It is only six days since three girls aged under 10 were killed, and several other women and children injured, by a knife attacker at a dance class in Southport. It is hard to overstate the horror of these events, and hard also to imagine the additional strain brought by the wider violence that has followed. The families of the three dead girls – Alice Dasilva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe – and others who remain in hospital, can hardly have begun to process their losses as the ugliest of reactions set in.
A teenager, Axel Rudakubana, has been charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder. As Farah Nazeer, the chief executive of Women’s Aid, and others wrote to the home secretary on Thursday, the attack must be viewed in the context of what police chiefs described last month as a “national emergency” of violence against girls and women. Partly because the suspect’s 18th birthday is on Wednesday, and also in an effort to tackle misinformation, a judge decided to name him.
The riots that have spread across the UK from Southport since Tuesday are the effect of a cocktail of anti-immigrant, far-right views mixed with lies about a traumatic news event, gulped down by violent thugs. It is hard to unpick precisely how falsehoods, including that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker, were invented and spread. But there is no doubt about the malign role of public figures including Nigel Farage. By publicly questioning whether the truth was “being withheld from us”, Mr Farage disgracefully lent credence to the incendiary notion that the authorities were concealing facts. Nor is there any question about the contribution of social media, where these dangerous ingredients were shaken and stirred.
The grim consequence is devastation. In Sunderland, a Citizens Advice office was destroyed by fire. In Liverpool, a library is a burned-out shell. In Rotherham and Hull, hotels housing asylum seekers were targeted. In Hartlepool and elsewhere, mosques were attacked. Dozens of officers have been injured and more than 100 people have been arrested. Both the extent and the explicitly racist, anti-Muslim nature of the violence have made this a terrible week like no other. As well as public buildings, the less tangible social assets of confidence and cohesion have been viciously attacked.
Ministers have queued up to warn rioters of “consequences” and “the full force of the law”. Strenuous efforts must now be made to prosecute ringleaders, and to reassure the targeted communities. But while racism is not new, and parallels can be drawn with previous riots, it would be a grave error to overlook what is novel about these events.
Ideologically motivated xenophobes have always looked to thugs to spread fear among those members of society who they wish to isolate. But experts are clear that the far right does not organise in the way that it used to. Our media landscape, which is symbiotically linked to politics, has both raised the temperature of civic life and created forums for destructive, anti-democratic impulses to coalesce in new ways. Lord Walney, the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption, has suggested that the current legal and regulatory framework is insufficient when faced by this kind of “rolling rabble-rousing”. How to tackle this manufactured chaos is among the biggest challenges now facing Sir Keir Starmer’s government.