The growing unrest in far-right circles in the United Kingdom has become the first crisis for the new Labour government of Keir Starmer, one month after his election victory. The wave of misinformation spread on the Internet about the accused of the multiple stabbings last Monday in Southport (in the northwest of England), which claimed the lives of three girls between six and nine years old, has ignited radical groups that have taken advantage of the tragedy to encourage supremacist narratives and hate speech against migration. Although the accused, 17 years old, was born in Cardiff (capital of Wales) to a family of refugees from Rwanda, false comments on the Internet claimed that he is a Syrian asylum seeker, on the radar of the intelligence services.
The fervent social media mobilisation spread to the streets, with riots starting in Southport and spreading to other towns. By the end of the week, there were a hundred people arrested and 50 police officers injured. The protest organised on Tuesday outside a mosque in the town where the attack took place, coinciding with a vigil for the victims, later spread to London, Manchester and Hartlepool. Even the dissemination of the suspect’s identity has not stopped this fervor. Despite the fact that he is a minor, the Liverpool judge before whom he appeared took this decision precisely to try to counter the “vacuum” that had allowed “disinformation to spread” about the case.
This weekend, around twenty protests are planned across the United Kingdom, including Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool and Belfast, most under the slogan of the week’s protests: “Enough is enough” (“Enough is enough”).“enough is enough”The rhetoric is typical of British far-right doctrine, with appeals to “patriots” and slogans such as “save our children,” which links the Southport incident to the risk posed by migration. It is also similar to “stop the boats” (“stop the boats”).“stops the boats”)the slogan of the previous conservative government in its campaign against the arrival of migrants across the English Channel.
Although the demonstrations have so far gathered only a few hundred people at best, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has not wanted to wait for the crisis to get out of hand. Less than 24 hours after more than a hundred radical protesters were arrested near Downing Street, his official residence, the Labour leader called the police chiefs together to coordinate an integrated response to potential disturbances and to send a heavy-handed message against the promoters.
Police forces across the country are on high alert after Starmer granted them powers and, crucially, resources to contain violent incidents. Measures include the use of facial recognition systems to identify people on the radar of security forces, and constant monitoring of railway ticket sales to detect movements. In many cases, the instigators are not from the affected community, but respond to a concerted strategy on platforms such as Telegram. For this reason, a virtual intelligence centre already monitors the content of channels linked to the far right.
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There will also be more officers on trains and in transport hubs to provide support in what National Police Chiefs’ Council chairman Gavin Stephens has predicted will be “difficult days ahead”.
Starmer himself is no stranger to the ripple effect of the riots: when protests over the police killing of a black man took place in London in 2011, under his leadership, some 3,000 people were brought before courts operating virtually around the clock in five days, with the harshest possible sentences handed down.
This time, however, both the government and the police have an added challenge in social media that they can barely counter. The prime minister issued a veiled warning this week to the tech giants about their responsibility in the spread of disinformation, hate rhetoric and mobilization encouraged by extremists, but he also recognized the delicate balance imposed by freedom of expression, a debate that had already divided the executive. tory when he drafted the legislation on the matter.
As a result, while X (formerly Twitter) began to take down, albeit belatedly, some of the false posts about the Southport attack, other platforms such as Telegram – whose main claim is the lack of moderation – have become one of the main channels for channelling discontent. In practice, the United Kingdom lacks the mechanisms to combat disinformation on the internet, as was made clear when the Metropolitan Police, the country’s largest force, admitted a few months ago that it could do nothing about the fake audios that had circulated from Starmer himself, or from the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
Ofcom, the national communications regulator, is in the process of defining rules for internet platforms in the Online Safety Act, which will come into force next year. The text, however, makes no specific reference to disinformation and the tech giants will only have to act if their terms and conditions require it, unlike the initiative taken by the European Union with the Digital Services Act, which has already fined X for violating the rules on disinformation.
As a result, figures such as Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the ultra-nationalist English Defence League (EDL) group, whose name was chanted at this week’s protests, have room to perpetuate false information, without necessarily crossing the threshold into illegality; as does Patriotic Alternative, an organisation that encourages provocation, largely in reaction to news, taking care to avoid direct calls for violence to circumvent the ban. The new populist MP Nigel Farage also contributed to the conspiracy narrative, declaring, in relation to Monday’s attack: “I wonder if they are hiding the truth from us.”
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