Last August, riots exploded around the UK in the wake of the murder of three girls in Southport, north Merseyside, at the hands of killer Axel Rudakubana. At the time, the series of public displays of violence and disorder were fuelled by misinformation around Rudakubana’s religion, immigration status, and his motivation – now that he has been sentenced to 51 years in prison, and far more information about his life is available, belief in August’s misinformation ought to have waned. Sadly, that’s not how viral misinformation works.
In the hours and days that followed his attack, Rudakubana was falsely revealed to be an illegal immigrant, recently arrived on a small boat, allegedly named the far more mob-friendly and Islam-coded “Ali al-Shakati”. In fact, Rudakubana was born in Wales, and had been attending a school in Formby, halfway between Liverpool and Southport. Rudakubana was British, born to an immigrant family of Rwandan Christians. His father, Alphonse, is believed to have fought with the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which brought an end to the genocide in 1994. Rwanda, for the avoidance of doubt, is a 92% Christian country; only 2% of Rwandans are Muslim. It is beyond doubt by this point that those riots were predicated on lies, initiated and spread opportunistically by those with anti-immigrant and Islamophobic agendas.
After his arrest, Rudakubana’s house was raided, and police found that he possessed a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual – leading some to claim that, actually, their assumption of a religious motivation behind his attack was correct. Conspiracy theorists and far-right activists took a victory lap, declaring the murders as an Islamist terrorist attack. Why else, they argued, would he have enlisted with Al Qaeda? Clearly, this was evidence that the UK has a problem with calling out terrorists and criminals when those criminals are Muslims. Indeed, Reform UK MP Nigel Farage appeared on GB News to say as much:
our ability to stop terrorists is dismal but I think what’s even worse is the cover up… I was right all along, and if the public had known the truth about this guy crazy conspiracies would not have spread online and those riots would have been nowhere near as bad as they were. All Keir Starmer can do is talk about the far right well what about some of the evil ideologies that are allowed to persist within our community.
Ever willing to blow dog whistles, it is left to the GB News viewer to wonder precisely what Farage was referring to as ‘evil ideologies’. Meanwhile, Farage’s colleagues at Reform UK, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson, used their inevitable airtime on GB News to call for a reintroduction of the death penalty.
There are a number of things wrong with this response. In the days after his attack, those who were confidently declaring a terrorist motivation had zero evidence that that was the case – beyond that it was a horrific attack, carried out by someone who they wrongly believed had a Muslim-sounding name. Even if it later transpired that Rudakubana had indeed been radicalised, their jumping to the conclusion before there was any evidence was still misinformation. We can’t allow knee-jerk assumptions to be the standard we accept, with the justification that some of our speculations had turned out to be true.
More importantly, there was more to this story than an Al Qaeda training manual. Rudakubana, it transpires, was also in possession of material from the IRA, the Nazis, and the Rwandan genocide. A clearly disturbed teenager, he had developed a deep interest in extreme violence and spent hours watching graphic videos of murder and researching genocide, including looking up material on school computers. According to one senior official:
He was absolutely obsessed with genocides. He could name every genocide in history and how many people were killed – Rwanda, Genghis Khan, Hitler. It’s all he wanted to talk about.
Given the range of extremist material Rudakubana consumed, it is unlikely he owned the Al Qaeda manual because he was committed to instituting a worldwide caliphate. Rather, if one’s goal is to obsessively read about how to kill people, then the handbook of a terrorist organisation is going to be somewhere that material can be found, regardless of its ideological bent.
Indeed, Rudakubana was not prosecuted as a terrorist for this reason. According to the sentencing note:
The prosecution have made it clear that these proceedings were not acts of terrorism within the meaning of the terrorism legislation, because there is no evidence that Rudakubana’s purpose was to advance a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
Ideology undoubtedly plays a role in this story, but not Rudakubana’s ideology: those who instantly assumed, and continue to ascribe, a religious motivation to his attack in spite of the evidence to the contrary are the ones being led by their own ideological biases. They have already made up their minds about what this atrocity represents, and which social ills it illustrates, and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.
