When three girls were killed in Southport, the reactionary digital right proved adept at exploiting the horror. The rioters are quickly being punished, writes Ros Taylor, but the new government needs to recognise the ease with which lies spread in the new digital ecosystem and be frank and transparent about its own approach to immigration.
What now? The rioting that broke out across England and Northern Ireland in early August seems to have subsided. Some of the perpetrators have already begun serving jail sentences. There is widespread disgust at the men who have tried to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers, injured scores of police and chanted racist and Islamophobic slogans. And if that were the whole story, the government could declare that it has dealt effectively with an outbreak of racist thuggery and move on to fixing Britain’s endemic problems. Unfortunately, it is not.
What triggered the violence was the killing of three little girls by a 17-year-old who, because of his age, was not at first named. This gave the populist right and supporters of ‘reactionary digital politics’, as the political scientist Alan Finlayson has described them, an opportunity. False rumours that the killer was an asylum seeker (he is the son of immigrants from Rwanda) quickly spread on social media. ‘Protests’ against the killings became mobs.
The ‘reactionary digital right’ range from far-right activists like ‘Tommy Robinson’ (a pseudonym), Reform Party MPs, X’s Elon Musk (who predicted a ‘civil war’), presenters of the right-wing TV channel GB News and Matt Goodwin, a former professor at the University of Kent, who has studied the far right and begun to embrace populist politics himself.
With platforms in Parliament and the media that guarantee them attention, this loose group of right-wingers portray themselves as the voice of a ‘silenced’ majority whose worries about immigration are ignored by the government elite. Most of them they have insisted they do not approve of the violence. They do, however, share the rioters’ anger over immigration.
The new Prime Minister Keir Starmer has rejected any suggestion that the rioters have legitimate grievances. To make the point, the government has speeded up prosecutions, convictions and sentencing. Britain’s courts are plagued by delays, inefficiencies and chronic underfunding. Prisons are already overflowing. But somehow the justice system has risen to the challenge.
What was to blame?
Convictions are the relatively easy part. Who or what is ultimately to blame for the riots, and the racism and Islamophobia that was openly on show? The anger of the ‘left behind’, who voted for Brexit in the expectation that immigration would fall and who have been hit hard by the cost of living crisis? Social media firms’ unwillingness or inability to police their platforms? Fourteen years of Conservative austerity? Fury at ‘two-tier policing’ (the belief that ‘woke’ demonstrations are policed less harshly than others)? Warm weather, bored teens and football fans impatient for the start of the new season?
The Reform leader Nigel Farage quickly blamed ‘legitimate concerns’ about both legal migration and small boat crossings. “The far right are a reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease that is out there shared by tens of millions of people. I don’t support street violence… But just to blame a few right thugs, to say that’s the root of our problems, doesn’t work,” he told his X followers, suggesting that the police were too afraid to stop and search people of colour. Given the people seen hurling bricks at police on the TV news were white men and boys, it was not an obvious conclusion.
There is very little sympathy for the rioters. Many people were sufficiently appalled by the violence to turn out to demonstrate their solidarity with migrants. Yet Farage has still turned the situation to his advantage. Anyone hoping that disgust with the thuggery on show would translate into greater tolerance of immigration has to reckon with a YouGov poll following the rioting. Fifty-one percent of Britons now say immigration is the ‘top issue’ facing the country. On the face of it, a slim majority of voters now share the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the radical digital right.
This is why a crackdown on the social media that the rioters used to spread their hateful messages looks attractive to some on the left. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said he wanted to see the new Online Safety Act toughened up. Yet it is far from clear that a beefed-up law will prove effective. What, after all, can it do to persuade X, WhatsApp or Telegram to stop hosting inflammatory content? TikTok users streamed live footage of riots before the platform could censor them. The threat of a fine is unlikely to bother Musk. He would simply refuse to pay it and dare the UK government to shut down a platform on which politicians and journalists now depend. Banning these platforms altogether is the hallmark of repressive regimes that Britain would not want to emulate. Many of the people revolted by Musk, me included, have decamped to Bluesky, but some would have preferred to stay on a platform where they did encounter differing views.
We don’t want to talk about it, but will probably have to
Somehow, Labour has to seize control of the narrative on immigration — even if it has understandably preferred to simply condemn the violence and ignore its political dimension. This will be very hard. The party would rather concentrate on fixing the many problems facing Britain and hope that anti-immigrant feeling dies down if people begin to feel more prosperous and confident about the future of the country. The risk of appearing to legitimise the rioting is real. Any suggestion of it will be hated by the left of the party and those who feel they heard quite enough negativity about immigration from the Conservatives. In fact, Labour has been trying to reconcile a policy of cutting net migration with the instincts of many of its own activists, who generally favour immigration and would like to see a return to the EU and freedom of movement.
This is made all the more complicated by the fact that net migration is far higher than it was before Brexit. The Conservatives talked tough on immigration, but in practice allowed a great deal of it in order to fill jobs that Britons do not want to do — a phenomenon identified by the migration expert Hein de Haas, who has pointed out that right-wing government rhetoric often does not match reality.
Labour has begun to speed up the long waits for asylum decisions that have led to migrants living in hotels. It has started the work of improving relations with France and tackling small boat crossings. But it may need to be more explicit about its efforts — and probably be more proactive in taking on the far right, too.
“Knowing how to win elections is a key political skill. So’s being expert in policy technicalities,” says Finlayson (on X). “But so too is knowing how to fight in the ideological, cultural and rhetorical theatre. It’s obvious to us who haunt reactionary online spaces that Labour is failing at the latter.”
This could mean a deliberate shift, led by the government, away from X as the preferred space for mainstream political debate. British institutions and civil society have come to depend on it — and convinced themselves that posting there reaches the people who matter. In fact, X prioritises viral content over accurate and useful information. Recognising and acknowledging that would be an important step.
If Labour wants to sign off on a new deal with the European Commission, it may need to be open to an EU youth migration scheme. The government has been lukewarm on that, afraid that temporary work and study visas will be seen as a return to freedom of movement. But if Starmer is clear that they are not and makes the positive case for youth mobility, he could both please his own MPs and reassure those sceptical about migration.
Punishing the rioters quickly was the right reflex. Most Britons are repelled by them. Labour won a very big majority last month when it rejected the Rwanda scheme and took a nuanced approach to immigration. The challenge is now to explain what that means in practice and why it will take time to feel the impact of a new approach — before Farage fills the vacuum.
