How the government used arbitrary authoritarianism to quell unrest

Keir Starmer locks people up who say nasty things on Facebook.” When Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said this on a recent BBC Question Time, he was met with applause from the audience — and dismay and disdain from his fellow panellists. “No, he doesn’t”, snapped Labour’s Jacqui Smith, incredulous, sniffing that to suggest such a thing was mere “sloganising and performative politics”. Farage pressed the issue: “When… people who write horrible things on Facebook go to prison, something is very wrong.” “Nonsense”, muttered Alastair Campbell, the podcaster and noted moral philosopher, visibly ill at ease. Host Fiona Bruce then sought to draw a line under the exchange, using all the authority of the national broadcaster to insist that “the prime minister doesn’t decide who goes to prison and who doesn’t”. Bruce could not deny, of course, that following the countrywide disorder after the Southport attack this summer, dozens have been sent to prison for things posted online. But for the panel, if this was acknowledged to be a problem at all, responsibility for it did not lie with the prime minister.

Clearly, this is what many people who doubtless imagine themselves to be right-thinking would like to believe. It’s certainly a convenient line for the Labour government to take. Yet we all saw what happened last summer with our own eyes, and the evidence suggests otherwise. Yes, Starmer did not literally jail anybody himself — a clever-clever quibble that could equally be applied to Stalin. But in the weeks after the Southport attack, as we shall see, he took personal control of the justice system and launched it, remorselessly, at the white working class.

It’s true at least that the present government didn’t write the speech laws under which people are being locked up. As our culture has become both more woke and more censorious in recent years, offences like the “stirring up racial hatred” offence in the Public Order Act 1986 and the “grossly offensive” online communication offence in the Communications Act 2003 have come to function like blasphemy laws. Crucially in relation to Southport, neither necessarily requires evidence that the accused has directly incited disorder or that they have offended (or caused alarm or distress to) any particular individual — only that such an outcome was “likely”, or “intended”. This means the principal test of whether speech could be classed as criminal according to these laws was, essentially, whether the accused has violated the sacred values of state multiculturalism.

This is a sure recipe for arbitrary authoritarianism, with much turning on the priorities of the justice system. To understand the scope and severity of the state crackdown, then, we must look back at the political narrative presented by Sir Keir Starmer and his allies during those febrile days last summer.

High-handed and tone-deaf, the prime minister’s initial response to the horror in Southport was a sign of things to come. It was the day after the attack that Starmer visited the seaside town to pay his respects. Another leader would have given a sombre, unifying speech, to a nation in shock at the senseless deaths of three young children: Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King, and Alice da Silva Aguiar. Instead, Starmer appeared only in a carefully staged meet-and-greet with local emergency services, where he implausibly tried to present the Southport attack as an issue of “knife crime”. He then opted to admonish the wider public that this was “not the time for politics”. An extraordinary statement from the head of the political nation, bordering on the totalitarian — what if people felt it was? Soon enough, Starmer was being heckled at a flower-laying for the child victims over the government’s failure to protect them. Following Starmer’s lead, the local Labour mayor, Steve Rotheram, castigated the residents of Southport for daring to voice their anger: distraught though they were, it was not “appropriate” for people to have “used this occasion to put forward some of their nefarious theories about what happened”, he said. Straight away, before any unrest had begun, anyone who saw these killings as a political issue — that might therefore be a legitimate reason for anger at the government — was cast as a pariah.

Yet people were angry and soon things were kicking off. After two nights of protests and disorder up and down the country, Starmer summoned the unruly nation for a speech from No.10. Starmer could have taken the chance to show he understood where people were coming from — instead, he came out flinty and fuming, setting the tone for the government’s whole response. “It is not protest”, was the signal line. “It is not legitimate.”