What does the public believe?
Once that narrative has been cemented, it can be incredibly hard to dislodge. According to YouGov’s recently analysis of public awareness of the details of the crime, 35% of all respondents believe these murders were a terrorist attack. Among Reform UK voters, that figure leaps to 66%. Two in three voters for Nigel Farage’s party believe something which is demonstrably untrue.
It gets worse. YouGov compared their latest figures to a similar survey conducted shortly after the riots. In August, 12% of people wrongly believed the killer was an immigrant to the UK – five months later, that figure had actually increased to 21%. As time has passed, evidence has conclusively proved this belief false, yet almost twice as many people believe the falsehood.
Similarly, the August survey found that 11% of people believed Rudakubana was a Muslim – which he isn’t – and 4% believed his motives were religious terrorism. By January, 24% of people now believe he is a Muslim, and 23% believe that his attack was explicitly motivated by religious terrorism. Six times as many people now believe Rudakubana was carrying out a terrorist attack in the name of Islam than they did in the days after the attack took place.
This is the legacy of the misinformation that spread after the riots – the fact checks fade, and the lies and rumours and confident assumptions stay in place.
A political breakdown of that growth in acceptance of misinformation about the attack shows once again that this is an issue heavily skewed to the right of the political spectrum. In August, just 8% of Reform voters in August thought this was a religious terrorist attack, by January, that figure had risen to 55%. Those figures compare with a rise from 3% to 31% among Tories, 3% to 17% for Labour voters, and 3% to 16% among Lib Dems. Reform voters are overwhelmingly more likely to believe a lie about this being an Islamic terrorist attack on the UK.
On who is to blame for the attack, understandably the majority of all respondents place the blame with Rudakubana (87%) and his parents (72%). From there, the authorities get their share of the blame – 70% blame the counter-terrorism programme (Prevent), 64% blame mental health services and 59% blame the police. These seem reasonable – Rudakubana was known to those authorities before his attack.
He was actually referred to Prevent three times: in December 2019, after making comments about a mass shooting, in February 2021, when a pupil raised concerns about Rudakubana posting images of Colonel Gaddafi on Instagram; and in April 2021, when a teacher raised concerns after noticing he was reading about the 2017 London Bridge attack. However, because there wasn’t any religious, racial, political or ideological element to his concerning actions, he wasn’t considered suitable for intervention under the scheme. Ironically, had Rudakubana actually been a Muslim, it might have been a different story.
Next, YouGov asked whether political parties were to blame. According to 63% of Reform UK voters and 40% of Tory voters, the political group that holds the most blame for this atrocity is the Labour government, which had been in power for almost four weeks when the attack happened.
Astonishingly, Rudakubana was four years old when the Conservative government came into power, and committed his crime four weeks after they left power, yet for Reform and Tory voters, the blame lies with Labour. Clearly, those Farage and Reform and Tommy Robinson attack lines have worked on their audience.
Perhaps this should not be a surprise. The Reform party, “Tommy Robinson” (alias of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), and the broader right-wing misinformation ecosystem have been building a picture of the UK for a while; one where Muslims commit rampant crime and where the authorities are too scared or complicit to do anything about it. These pictures are particularly vivid for people who live in parts of the UK where they’re less likely to encounter Muslims, or who don’t live in the UK at all. Unfortunately, some of those people are enormously powerful, extremely wealthy, terminally online and criminally gullible people… like Elon Musk.
X marks the plot
As riots raged around the UK, Musk’s response was to retweet and amplify some of the biggest sources of racist falsehoods, including Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. So taken with the former, Musk has subsequently offered to help fund Tommy Robinson’s appeal against his imprisonment, seeing Robinson as a ‘political prisoner’ and calling for his immediate release from prison, in a tweet seen 73.5m times. For the avoidance of doubt, Robinson is in prison for contempt of court, having repeatedly spread dangerous lies that endangered the life of a 17-year-old Syrian immigrant. He is not a political prisoner, he’s just the regular kind.
