• Andrew McIntyre, sentenced today to seven and a half years, was a key instigator of last year’s racist riots. He played a leading role in some of the most destructive far-right violence in recent UK history.
• HOPE not hate identified him after analysing over 160 anonymous accounts. Our work led to his arrest and now his imprisonment.
• Our analysis shows that McIntyre is a previously unknown 39-year-old neo-Nazi who has had short-lived memberships of fascist groups including Patriotic Alternative, and was for a period a vocal supporter of Nigel Farage.
Today saw the sentencing of Andrew McIntyre, a key architect of the racist violence that took place this summer, to seven and a half years for incitement to violent disorder and possession of a knife. The sentence follows his identification by HOPE not hate and his subsequent arrest on 9 August.
We can now reveal the story behind McIntyre’s campaign of hate, threats and violent disorder – and how we tracked him down and provided the evidence that put him behind bars. Through extensive analysis of his online output, we can also provide details of his political history and disturbing insights into his mindset and activity.
McIntyre is a previously unknown 39-year-old neo-Nazi who has had short-lived memberships of the fascist groups Patriotic Alternative and Vanguard Britannica, and was also, for a period, a vocal supporter of Nigel Farage. However, he went on to play an outsized role in inflaming the riots that broke out in Southport, the wider Merseyside area, and then across the country in the days following the horrifying murder of three young girls at a dance studio in Southport on 29 July.
McIntyre set the time and location for the initial riot that targeted a mosque in Southport the day after the murders, an event that saw over 50 police officers injured. He then organised a similar riot targeting a mosque in Liverpool a few days later.
Subsequently, he would create the notorious list of 39 locations to be targeted across the UK, predominantly offices of asylum support organisations. The list provoked fear and panic across much of the country, although none of the sites listed ultimately suffered significant disruption, in part due to a major anti-fascist mobilisation.
McIntyre’s desire for extreme violence and chaos on the streets of Britain was clear from the start. On 5 August, a day after two separate mob attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers, he shared a video of the 2019 Christchurch mosque terror attack, coupled with a caption lauding the shooter: “WHITE LEGEND. FUCK ISLAM. FUCK JEWS”.
In reply to another Telegram user who suggested that civil war might soon break out in the UK, McIntyre said: “I say a prayer every night asking only for this”.
McIntyre was arrested on 9 August, nine days after the Southport riot, after HOPE not hate shared his identity with Merseyside Police. By this time, serious disorder and rioting had spread to numerous cities across the UK, leaving communities terrorised and properties vandalised and torched. 300 police officers were injured and at least 1,590 people have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the riots that followed.
McIntyre’s role in the riots
On 29 July, within hours of the horrifying Southport attack, a Telegram user going by the handle “Stimpy” – who we would later identify as one of McIntyre’s many pseudonymous accounts – called for a demonstration on St Luke’s Road, Southport, at 8pm the following day. In quick succession, he also created a TikTok account and Telegram channel to promote the protest, calling the latter “Southport Wake Up”.
McIntyre’s choice of St Luke’s Road for the demonstration – when the attacks took place on nearby Hart St and a vigil for the victims was planned earlier in the evening at the Town Hall – became clear later when he posted a map of the area with a mosque on that road circled in red. In an accompanying post, “Stimpy” made his intentions clear:
“time for a 🔥
McIntyre post on Telegram, 29 July 2024
TIME FOR WAR”
This would be the opening of McIntyre’s short, but influential, campaign as the earliest instigator of the violence that would grip the UK for the next fortnight. The Southport Wake Up channel gained over 13,000 subscribers in the week that followed, and its content set an apocalyptic and violent tone that would permeate the disorder that followed.
It would later emerge that McIntyre had himself been arrested for possession of a knife at the Southport riot, and was released on bail the following afternoon.
But this setback did nothing to quell his appetite for violence. Upon his release from custody, McIntyre immediately returned to Telegram to issue more threats and to identify his next target: two mosques in Liverpool, to be targeted on Friday and Saturday evening that week.
While the Friday night event was something of a washout, with the small far-right turnout comfortably outnumbered by police and counter-protesters, Saturday was far more dramatic.
As evening fell and disorder spread across England, a large group who had attended an earlier demonstration in Liverpool city centre began to head up County Road towards the mosque, as McIntyre had directed. The mob engaged in running battles with police, destroyed an Islamic leaflet stall in the city centre, and, ultimately, burned down a library when they were prevented from reaching their target.