Now, there had been lawlessness and violence which did merit condemnation: police had been attacked, a mosque was bricked, attempts were made to set fire to an asylum hotel. But there is also a right to protest, of which Starmer, a human rights lawyer, is well aware — in 2020, he had supported the often violent antics of Black Lives Matter. The boundary between unlawful civil disorder and lawful protest can often be blurry. Yet here, at a stroke, Starmer drew a political line that placed everyone involved up and down the country, no matter what they were doing, no matter how peacefully or tangentially, on the wrong side. Later, the justice system would also prove similarly indiscriminate, with the charge of “violent disorder” being levelled at people who had committed no violence, but had shouted unpleasant things at police, or at a police dog, or at migrants.

In that same speech, Starmer had taken great trouble to emphasise the importance of a neutral judicial process. “I remind everyone that the price for a trial that is prejudiced is ultimately paid by the victims and their families”, he said, of the Southport suspect. Yet with his sweeping claim about the nature of the unrest, he had done just that, priming the justice system’s treatment of everyone involved. He did not say “violence is not legitimate and any protest must be peaceful”, but simply: “It is not legitimate.”

Further heightening the tenor of condemnation was Starmer’s claim that the unrest was the work of an organised “far-right”. The “tiny, mindless minority” involved in the disorder spreading across the country had generally travelled to do so, he said. These “thugs” had “got on trains and buses”, gone “to a community that is not their own” and proceeded to smash it up. This narrative, aiming to suggest that the disorder reflected mere malign opportunism, rather than genuine public sentiment, went largely unquestioned. In the media, much of the rioting was swiftly being attributed to the English Defence League, a far-right group which has been largely defunct for years. So great was the concern that later, a threat of 100s of “far-right” demonstrations descending on places as unlikely as Walthamstow and Brighton was enough to motivate several highly-publicised counter-protests (the phantom far-right never showed up, with one of those behind the claim later admitting it was a “hoax”).

I recall wondering how at the time Starmer could possibly have known the provenance of those involved at this early stage (1 August, three days after the attack). Now, we know that both in Southport and across the country, the majority of those arrested were locals, as later analysis of the arrest data by both the Telegraph and the Guardian has found.

The narrative wasn’t true … But its effect was to tar any and all of those out on the streets with the “far-right” brush

The narrative wasn’t true: this was spontaneous, grassroots anger — not an orchestrated neo-fascist uprising. But its effect was to tar any and all of those out on the streets with the “far-right” brush and thus make them radioactive. Not for the folk of Hull or Hartlepool would we hear the pop sociology and liberal handwringing that followed the 2011 London riots. Talk of the “left behind”, by which liberals had for years tried to explain the heavy Brexit vote in these areas to themselves, was abruptly forgotten.

Still, if a riot is the language of the unheard, there is much those in these poor parts of the country, so ill-served by the political establishment, might have been trying to express. To complain of crime, unemployment and declining living standards, perhaps; the unwanted presence of asylum hotels, and, most of all, repeated betrayals in Westminster over mass immigration and political indifference to its consequences. Indeed, of those towns and cities that witnessed disorder following the Southport attack, many had first endured the horrors of rape gangs, so long ignored, downplayed and actively covered up: among them Bristol, Nottingham, Middlesborough, Blackpool and (of course) Rotherham.

But in Starmer’s telling, these people were not fellow citizens — their actions calling at least for understanding, if not approval — they were enemies of the state. We can take the temperature of the officially sanctioned odium by noting that one police officer, speaking recently to the BBC, has described those participating in the disorder, luridly, as “parasites”. “These people have no place in society”, he adds. Perhaps many of those involved would agree.

Not everyone arrested last summer was out on the streets, however, and the PM and his lackeys also helped to instigate what soon became an official hysteria about “disinformation” and online speech. It was “clear” that the “violent disorder” we were seeing had been “whipped up online” came the message from the Downing Street lectern, echoing Yvette Cooper’s remarks earlier that week at the despatch box. Superficial yet politically convenient, this explanation for the riots was eagerly seized upon. Suddenly, the director of public prosecutions was emerging from obscurity to announce “dedicated police officers whose sole task is to scour the internet” looking for wrongthink. At the height of a collective two-minutes’ hate against X and its free-speech policies, Met Commissioner Mark Rowley appeared to mull extraditing its proprietor, Elon Musk. “Think before you post”, warned the government’s official X account, darkly. The state was at war, and dissenting speech was the enemy. In the wake of this censorious spasm, Ofcom has now decreed that there was a “clear connection” between online speech and last summer’s disorder.