Musk has also claimed he will fund an electoral push by Reform UK, whose members (as we have seen) are clearly sponges for Islamophobic and xenophobic misinformation… though, notably, Musk has flip-flopped over whether Nigel Farage is the man to lead them to electoral glory on the Musk dime.
Musk spent much of January trying to use the influence his money affords him, in an attempt to remove Keir Starmer and push for a general election, on grounds that might be charitably referred to as ‘unclear’. He has also targeted Labour’s Jess Phillips, labelling her a “rape genocide apologist”, specifically over the issue of grooming gangs in the UK – accusations that led to an significant rise in death threats to Phillips.
As divisive a figure as Jess Phillips (and indeed, any outspoken female politician) might be, nobody who has any understanding of UK politics could deny she’s put the work in when it comes to helping victims of rape and domestic violence. Indeed, the victims of the Telford sexual abuse scandal – one of the scandals Musk claimed to be so motivated by – came out in support for Phillips against his attacks. Evidently, Musk has no idea about that, due to the cocoon of lies he has built around him.
Where, then, does Musk get his talking points about the issue? One thing we can say for certain is that Tommy Robinson – the man Musk has called a political prisoner and who has retweeted and responded to numerous times in the last year – has built a career on lying about Islamic grooming gangs.
Grooming gangs
According to Tommy and his followers and imitators, the UK government has been deliberately covering up a mass wave of grooming gangs, in which Muslim men of Pakistani heritage, who may or may not be immigrants, are targeting vulnerable young white girls; only Tommy Robinson is brave enough and patriotic enough to talk about it, and that is why he is being persecuted and imprisoned in an attempt to silence him.
As with all the best political propaganda, this warped view is based on some kernels of truth: in 2010, a group of British-Pakistani men in Rotherham were convicted of sexually abusing girls aged 12 to 16. Investigations found that this was not an isolated case, and child-grooming gangs have subsequently been jailed in more than a dozen other towns, including Rochdale, Oldham and Telford.
Inquiries into how these scandals happened have found that the contemporaneous response from authorities was inadequate, often because the victims were dismissed as being unlikely to be reliable witnesses, often because of prejudice around their circumstances – some of the girls were from care homes, or had more deprived socioeconomic or troubled backgrounds.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure that should have protected them failed – social workers were underfunded and overwhelmed, meaning cases weren’t given priority and followed up, and some local councils were in denial about the extent of the issues, and effectively minimised it. On top of that, undeniably, there were concerns by some of the police and other authorities that they might be accused of racial targeting if they investigated the specific gangs that were operating. That racial angle should not be overlooked, but it also should not be overstated, when issues of misogyny and class snobbery and poverty were just as prevalent.
The failure of the state to protect those victims, and to effectively investigate their cases, was seized upon by people like Tommy Robinson as an opportunity to recruit – he argued that these cases don’t represent the system failing, but actually that the system is operating as its designed to, and that pandering to Muslims takes precedent over the protection of young white girls. Never mind the fact that the actions of organised gangs don’t reflect the behaviour of people who happen to look like them, or that local Muslim communities are just as outraged as the rest of us. Never mind the fact that the vast majority of grooming and child sexual exploitation in the UK happens at the hands of white men – whose cases never receive the attention of people like Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. Never mind the fact that these cases had real victims, whose life stories aren’t Robinson’s to use as political capital. For those who want to allege that the system protects Muslim criminals at the expense of white lives, this was manna from heaven.
Musk pulls the strings; the right wing dances
The political right in the UK has danced to Musk’s recent tune when it comes to this subject. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch took to parliament to call for a full national inquiry into the scandal, despite being in power in 2022 when her party carried out precisely such an inquiry… whose recommendations they subsequently ignored.
