm.
That was all it took, and from there carnage ensued. Vehicles were set alight, locals were attacked, the police – who had responded to the murder of three children just over 24 hours earlier – were pelted with bricks chipped out of walls and dug out of the very road itself. It became a riot, and it headed to Southport Mosque. Thankfully, nobody was killed.
Misinformation and propaganda
It was all based on lies. Ali Al-Shakati didn’t exist; the killer was called Axel Rudakubana. Rather than a recent arrival on a small boat, he was born and raised in Wales. Rather than a Muslim, he was Christian, born to strongly religious Rwandan parents. And rather than covering this up in a sinister fashion, the silence from the police was because he was 17, and therefore a minor, with a legal right to anonymity until a trial judge releases his name, which in the cases of minors usually only happens after sentencing.
So how had Channel 3 Now News, the original source of the name, got this so wrong? It’s because there is no Channel3Now – in the UK, the third TV channel is called ITV, we don’t have a Channel 3. The source called Channel3Now is a now-suspended YouTube channel, whose first videos were Russian language motor racing videos. The channel was bought, repurposed, renamed, and retooled to try to generate income by mass producing news articles, regardless of their veracity. It’s unclear who first sent it to Bernie Spofforth – though she has since been arrested, so we may find out its route to her in due course – but once it was with her the existing conspiracist infrastructure of the UK went into full force, flinging lies to every confused and angry person in the network.
Farage, for his part, has since admitted that his source for his rumour mongering and questions to just-ask was… alleged sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate. These are the waters in which the Right Honourable Member for Clacton-on-Sea swims, apparently. As Labour MP Jess Phillips pointed out, if he truly had genuine questions about what was going on, Farage could have turned up for work and asked those questions of the people who knew, but instead he decided to put out an opportunistic video on Twitter. Far from apologising, Farage has only doubled down, releasing further videos warning that the worst is to come unless immigration is curbed.
And what of that Muslim with a machete, whose arrest further nudged the mob into violence? His name was Jordan Davies, and rather than being an immigrant, he was from Southport. Rather than a machete, it was a flick knife. And rather than being a Muslim, he was attending the riot as one of the far-right sympathisers, having posted to his Instagram: “Show these dirty little rat bastards who there fuckin dealing with. Gunna be hard to keep it peaceful not going to lie”. Again, he messaged that while carrying a knife.
The rumour about him being Muslim seems to have been based on him having a beard in a grainy photo of his arrest. The source of it is still being investigated, as presumably is their intent and how aware they were of his identity at the time they lied about him being a Muslim agitator.
For the complete avoidance of any doubt, there were no Muslims involved in this horrible crime – the killer wasn’t Muslim, and the people inciting the violence were not Muslim. But on Friday – apparently in response to the crime and in the memory of those girls – a mob gathered outside of the Abdullah Quilliam Society Mosque in Liverpool, whipped up on social media by all these same forces. Fortunately, they were hugely outnumbered, and the leader of the Mosque, Adam Kelwick, even came out to speak directly with some of the protesters, talking some down from their fears, listening to what they had to say, and hugging one of them.
We went to see Adam speaking at an anti-racism event, and he was a great speaker, calling for compassion and humanity, even for those who are yelling slurs and aggressive things at us, because everyone is a human being, and people are scared and confused. And he also made the absolutely correct point that the killer was not a Muslim, but even if he had been a Muslim, that in no way justifies a mob attacking a random mosque, any more than we should be burning down churches because the killer was Christian. This wasn’t justice, and it wasn’t even vengeance, it was a race riot. And it wasn’t the only one.
Riots and racism
Over the next few days, riots would break out at cities and towns across the UK. There were nazi salutes on the streets of Leicester, swastika tattoos on rioters who had travelled from Stoke to join the mob in Sunderland, and people going house to house in Middlesbrough, kicking in doors and stopping cars to try to find people who weren’t white. In Rotherham and in Tamworth, crowds gathered outside of hotels where asylum seekers were being kept, putting out the windows, daubing racist graffiti, and trying to set alight to the building to burn the families inside. All of this purportedly in the name of legitimate concerns, all of it denied as being influenced by the far right. The swastika tattoos were on people who had reasonable concerns. A hotel filled with families and kids was torched in the name of children’s safety.
Even the anti-racism demonstration we joined in Liverpool was convened in order to march down to the waterfront to oppose a rally that had been gathering there, where six or seven hundred people – mostly, but not all, men – had been gathering. We left before their protest turned violent, and before they fought with the police, and broke their way into a phone shop in town, one that happened to be owned by a Muslim. They eventually left the town centre, only to reconvene in Walton, supposedly to gather outside of a Mosque, before eventually setting fire to a community library.
Ostensibly, this was all meant to be a protest, but what they were protesting wasn’t clear. Some of the crowd in Liverpool and elsewhere were yelling “Who the fuck is Allah?” – none of this was to do with Muslims at all. They were also holding signs saying “Save Our Kids” and yelling about “nonces”, and again, this wasn’t a case of child sexual abuse. Nine children had been stabbed by a 17-year-old. In many of the riots, they were yelling “we want our country back”.