On Sunday, another wave of extraordinarily violent riots upturned towns and cities across the country. This included two attempts to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers in Rotherham and Tamworth, with large mobs attacking the police officers who were attempting to protect the buildings.
The following Monday, McIntyre attempted to take his campaign nationwide. He produced a list of 39 targets across England, mostly the offices of asylum services, to be targeted on the evening of 7 August. He posted this list to the Southport Wake Up channel alongside flame emojis and encouraged the prospective rioters to conceal their identity:
McIntyre’s list went viral, shared widely on WhatsApp and other social media platforms by those fearful of further violence. Some businesses and schools closed early in the towns identified, and anti-fascists mobilised in some areas to defend their communities against the far right.
None of the targets listed actually saw any significant far-right turnout, however. Analysing the list at the time, HOPE not hate described it as a “hit list” of aspirational targets which did not seem to align with the mostly organic, decentralised events of the preceding days.
Indeed, by 7 August the disorder had largely lost steam, in part due to the swift criminal justice response acting as a major deterrent. Additionally, the mysterious origins of the list aroused concerns in some far-right quarters about whether the whole thing was a form of police entrapment.
The following day, McIntyre became aware that HOPE not hate had passed his details to police. Doubtless realising that time was now not on his side, McIntyre issued his final defiant statements on Telegram, declaring that he “redact[ed] nothing said” and taunting our CEO Nick Lowles on X:
“Eiy”: The word that gave him away
McIntyre’s clear intent to spread hate and violence made it imperative that he was identified and arrested as soon as possible. It was clear, however, that he would not be an easy target for us to identify.
His use of Telegram, a notoriously under-moderated and uncooperative social media platform, and habit of cycling quickly through anonymous accounts meant that his digital footprint would be difficult to trace.
With that in mind, we began to scrutinise the content of every message posted by the Southport Wake Up channel and the accounts he used to moderate the accompanying chat group, searching for anything that we could use as a lead.
While doing so, we noticed that four of the accounts he had used in the Southport Wake Up chat had used a word that was unfamiliar to us: “eiy”
Seemingly used as a variant spelling of the affirmative “aye”, as opposed to the interrogative “eh?”, McIntyre had used this word across four of the ten accounts he was using in the chat group and to promote it in other online spaces:
This discovery – a word that is essentially unheard of in British English – allowed us to search archived messages from UK-based far-right Telegram chats and identify another eleven accounts belonging to McIntyre, some dating back as far as 2021.
Having noticed this, we then began to search for more linguistic clues in McIntyre’s writing. We then identified his use of other distinctive words, for example “pakki” (an unusual spelling of the racial slur) and “abaa” (a regional variant of the word “about”). Neither were unique to McIntyre, but both are used rarely enough that it allowed us to track down other deleted accounts belonging to him.
By searching for McIntyre’s linguistic tells and cross-referencing them, we were able to uncover a total 168 separate social media accounts belonging to McIntyre, 155 of them on Telegram and the remainder on YouTube, TikTok and Twitter.
The vast majority of his Telegram accounts were used for just one or two days at a time, for the purposes of harassment. McIntyre would create a so-called “burner account” in order to gain access to particular far-right chats and abuse the membership. The chat’s moderators would then ban him and he would create another account to repeat the process.
However, he had retained a few of his earlier accounts for longer periods, and while interacting with other users McIntyre occasionally revealed biographical details and images that we could then piece together to identify him.
For example, from one account McIntyre had referenced living in Bootle, Merseyside, and a photo he had posted of the interior of his car from another account inadvertently revealed a decal sticker showing that the vehicle had been sold at a Skoda retailer in the area.
We were then able to locate the street McIntyre lived on by scrutinising the background of photos and videos he had posted across various accounts, noting that he appeared live across the street from a wooded park which we were able to find via Google Maps.
We then identified the exact flat he lived in by cross-referencing a photo he had taken through a rear window with a satellite photo from Google Maps, noting a large buddleia plant growing from a wall at the rear of the property and white painted wall in a nearby property:
McIntyre was arrested on 9 August, after HOPE not hate handed this information to police, but chose to spend his last days of freedom issuing taunts on Twitter, apparently still believing that he was untraceable:
Knowsley: The practice run
Our extensive record of McIntyre’s social media provided insight into his backstory. We learned that he was working as a cab driver on night shifts, for example, which explained his largely nocturnal online activity.
