(Bloomberg) -- Keir Starmer said far-right demonstrators involved in clashes with police would “face the full force of the law,” as the prime minister’s fourth week in office was overshadowed by social unrest and signs of rising political extremism.
After three young children were killed in north-west England, a group of men appearing to act on online disinformation attacked a mosque and threw bricks at police officers. Starmer said in a statement posted on X that they had “hijacked the vigil for the victims with violence and thuggery.”
The rioting erupted in the town of Southport on Tuesday night, following the fatal stabbings of three girls aged between six and nine at a Taylor Swift-themed children’s event a day earlier. Another eight children were stabbed, five of whom remain in a critical condition, as are two adults who were attacked. A 17-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of both murder and attempted murder.
The rioting poses an early test for Starmer, who won the general election in the UK on July 4, and serves as a reminder that his premiership will face challenges in its handling of both violent crime and the threat from the far-right.
A day after his chancellor announced an audit of government spending whose messaging was designed to place blame on the official Conservative opposition, the events underline that the new government is operating in a far more fragmented political landscape than it might have hoped.
Along with a Tory rout, the election delivered unprecedented electoral gains for the right-wing Reform Party, which won its first five seats in the House of Commons and came second in another 98 of the UK’s 650 constituencies.
On Tuesday afternoon, its leader Nigel Farage posted a video on X where he repeated online conspiracy theories about the Southport killings.
“The police say it’s a non-terror incident,” he said. “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us? I don’t know the answer to that. I think it’s a fair and legitimate question.”
Farage himself was elected to Parliament earlier this month after his party won some 14% of the vote off the back of its anti-immigration rhetoric. Although hostile policies toward immigration became steadily more central to the campaign promises of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, they were unable to stymie Reform’s ascent.
False Information
In the hours after the stabbings, a number of influential right-wing accounts on X spread false information about the attacker, including claims that he was an asylum seeker or a refugee. Others cited a Muslim name in connection with the killings, attributing the news to Channel 3 Now, a fake news organization whose origins cannot easily be traced.
The police said the perpetrator of the killings, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was in fact born in Cardiff, Wales. His parents are from Rwanda, the BBC reported. Counter-terror police are assisting with the investigation but it is not currently being treated as terror-related, it said.
Even so, tens of millions of people had already seen the initial tweets, according to analysis by Marc Owen Jones, a researcher at Northwestern University, leading to a surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric online. Supporters of the far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, claimed that the police and media were involved in a cover-up and backed his calls to rally in Southport.
Some 39 police officers were injured in the ensuing confrontations with demonstrators, according to the North West Ambulance Service. Merseyside Police said that at around 7.45 p.m. on Tuesday “a large group of people — believed to be supporters of the English Defence League — began to throw items towards a local mosque.” The English Defence League is a far-right group that has been responsible for violence in the past. Police vehicles were set on fire and one officer had their nose broken, the force said.
The killings and clashes between protesters and police are the latest in a series of violent incidents that have taken place in Britain in recent weeks. Last week, an army officer was stabbed near a barracks in Kent in an attack the police also said was unlikely to be terror-related. A separate fight between police officers and a group of violent men at Manchester Airport also sparked inflammatory posts online about who was responsible, and misinformation was spread online about rioting in Leeds earlier this month.
Anti-immigrant influencers have exploited similar tragedies elsewhere. When Joel Cauchi attacked and killed six people in Sydney in April, false information was spread about the attacker being Muslim or Jewish.
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