Last night a riot broke out in Southport, Merseyside following the horrific killing of three children and the serious injury of five others by a 17-year old knifeman on Monday 29 July.
At 5pm, a peaceful vigil took place at the Town Hall attended by locals. Later around 8pm, crowds began to gather at St Luke’s Road, close to the scene of the attack, and things quickly turned ugly. Attendees, some in balaclavas and face masks, surrounded and attacked a local mosque and the police who tried to stop them.
Over 50 police officers were reportedly injured, some seriously, in a barrage of bricks and other missiles. In scenes reminiscent of last year’s anti-migrant riot in Kirkby, Merseyside, a police van was torched along with several cars belonging to the public.
In another disturbing turn of events, a man from Standish was intercepted and arrested by police during the vigil with a balaclava and a flick-knife, although his intentions and relation to the protest are currently unknown.
The riot followed a blizzard of false information around the attack, much of it circulated by far-right accounts online. This includes the unevidenced claims that the attacker is an undocumented recent arrival from cross-Channel migration and/or a Muslim, that the attack was “anti-white” in its motivation, and that the state and media is deliberately protecting the identity of the attacker for sinister purposes.
As tensions remain high, further protests have been announced across the UK.
Whilst most attendees are not known to have had any formal involvement in far-right organisations, a number of football hooligans from across Merseyside and the Wirral flocked into Southport last night.
One activist to bus into town was David Miles (AKA the English Wanderer) from Birmingham, a core member of Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s most active fascist group. Miles somewhat unwisely posted pictures of himself at the event on social media.
Another is Rikki Doolan, an evangelist social media personality who addressed an enormous demonstration headed by the anti-Muslim extremist Tommy Robinson in London last weekend. Doolan was abused on camera by others in the crowd for being “anti-white”.
The exact origins of the St Luke’s Road demonstration are yet to be determined. However, the earliest mention we have found so far is from a Telegram user named “Stimpy”, who established the “Southport Wake Up” chat group following the attack. From 18.00 Monday evening, the user began encouraging others across Telegram to assemble at St Luke’s Road at 20.00 on Tuesday.
Whilst it is not currently known whether “Stimpy” is the originator of the protest, or simply an early and avid promotor, the account – which appears to be new – used the Southport Wake Up group to post false information about the attack, as well as overt racism and nazi propaganda, and publicised the location of the local mosque.
Within an hour of its launch, the group also pushed alarming advertisements of the event from an anonymous TikTok channel. One such video states “”DIVERSITY IS A HATE CRIME AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE”, and another: “NO FACE, NO CASE: PROTECT YOUR IDENTITY”.
The protest was subsequently picked up by several figures across the far right, including PA’s Welsh Regional Organiser Jeff Marsh, who has several convictions for violent offences, as well as the nazi British Movement and the Independent Nationalist Network, a tiny PA splinter group.
Others include Daniel Thomas (AKA Danny Tommo), a close associate of Tommy Robinson who has served time for kidnapping, and James Harvey, of the small far-right media operation Students Against Tyranny.
In the run-up to the riot, a panoply of far right, reactionary and conspiracy theory-oriented social media accounts began filling the perceived information vacuum with false claims. In doing so, they sought to advance their primary preoccupations: opposition to immigration, cross-Channel migration and Islam.
In the hours after the attack, Merseyside Police publicised that the suspect was from Cardiff and was 17 years of age. In UK law, individuals below the age of 18 are granted protection regarding their name and other identifiable information. Despite this, unevidenced claims soon spread that the attacker was named “Ali Al-Shakti”, and was both on an MI6 watchlist and known to mental health services in Liverpool. This claim appeared to originate from a fake news site called “Channel3NewsNow” and would contribute to a cascade of further disinformation associated with the attacker’s supposed religion.
The far-right and misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, who is awaiting a court date in Romania on rape and trafficking charges, was quick to spread his own version of events in Southport. Tate claimed falsely that the attacker was an “undocumented migrant” who had “arrived in the UK on a boat”, despite the fact that by this time authorities had already revealed that the attacker was from Cardiff. This video was viewed over 12 million times before X/Twitter removed it for breaking its terms of service.
Elsewhere, the disgraced former actor Laurence Fox swiftly took to Twitter to advance the wholly uncorroborated claim that the attacker is Muslim, also writing: “We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain”. Despite no further information released about the attacker, Fox’s tweet remains online and with close to one million impressions at the time of writing.
The rioting in Southport has led to an outpouring of support, coupled with some outright glee, across the British far right. Whilst some chose to actively encourage the unrest, others took to social media in an attempt to explain away the violence.
Poisonous fascist influencer, Steve Laws, who got 185 votes in the General Election in Dover & Deal, has trodden a dangerous path in his support for the violence which could well put him in hot water. Whilst bricks and other debris rained down on police, Laws tweeted: “Give ‘em hell, lads”.
He soon went even further, celebrating the attack on the mosque which, were it not for the police presence, would very likely have been subjected to serious criminal damage. Laws, however, was cheering it on.
Mark Collett, the leader of the fascist Patriotic Alternative, predictably chose to shift the blame for the wanton violence away from the rioters and onto a trifecta of targets: the government, police and the media. In his conspiratorial worldview, these three constitute an “anti-white establishment” that has colluded in such a way as to leave “white British” people with “no other way to be heard”. In the classic fascistic formulation, responses to Collett’s post from supporters indicated that they believed Jews were behind this supposed “anti-white establishment”.
Conversely, the Spectator columnist James Delingpole quickly decided that the attack in Southport was actually a “fake thing” that had been “cooked up” as a distraction.
Meanwhile, the veteran conspiracy theorist David Icke accused the rioters of “falling for the plot” and being “pawns in a game they don’t understand”, suggesting that conflict between migrants and the “indigenous culture” is part of a wider plan by shadowy elites.
Buoyed by the attendance of this event, numerous other demonstrations have been announced in the past day. These include one outside Downing St in London on Wednesday evening, called by key Tommy Robinson organiser Danny Tommo, and another in Aldershot.
Other protests have been suggested in Cardiff, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester and Sunderland this weekend, though it is unclear how well-organised and attended these will be and whether they will match the level of anger and violence that marred the Southport demonstration.
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.
The latter will be desperately hoping that tensions rise further still and that they can take the UK down a path that can only bring more chaos to our streets. Our role is to stop them.
After the shocking attack in Southport on Monday and the far-right riots that followed, it’s clear that communities across the UK need our support.
Please join us to urge MPs to prioritise community cohesion and support towns like Southport.
We have drafted an email that you can send to your MP.