The “Save Our Kids” banners, of course, give away some of the origins of this movement and how the confused crowd had been convened: it is a QAnon slogan, notionally about an epidemic of children being trafficked into sexual slavery by a shadowy cabal of elites. It also crosses into the anti-Muslim narrative around ‘grooming gangs’ – the far right talking point which takes the real-life instances of paedophile rings among some Muslim communities in some towns across the UK, and emphasises it in order to falsely insinuate that the majority of child abuse in the UK is committed by Muslims. The same might also explain the gentleman who had constructed a seven-foot tall Christian cross out of plywood and daubed it with slogans – because the same spaces that favour QAnon have also been amplifying Christian Nationalist imagery.
That QAnon slogans and Christian Nationalism had spilled out onto the streets of Liverpool ought to have been a shock, except this was not the first time we’ve seen it happen – in my first-ever editorial for The Skeptic magazine, back in September 2020, I highlighted how anti-vaccine marches that were organised on Telegram were seeing people take to Merseyside streets with QAnon banners. Those anti-vaccine marches went away, but the groups didn’t, and the influences on those groups didn’t – they continued to boil away, simmering in a soup of conspiracism, Satanic Panic, culture war provocateuring, and anti-woke virtue signalling. They bubbled their way through claims around people who died suddenly, through Andrew Bridgen and Aseem Malhotra telling them the vaccines were deadly, through warnings about 15-minute cities and central bank digital currencies and drag show story hours and transvestigations, and they were kept on the boil by cynical actors stoking the flames.
Those cynical actors are, in my opinion, particularly responsible for the cries of “We want our country back”. The rioters wanted to take ‘our’ country back from the immigrants, Muslims and people of colour (the rioters were not asking about country of origin before they meted out their racially-motivated ‘justice’). It would be easy to see this as simple racism, but I think we should also not overlook the impact of conspiracy theory and conspiracist dog-whistling in fomenting the rage, specifically the “Great Replacement” or “White Genocide” conspiracy theory.
The role of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory
According to the Great Replacement, white people are under threat in their native UK, due to the influx of immigrants from outside of Europe. This influx is, the conspiracists argue, no coincidence – it is deliberate, intentional, and coordinated. It will be no surprise as to who the conspiracists think is behind this concerted attack on the white British people: when the neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville they chanted, “Jews will not replace us”. They weren’t afraid that their place would be taken by Jewish people; they feared that a shadowy cabal of influential Jews was trying to destabilise ‘native’ white countries by co-ordinating the mass influx of people of colour, who would soon replace the white race in their ‘own’ country.
Explicit references to the Great Replacement, or “The Kalergi Plan”, or themes central to the conspiracy theory are near-constant in the conspiracist Telegram groups which started during the pandemic and have continued to spread scaremongering misinformation since. What’s more, those explicit references have been augmented by high-profile dog whistling – Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster (among many other examples from the current MP for Clacton), David Cameron warning of a “Swarm” of migrants, Suella Braverman claiming we are experiencing an “invasion”, Rishi Sunak creating the “Stop the Boats” slogan which echoed around the riots, even David Davies warning that asylum seekers might be lying about their age in order to enter the country.
The trope that most refugees are “fighting age men” is constantly brought up as a gotcha, despite there being good reason why men are more likely to seek refuge before their family. It’s also deliberate that they’re described as of “fighting age” rather than “working age”, or simply “adult”. The effect is to create and stoke the fear that refugees are here to fight, with the inevitable implication being that the white people of the UK must fight back, or lose ‘our’ land.
Arguably, nobody is more central to the point at which mainstream dog whistles met with closed-group extremism than Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka “Tommy Robinson”.
Tommy Robinson
Back when I was investigating the White Rose antivax movement on Telegram, I warned that those conspiracy spaces I was monitoring were being constantly filled by antivax content originating with Tommy Robinson’s channel. To the point where, when I was talking to our friend Lewi, who was the mod of some of those channels, I even asked why Tommy Robinson’s content appeared so frequently, and he admitted that he needed to get better sources, but it was hard to find things elsewhere that had the kind of antivax messages Tommy Robinson’s channel was reliably pumping out.
Whenever I give talks about the antivax movement, I’ve pointed this out, that Tommy Robinson would prolifically post dozens of times per day, antivax and conspiracist posts, that would go viral across Telegram. And either it was because when the pandemic came along, Tommy and his crew became instantly radicalised into antivaxxers… or, they simply recognised that there were a lot of confused, scared and disaffected people during the pandemic, and if you pivoted to producing the kind of content they liked, plenty of them would follow you. Sure enough, Tommy Robinson started singing their song, and they started buying his album – his channel amassed hundreds of thousands of followers. And once they were following, he could start to feed them the kind of messaging he wanted them to believe – about Islam, about immigrants, and about England.
