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Sir Keir Starmer wants to “put a stop” to the far-right violence that is spreading across the UK.
The question the prime minister must first answer is not how, but who.
With dozens of protests planned for this weekend, efforts to quell the unrest are complicated by the way the far right has evolved from the more formally organised racist outlets of old, such as the defunct British National party, into more fragmented, personality-driven splinter groups.
Their ability to whip up spontaneous protests — and spread disinformation — has been facilitated by viral online posts and recommendation algorithms on TikTok and X, as well as dedicated Telegram channels.
Instead of a single entity that could be banned or sanctioned, police now faced an “amorphous” adversary, said Paul Jackson, professor in the history of radicalism and extremism at Northampton university. A “wider mesh” of splinter groups and personalities, who find common cause and whose capacity to organise spontaneously, has been greatly enhanced by social media.
The prime minister this week put social media platforms on notice, warning them that the incitement “clearly whipped online” was also a crime — and one happening on their “premises”.
Riots that began on Tuesday in Southport near Liverpool — in the wake of the murder of three young girls — have spiralled into the most widespread eruption of far-right violence in the UK in years.
Protests have broken out from Hartlepool to Downing Street, with more than 130 people arrested across the country so far.
Yet who was behind the gatherings was not initially clear.
When rioters first attacked a mosque in Southport on Tuesday night, hurling bricks at officers and falsely blaming immigrants and Islam for the mass stabbing of young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class the day before, Merseyside police initially pointed the finger at the English Defence League.
There were calls for the EDL, founded by one of the UK’s better-known activists on the far right Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — better known as Tommy Robinson — to be proscribed. But according to experts, the EDL ceased to exist in any formal way more than a decade ago, even if some of Robinson’s followers — including at least one member of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative — were spotted at the riots.
There was already momentum behind the far right before Monday’s mass stabbing, said Jackson. Followers of Tommy Robinson were buoyed by the rally he held on Saturday last week — by far the largest far-right gathering in London in years with as many as 30,000 attendees.
More worryingly, said Jackson, the central themes of these far-right activists, particularly their vilification of immigrants, had been amplified in the mainstream, including by members of Rishi Sunak’s immediate past Conservative government.
“When more mainstream politicians are saying rather similar things, they are giving licence to those smaller groups, giving them greater legitimacy and purchase,” added Jackson.
Hours after Monday’s attack in Southport, Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration Reform party and now an MP, posted a video online insinuating that the police had withheld information about the stabbings.
“Promoting distrust — that is something the far right is doing,” said Jackson.
The protests, in which people have chanted Rishi Sunak’s “Stop the boats” slogan, were originally sparked by the murder on Monday of three girls aged six, seven and nine and the stabbing of multiple others in Southport.
But they adopted wider anti-Muslim, anti-migrant themes fuelled by early interventions online from a plethora of far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists including Robinson, his ally “Danny Tommo”, the Reclaim party leader Laurence Fox and influencer Andrew Tate.
“The explosion of anger on display in Southport was a toxic cocktail of raw and understandable horror at the brutal murder of children, mixed with ingrained societal Islamophobia and misinformation spread by influencers seeking to inflame tensions,” wrote Joe Mulhall, a senior researcher at the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate.
Georgie Laming, campaign director at the advocacy group, said many of the people who had “riled things up” this week had previously been banned from X. “Now they are back,” she said after self-declared “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk took over the social media company and rescinded multiple bans.
The 17-year-old suspect in the Southport killings, who was charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder at Liverpool Crown Court on Thursday, was not Muslim, nor was he a migrant. Axel Rudakubana, who was named after the judge lifted reporting restrictions in place because of his age, was born in Cardiff to parents who had emigrated from Rwanda.
But posts on mainstream social media platforms shared “hateful” misinformation about the attacker’s identity, helping to “mobilise people at scale”, said Hannah Rose, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think-tank.
Soon after the attack on Monday, a false name began spreading on X alongside posts alleging that the attacker had recently arrived in the UK via a small boat and that he was Muslim.
By 3pm on Tuesday, the day after the attack, the false name had received more than 30,000 mentions on X from more than 18,000 unique accounts, including accounts with “verified” checkmarks, according to the ISD.
Infographics promoting the protests in Southport and Whitehall were also shared on both TikTok and Dubai-based messaging app Telegram, while organising details were shared on X.
Recommendation algorithms — which typically promote posts that are receiving, or are likely to receive, high levels of engagement — helped amplify misinformation about the attacker.
Posts that were “overtly hateful” remained circulating widely on X for many hours despite violating the platform’s stated policies, said Rose. Neither TikTok nor X responded to requests for comment.
Hope Not Hate has tracked plans for more than 30 far-right protests in towns and cities across the UK this weekend. But Laming said there was “no single organiser” for these events.
