‘How the Conservative Party and the British Press Normalised a Climate of Racism’

While Tommy Robinson has been accused of stoking the far-right riots sweeping Britain from the comfort of a sun lounger at a luxury hotel, an expert on extremism has explained how the Conservative Party is ultimately to blame for “normalising” racism.

Riots, fuelled in part by misinformation spread across social media about the alleged perpetrator of a stabbing attack in Southport on July 29 that left three children dead and several others critically injured, has led to 428 arrests, with numbers rising every day, and warnings that terror charges may be laid. The Crown Prosecution Service said Wednesday that a further 20 people had been charged, in addition to the 120 people charged Tuesday, as the Government moved to free-up prison spaces for those convicted of serious crimes.

Reports Wednesday suggested nearly 6,000 police officers have been drafted in after a list of some 39 locations were shared by far-right protesters as tonight’s targets. They include immigration centres, refugee shelters and lawyers’ homes. GP and hospital appointments have been cancelled, and pubs, shops and officers boarded up, as staff are too scared to attend work. Hope Not Hate is “prioritising 48 locations” tonight that it thinks are possible hotspots, Sky News reported. The broadcaster suggested more than 100 far-right protests were planned tonight.

Speaking on the Byline Times Podcast, Joe Mulhall, director of research at anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate, said the riots need to be viewed through the lens of wider society, not just the actions of agitators, like Robinson, who manipulate events to sow discord, boost their popularity and line their pockets.

Mulhall explained that while bad actors create mistrust, what they really do is “shape and direct” existing prejudice and discrimination that has been incubated and normalised by politicians and the press.

More people have ended up with negative attitudes about Muslims because of what they’ve read in newspapers and what they’ve heard from mainstream politicians than what Tommy Robinson has managed

Joe Mulhall, Hope Not Hate

He added: “I think it’s sometimes it’s comforting to think of the far right as this kind of tumour which hangs off the body politic, and if we just locked it off, everything else would be fine, but it’s not. It’s much more of a gangrenous limb that is part of the system… we have now come off the back of many years of a Conservative Government where the rhetoric and the way they talked about Muslims and asylum seekers and refugees and immigrants, of all kinds, was pernicious, it was negative, it was discriminatory, and it has normalised a lot of that rhetoric.”

Mulhall, and fellow podcast guest, Dr Bethany Usher, author of ‘Journalism And Crime’ and senior lecturer in journalism at Newcastle University, also singled out Nigel Farage for his role in the unrest.

The Reform UK leader was accused of being “Tommy Robinson in a suit” after he posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, a day after the stabbings questioning the accuracy of the police’s assessment that it was not terror related. He has since accused police in the UK of “two-tier policing” a conspiracy-theory claiming police handle certain groups in society differently, that is also being peddled by Elon Musk.

Mulhall said it was difficult to be “shocked” by anything Farage did any more, but he branded his behaviour since the stabbings, “really quite disturbing”. As an MP, the researcher pointed out, Farage could have easily got all the information he needed about the stabbings, rather than making a social media post.

The way he (Farage) was questioning the official narrative is really deeply dangerous, and it was in many ways, the perfect example of Farage. There was a nod and a wink to the far right…. I think it is really scary to see this man now sitting in Parliament

Joe Mulhall, Hope Not Hate

While also condemning Farage, Usher called out the tabloids for giving the MP for Clacton “the celebrity treatment” during his election campaign, suggesting that “celebrity politics and the far-right are kind of expanding everywhere at the moment with really dangerous implications”.

Usher also spoke of the lightning speed which misinformation spread about the teenager accused of the stabbings – 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana – with agitators suggesting he was a Muslim asylum seeker. Rudakubana was born in Cardiff before his family moved to Banks, Lancashire. The fact he is British, Usher lamented, was a point lost on rioters who deemed him still an immigrant as his parents are Rwandan, which is “really, really dangerous”.

Mulhall said, within hours of news breaking of the stabbings, “we started to pick up far-right individuals and people on the extreme fringe organising and starting to spread misinformation”, including that it was an Islamist-motivated attack. Robinson played a part, so did Andrew Tate who suggested the accused was an undocumented migrant who crossed the channel on a boat; then later, Farage.

“And we started to see huge levels of anger and huge levels of engagement of this misinformation and disinformation that was spreading around far-right circles,” Mulhall said.

When “these sorts of horrifying events happen”, Mulhall explained, there are people who are “predisposed” to prejudice and discrimination, “that are already either kind of inoculated to far-right ideas, or are active individuals”, and immediately there is a “presumption” that it “must be a Muslim, that is must be a person of colour, that it must be an asylum seeker”. These people, “instantly just leaped in with presumptions based on their own prejudices”. Worst still, he said, there are people who “consciously, and I think extraordinarily shamefully… saw it as an opportunity to whip up local anger”.

“There’s fear and anger, and some people on the far-right saw it as an opportunity, an opportunity to spread misinformation, disinformation, and to essentially, to try and target that anger that exists, towards Muslims, towards asylum seekers, towards people of colour, and to try and advance their narrative that, you know, multiculturalism has collapsed, and that we’re living in a kind of post apocalyptic hellscape.

“And I think it’s that use of a tragedy like this which is so disgusting. You know, most people were still shocked and heartbroken… but there was someone on the far-right that’s felt that this was their chance.”

Podcast host, Adrian Goldberg, suggested what Mulhall was speaking about “fits into a bigger story”, which Usher has written about, the “othering of minorities… of those who have sought sanctuary in Britain” that has been maintained by the Daily Mail and The Telegraph and at the “very top of our Government for many years”.

Usher spoke of the use of crime as “clickbait” that helped fuel the “attention economy” which Robinson and Tate bask in, for political reasons, followers, and financial gain.

“It was about using this tragedy… using the deaths of these children to make money. And that’s equally as abhorrent, and something that we’re not talking about enough, and what we have to look at as a society.”

She suggested that social media companies aren’t going to do “very much” about misinformation and people “spewing bile” so it is up to users to be more mindful about what they share – so they don’t add fuel to the fire.

“One of the problems here is lots of people mindlessly shared that content or they didn’t think. They didn’t think of the consequences,” Usher explained.

She illustrated the point further by suggesting just as people see riots unfolding and “join in and it escalates” the same thing plays out on social media.

Goldberg drew parallels between the riots and the 1930s, suggesting the “spirit of Nazism is sadly alive on the streets of Britain”, and while Mulhall tempered the comparison, he said what was troubling was the “speed with which things can go from growing discrimination and prejudice across society, and the speed with which that can be weaponised, and it can end up in terribly dark, dark places”, like “a mob turning up outside a mosque and chanting, ‘burn the mosque’.”

Mulhall said the UK must ensure that people continue to find that as “appalling as they currently do”, while Usher added that the public need to “fight back against this growing malaise” and realise, “I don’t want this. This is not who we are.”

In a reassuring conclusion to the podcast, Mulhall made clear that the rioters are a “minority” and that the only way they “win” is if “we don’t decide to stand up and fight them, don’t decide to push back”.

“There’s nothing inevitable to this rise that we’re talking about, to the rising far-right, this rising hatred. We are still in the majority here by quite some margin. So the hopeful bit is that if we do stand up and we do decide to oppose these people, we win. It’s just making sure that we actually get around to it and get stuck in straight away.”

Listen to the ‘Nigel Farage and The Far Right’s Southport Shame’ podcast here.