It is likely that the riots would not have happened were it not for Tommy Robinson. In the week before the killings, he held a rally in London and attracted 30,000 people – where he screened a film in which he falsely accused a Syrian teenager Jamal Hijazi of a violent assault, resulting in Hijazi receiving death threats. Robinson was successfully sued by Hijazi for defamation and owed £100,000 in damages. He didn’t pay. Instead, he repeated the claims and then fled the country to avoid the law.
Robinson was in a luxury hotel in Cyprus when, a few days later, the murders happened in Southport. He used his Twitter to amplify the misinformation about the killer, pointing almost a million followers in the direction of the riots. His Telegram channel shared the times and places of other planned riots and shared a hit list of immigration offices to target. On August 2nd, he appeared on Info Wars, where he told Alex Jones that “Between now and October, I’m going to pour petrol on the fire.” Whether that use of imagery was intentional or not, two days later, his followers tried to burn down two hotels filled with asylum seekers, while chanting his name.
Elsewhere, he has used his Twitter account to warn that white people are going to become a minority in the UK, and to release a video in which he further incited violence, saying:
“Stop the fucking boats. Get them out of them hotels. Get them gone. Put them on boats and send them back. They shouldn’t be here. They’re endangering the safety of our families. Men will rise up – they were always going to rise up. They have to rise up to defend their families. You’ve brought this war on our shores (sic).”
According to The Times, Robinson’s incendiary tweets from his luxury hotel were seen more than fifty million times per day over the course of the riots. This despite him having previously been banned from Twitter for hate speech – a decision which was overturned when Elon Musk intervened in November. Those looking to Twitter’s ownership to curb these flagrant attempts to rile up a mass following and set them upon an innocent population will be sorely disappointed –Musk appears to view Tommy Robinson as less of a threat to stable democracy, and more of a reputable news source, even responding directly to Robinson’s propagandist mischaracterisations of events.
Musk’s inability to distinguish right-wing agitators from legitimate sources of news is incredibly concerning. We’ve seen him amplifying a post from propagandist Andy Ngo about William Nelson Morgan, a rioter who was convicted “for refusing to disperse and holding a stick at a library riot in Walton West Yorkshire”. “Messed up”, commented Musk. For what it’s worth, the man in question was holding a truncheon and was threatening people with it, and required three police officers to restrain him. Also for what it’s worth, the library attack was the one in Walton, Liverpool – not Walton, the village in West Yorkshire. When one of the most powerful men in the country gets his crime reporting from someone who doesn’t even bother to find out where the crime happened, we should be concerned.
After the dust settles
Since the riots last week, the dust has somewhat settled, and order appears to have been restored. As a nation, we’re left with a clean-up job – something that community members across the country got on with very quickly, with people quickly volunteering to replace smashed windows, rebuild damaged walls, and repair broken trusts.
But while the physical damage has been all but repaired, the social damage will take a lot longer, and it will start by trying to understand the forces that drove the riots, and that provoked people into violence and disorder.
It’s impossible to deny the amount to which racism was responsible, including racism from within those communities. Mosques were targeted for a reason, but more than that, people weren’t pausing to ask who was Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Hindu or atheist; people were attacked for the colour of their skin and their perceived differences. We saw people doing Nazi salutes on the street, and proudly showing off swastika tattoos. They were there because they dislike people who don’t look like them. Equally, as was evidenced by the looting of shops (including Lush and Greggs), and by the number of rioters who turned out to have long criminal records, some of the riots attracted people who wanted to be part of the chaos.
However, there were undeniably a large number of people who were drawn to the riots for reasons that were not explicitly or consciously malign – people who were confused, angry and scared, who saw some children had been senselessly attacked and killed, and who worried that theirs could be next. Their fear and confusion made them malleable, and easy for cynical actors to manipulate them into directing that anger at scapegoats and political targets. There are still people, now, who believe that the killer was Muslim, or was a refugee, even though it’s unequivocally the case that he was not.
That anger, confusion and fear has been built and stoked for years, behind the scenes, in private Telegram groups where people are trained to accept dubious sources, and rewarded for spreading unconfirmed conjecture. It has been amplified on Twitter, where extremists like Tommy Robinson’s path heads in the same direction as people like Nigel Farage, Darren Grimes, Douglas Murray, Isabelle Oakenshot, Andy Ngo, and a carnival of other ‘social commentators’ who willingly stoke the immigration culture war if it happens to gain them money and influence.
This isn’t to say that last week’s riots were inevitable. But in many ways, they were predictable, and the warning signs had been gathering for a while. These riots had nothing to do with the deaths of three young girls, or the wounding of six others, and two adults; they had everything to do with a country which has ignored the role of conspiracism in growing the far right, a government that has actively fanned the flames of that growing fire, and a culture of social media sites who would rather monetise the people pouring on petrol than to turn off the fuel at the source.