Meanwhile, Farage and the Reform party argued for a far more targeted inquiry, tailored to their specific tastes:
The scope of that inquiry was like a shotgun, it was to cover a whole range of areas in which children were being abused. What we need, and what we’re calling for, is a rifle shot inquiry. One that looks specifically at to what extent were gangs of Pakistani men raping young white girls. Because, ultimately, it seems to me, there’s a deep racist element behind what happened.
For Farage, it is important that any inquiry doesn’t look at all grooming gang victims, just the white victims who have been abused by a specific race of perpetrator.
It might seem odd for Musk and his many committed (and often blue-ticked) fans to pin the blame for all of this on the recent Labour government, given they have been out of power for 14 years. The answer is likely due to a pattern of viral misinformation that Musk has trained himself and his fans to accept, because they happen align with his ideological biases, and the biases of his newfound political allies. Much of that misinformation focuses on Keir Starmer’s time served as Director of Public Prosecutions for the Crown Prosecution Service, from 2009 to 2013, which has led to claims about his personal involvement in failed cases. For example, one viral clip from 2020 has a caption that claims to show Starmer:
explaining in FORENSIC Details why victims of grooming gangs shouldn’t be believed if they’ve been under the influence or have a criminal record !!
The video is a 22-second clip of Starmer, in which he says:
A victim of child sexual abuse will swiftly report what happened to them to the police, will be able to give a coherent and consistent account, first time. That they will not themselves have engaged in any offending or other behaviour, and that they will not have misused drugs or alcohol at any stage.
This video circulated on Twitter at the time, and was called “revealing” by former Tory MP Nadine Dorries, with former Tory MP Maria Caulfield describing it as the “True Face of the Labour Leader #shameful”. Except, the clip wasn’t as it seemed – it was trimmed from a speech in which Starmer listed the many faulty assumptions on which cases had been turned down prior to his reform of the Crown Prosecution Service. This was Starmer listing examples of the failures that his new measures were brought in to prevent.
Another example originated in 2020 and was re-shared in 2022, where posts circulated on social media directly blaming Starmer directly for grooming gangs that escaped punishment, claiming:
From 2004 onwards the director of public prosecutions told the police not to prosecute Muslim rape gangs to prevent ‘Islamophobia’. That director was Keir Starmer, now the leader of the Labour party, who just promoted Naz Shah to his front bench, the Pakistani Muslim who thinks English children should keep quiet about being raped for the sake of ‘diversity’.
This is the kind of viral post that aligns perfectly with Musk’s recent claims, including his accusation that Starmer was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes” and that he “repeatedly ignored the pleas of vast numbers of little girls and their parents, in order to secure political support”. But this post is evidently untrue.
Keir Starmer was served as DPP from 2008 to 2013 – he wasn’t in the role in 2004, and only became an MP in 2015; whatever he did or didn’t while in the role, votes had nothing to do with it. During his time at the CPS, Starmer brought in measures to ensure victims in grooming gang cases wouldn’t be dismissed so easily, and by the time he left the role the office had the highest conviction rate on such cases in its history. There have been 17 trials of grooming gangs since 1997 and 14 of them have taken place since Starmer became DPP.
Just as large sections of the British public have internalised the lie that Rudakubana was a recent immigrant to the UK and a Muslim who carried out a religiously motivated attack, a narrative has become cemented that Keir Starmer personally intervened to protect gangs of child abusers from prosecution. It is a narrative that has been seeded by people like Tommy Robinson, for political power, and one that is subsequently hinted at and dog-whistled about by the handful of extremist MPs of Reform UK. The effect has been a pattern that’s become lodged, despite all the evidence to the contrary, in the social media discourse, to the point where Elon Musk has accepted it wholesale.
What all of this represents is ideologically motivated misinformation, designed to tie a religion – and, more pertinently, the people who follow that religion – to criminality, and to paint as complicit any politician whose solutions are anything other than extreme nationalism. And, as the YouGov survey illustrates, it is evidently working.
This is why skepticism can’t ‘stay out of politics’ – because we know that lies and misinformation definitely won’t stay out of it.
