A line has been crossed

How the Right became a Riot

I don’t want to seem apocalyptic about it, but this was the week that a line was crossed. As I write Sunderland is clearing up after rioters attacked police and burned down a citizen’s advice bureau. “Protestors” in Hull are right now outside a hotel where asylum seekers have been housed and bottles, concrete blocks and bricks are being thrown and windows smashed. In Liverpool young men yelling about “Pakis” are looting a phone shop. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel has just called for parliament to be recalled.

It's the culmination, not of popular anger at mass migration somehow funnelled through Monday’s murderous knife attacks on a kid’s dance workshop in Southport, but of a campaign of incitement by far-right media and far right politicians, increasingly enabled by more mainstream figures. It marks a turning point.

The bare facts

The 17 year old charged with the worst mass attack on children in this country for 30 years, is not a Muslim, is not a boat migrant and as of now we have no idea why he killed Bebe King, Elise Dot Stancombe and Alice Dasilva Aguilar, and injured several others. His parents came here from Rwanda and he was born in Cardiff.

I have mentioned on this site before the way in which the far right here and in other countries trawl violent and sexual crimes in the hope that they have been committed by migrants or non-whites. Instances are posted on social media and widely shared, often with a sneering reference to the “joys of multiculturalism”. I hardly need to add that when these crimes are the work of white people, the perpetrator’s origins or ethnicity won’t rate a mention. The absolute jackpot crime would be a child sex murder committed by a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a boat. This wouldn’t just rate a mention by your unfriendly local social media nazi and a bevy of YouTube influencers but by half a dozen Telegraph columnists and a score of GBNEWS and Talk TV hosts and their guests.

Within hours of the murders for which Axel Rudakabana has been charged - and in the absence of his identification , far right social media decided that they had completed its blame-bingo card. (Note, however, that despite a judge taking the unusual step of having an under-18 suspect named, it has made no difference whatsoever to those rioting in several towns in England.)