A riot in Southport shows how the British far right is changing

IT WAS AN ugly moment in a traumatic week. Sir Keir Starmer had come to visit the site of a horrific knife attack that had taken place on July 29th in Southport in which three children had been killed and ten others injured. By the time the prime minister arrived in the seaside town in north-west England the next day, conspiracy theories had been swirling online for hours. An angry mob heckled him as he lay flowers. “Get the truth out,” one yelled.

Things would get uglier still. By 8pm on July 30th dozens of thugs had gathered around a local mosque. They hurled bricks at Muslims who had come to pray and at the police who had come to protect them. A police van was set alight; 27 officers had to be taken to hospital. Overwhelmingly, the local community had only wanted to grieve in peace. “This is the only thing I will write, but please stop the violence,” said Jenni Stancombe, whose daughter had been killed in the attack .

Rabbles on streets are nothing new. But the violence in Southport—and further disturbances in London, Hartlepool and elsewhere on July 31st—show that the way hooligans congregate has changed. The rioting was sparked by false claims on social media that the attacker was called “Ali Al-Shakati” and had arrived in Britain on an illegal boat. (The police have said that the man charged with the attack, who is 17 and cannot be named, was in fact born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents.) “Six hours of misinformation on Monday fuelled a riot outside a mosque on Tuesday,” says Sunder Katwala of British Future, a think-tank.

The spread of lies has been made easier by social-media platforms tilting back towards permissiveness, after earlier efforts to clamp down on incitement and hate speech. Tommy Robinson, a far-right English activist, is one of many who have been allowed back onto platforms like X. Other sites like Facebook have cut their monitoring teams, says Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, a campaign group. Among those to have spread false rumours about the identity of the attacker is Andrew Tate, a misogynistic social-media personality with a large online following.

The riot was also an illustration of how the far right has changed in the past decade in response to a declining electoral market for overt racism. “There has been a turn away from the ballot box and towards the street and online,” says Mr Katwala. Agitators like Laurence Fox, a former actor, argue that multiculturalism has failed; at a rally in London on July 27th he told a large crowd that there was “no political solution to this problem”. A proliferation of football-hooligan and other groups on Whatsapp and Telegram, two messaging apps, has made it simpler to organise trouble, as happened after pro-Palestinian marches about the war in Gaza and seems to have happened again in Southport.

Mr Lowles, who tracks far-right activity in Britain, thinks that most of the rioters in Southport came from the town and those around it. Their cause may only attract a few hundred supporters in each area; locals were out the next morning in Southport to help clear up the mess. But the yobs are still numerous enough to cause trouble, and they will be back again. ■

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