We also discovered that he had an unhealthy fascination with weapons – making his arrest for knife possession at Southport less surprising. He had frequently posted photos of a knives and a bow-and-arrow, along with multiple videos of him using the latter to desecrate copies of the Qur’an.
Importantly, our discoveries also explained the speed with which McIntyre had launched his campaign to set the country ablaze: he was reusing a template he had established 18 months earlier.
In February 2023, a riot broke out in Knowsley, Merseyside, outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, a disorder that left police officers injured and a police van set ablaze. The event sparked an intense spate of anti-migrant protests at asylum accommodation sites across the country.
Our investigation shows that, whilst it appears McIntyre did not attend the Knowsley riot himself, he immediately set about trying to arrange further disorder at the same hotel over the weeks that followed.
In a foreshadowing of what he would achieve this summer, McIntyre used a string of anonymous TikTok and Telegram accounts to try and incite a rerun of the riot on successive Friday nights, complete with his characteristic use of flame emojis and aggressive rhetoric.
While none of these subsequent demonstrations mobilised more than a dozen people, Knowsley clearly served as a practice run for McIntyre and left him well-prepared to immediately exploit the murder of children in nearby Southport in pursuit of his longed-for carnage.
A history of fascism
Our dissection of McIntyre’s social media presence reveals further details of his political history.
Perhaps on account of his extreme antisocial tendencies, McIntyre does not appear to have remained with any group for a long time. However, the earliest accounts we found show that he was an active member of the North West branch of Patriotic Alternative (PA), then the UK’s largest fascist group, in the summer of 2021 before falling out with key members later that year.
While his membership of PA appears to have been fairly brief, it seems to have sparked in McIntyre a vicious animosity towards PA’s circle of critics within the far right – in particular those associated with the tiny “37 Gang” chat group. This vendetta would dominate his online output for much of the next two years.
Even by the standards of the online far right, McIntyre’s pursuit of these grudges was unhinged and disturbing, often spending entire nights posting hundreds of abusive messages, including graphic threats of rape and violence and posting endless streams of degrading pornographic videos.
“I wish to let [redacted] know that I intend to brutally violate her and then bleed her to death”
“I will pay someone to rape and murder you in your flat you fat fucking mess”
Examples of McIntyre’s threats abuse of other Telegram users
On one night in September 2022, for example, McIntyre used two separate accounts between the hours of 4am – 8am to post over 400 videos of women being choked and smeared with faeces into various chat groups against which he was pursuing a vendetta.
At around this time, McIntyre was also a supporter of Nigel Farage and Reform UK, leaving supportive comments on YouTube such as “VOTE REFORM” and “WE NEED YOU NOW, DO NOT LET US DOWN” under videos from the party in late 2022 and early 2023.
McIntyre’s view on Reform would later sour, however: when Richard Tice called for the “full weight of the law” to be applied to the rioters in Southport, McIntyre responded by saying “DEATH TO RICHARD TICE, FUCK REFORM – FALSE PROPHETS”.
Following his failed efforts to reignite a riot in Knowsley in early 2023, McIntyre began to participate in offline activities once more, and that summer joined a small far-right pagan grouping in the North West, the “Green Man’s Hearth”, which is itself largely composed of current and former PA members.
By September, he had moved on to the small fascist group Vanguard Britannica, but this again seems to have been a short-lived membership. In February 2024, he also promoted the fascist martial arts training group Active Club North West for a short period. However, it is unclear how actively he engaged with either group, beyond sharing their posts extensively in far-right Telegram chats.
Bloodlust
There is a stark contrast between McIntyre’s short-lived efforts to engage with offline far-right groups and the intense energy with which he pursued his vicious online harassment campaigns and incitement to violent rioting. The overall picture of McIntyre’s social media use is of a man so consumed with hate and violence that he could find little satisfaction in activities that did not immediately quench his desire for harming others.
His motivation to spread fear and violence was not an expression of political dissatisfaction or even solely an outcome of his extreme ideology, but a seemingly pathological desire to harass, abuse and cause suffering to others.
The country is safer with Andrew McIntyre behind bars. HOPE not hate is proud to have provided the evidence against him, and grateful to the supporters who make our work possible.