… far from the unrest being the product of social media, the killings became a lightning rod for other festering grievances

It’s true at least that amid an information vacuum from officialdom, a rumour that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker had flown rapidly around the internet. Its details were indeed inaccurate (even if subsequent revelations about the attacker have cast it in a different light). Yet one hardly needed social media to have been horrified by this story — to have seen those poor little girls’ faces plastered across the front pages — and the sentiments such rumours spoke to were real enough. It was understood that this was an act of evil by someone with a migration background. The attacker, allegedly, had visited unspeakable violence on what he clearly viewed as an outgroup, and children, at that. Whether this was Islamist in motivation or anything else, as Chris Bayliss wrote here recently, is to a large extent beside the point. Like Germany’s Magdeburg atrocity last month, the horror in Southport represented “the ultimate expression of contempt and resentment for a society [such attackers] do not understand, and feel no connection to”, Bayliss notes. The media might insist that the attacker, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Cardiff, and Starmer might bleat about knife crime. But people did not need even to be prompted by anything online to view this tragedy as ultimately the result of migration policy.

As such, far from the unrest being the product of social media, the killings became a lightning rod for other festering grievances. It was not “misinformation” about the Southport suspect that was to blame for longstanding local discontent about migrant hotels that bubbled over into violence in Tamworth and Hartlepool, for instance. Disgracefully, police officers found themselves attacked at incidents across the country, with 302 officers injured, 48 of them seriously. Yet one has to ask how much of this violence was motivated by long-standing resentment of the police in many of these areas, especially over failures to tackle the Pakistani rape gangs. At best, the claim the riots were “fuelled by misinformation on social media” is a very particular and very questionable sociological hypothesis — one that just happens to appeal to the worldview of a political class that is at once deeply censorious and wilfully blind to the problems it has created.

The state had its marching orders

Unlikely though this narrative was, that didn’t prevent it hypersensitising the justice system to potentially offending speech. One judge dutifully made this new orthodoxy explicit from the bench: “The violence was fuelled by misinformation and misplaced far-right sentiment.” Yet another, sentencing a man to prison for Facebook posts, freely admitted that the state would “never be able to quantify what level of disruption your post caused”, but nevertheless insisted it was “part of a spider’s web of disruption which caused riots”. Other prosecutions for speech offences came on similarly tenuous grounds. Neither the fact that Lucy Connolly’s “raging” tweet, about the potential destruction of migrant hotels, was deleted after just 3.5 hours, nor that it bore the qualification “for all I care” was sufficient to save her from prison. The TikTok livestream that Cameron Bell went down for footage that could not be said to have contributed to the disorder seen in Tamworth — it took place only after the riot there. Or take the two-year sentence handed down to Daffron Williams, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran suffering PTSD, for stirring up racial hatred. Among Williams’s “anti-Islam” Facebook posts found to be inciting was an AI image of a child dressed as a sword-bearing medieval knight alongside a lion, with the caption: “Time to wake up the lion to save our children’s future.” It is certainly hard to believe that this materially contributed to the countrywide unrest.

Dubious as all this was, every aspect of Starmer’s face-saving narrative about the disorder came to be accepted as the official view. Pravda-like Department for Education guidance from late August on how to talk to schoolchildren about what had happened (strangely, since deleted) makes this extent of this crystal clear. “Rioting coordinated by right-wing extremists was initiated by the spread of misinformation about the perpetrator of the Southport attack”, we learn, “resulting in violent, racist and Islamophobic attacks on our communities by extremists”.

The state had its marching orders.

Part 2 of this article will be published tomorrow

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This article (Starmer’s political prisoners) was created and published by The Critic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Laurie Wastell

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