United Kingdom

Chanaka Balasuriya, the 47-year-old owner of Southport’s Windsor Mini Mart, has been deeply affected by the violent unrest that spread across the UK - but also by the acts of compassion that followed.

Children will be taught how to spot extremist content and fake news online under planned changes to the school curriculum.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”.

Pupils might analyse newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help weed out fabricated clickbait from true reporting. In computer lessons, they could be taught how to spot fake news sites and maths lessons could include analysing statistics in context.

Police have released photographs of 12 people they want to speak to over riots which took place on Merseyside days after the deaths of three girls in Southport.

As riots swept the U.K. in recent days, far-right groups plotted attacks on immigration centers and swapped manuals for making petrol bombs on the fringe social network Telegram.

Social media platforms have faced intense criticism for hosting extremist rhetoric that has inflamed violent disorder since the killing of three children in Southport in a stabbing attack late July.

But while Elon Musk’s provocations on X (formerly Twitter) have grabbed the limelight, right-wing agitators have long enjoyed an unparalleled level of impunity on Telegram.

“The far right, fascists and neo-Nazis have long regarded Telegram as a safe space for the exchange of their views,” said Matthew Feldman, a specialist on right-wing extremism who teaches at the University of York.

Channels set up on Telegram following the killings in Southport amassed tens of thousands of members and were used to mobilize far-right rioters. Locations shared on the app were targeted for widespread violence and the destruction of property, including a mosque in Southport.

Rioters attempted to burn down two hotels housing migrants in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, and Tamworth, Staffordshire, on Sunday.

Telegram has since shut down some of the most egregious channels, including one named “Southport Wake Up,” that had gathered more than 13,000 members. “Telegram allows peaceful expression regardless of political affiliation, but calls to violence are explicitly forbidden by Telegram's terms of service,” the company said in a statement.

This unusual move was likely because the channels contained material that could have been considered “terroristic,” said Tim Squirrell, director of communications at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit which analyzes extremism.

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It's extremely rare for Telegram to “nuke” a whole channel, said Squirrell, who previously worked as a senior adviser on counter-terrorism to the British government. However, the platform has acted upon notices from the security services or counter-terrorism police before.

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The app’s headquarters are legally in the British Virgin Islands but it operates out of Dubai.

“It became really, really big during the pandemic, when it became a real home for conspiracy theorists of all stripes, and was used to network and mingle and repost their content,” said Squirrell.

“A lot of those networks never went away after the pandemic.”

The platform hosts a far-right channel set up by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, who was banned from Twitter. The far-right agitator has now returned to the platform under Musk’s stewardship.

Channels like those run by the conspiracist Unity News Network and far-right group Patriotic Alternative were prominent during the past week’s unrest in the U.K.

Lax content controls mean that far right organizers can conduct their activities undisturbed. Telegram has “less than a dozen” moderators, said Feldman, compared to the estimated 15,000 who work at Meta. Telegram’s few moderators spend their time removing “the worst things that humanity can come up with,” like child sexual abuse material, he added.

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The messaging service’s range of functionality makes it appealing to right-wing activists. “What you'll see is smaller, more vetted groups being used as a way to organize, and then larger public channels as a way to do recruitment [and] push propaganda out to a much wider audience,” said Squirrell.

While Telegram has removed some far-right channels inciting violence in the U.K., many remain open and have continued to share plans for public disorder. However, there are signs users are becoming more savvy about implicating themselves. “This list does not constitute an endorsement of any protest action that may lead to violence,” read one post identified by the Independent.

While Telegram has removed some far-right channels inciting violence in the U.K., many remain open and have continued to share plans for public disorder. However, there are signs users are becoming more savvy about implicating themselves. “This list does not constitute an endorsement of any protest action that may lead to violence,” read one post identified by the Independent.

While the app has half a billion users worldwide, average U.K. active users have numbered around 2.7mn since the beginning of 2024, although this increased to 3.1mn on the day of the stabbing.

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Although Telegram removed some channels this week, there are doubts the app will respect the U.K.’s new internet regulation, the Online Safety Act, when it comes into force at the end of the year.

Under this legislation, platforms will have to consistently remove illegal content, including content involving hatred, disorder, provoking violence and certain types of disinformation. But Telegram faces less stringent rules than larger platforms like X.

“[Telegram] will do as little as possible until there are credible threats [to] their bottom line,” said Feldman.

The hunt to find the rioters and the people who incited them began the moment the first brick was thrown. But the efforts to catch them will last weeks or months, and involve super-recognisers, specialist software, video doorbells and, in a few cases, criminal stupidity.

A dizzying number of newly convicted rioters and online agitators were this weekend waking up in a prison cell on the first day of their sentence. Of the more than 700 arrests made so far, about 300 people had been charged by Friday night, with more arrests and court appearances on Saturday.

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Anyone who has watched a police procedural will have some idea of how officers work, but the reality is usually more prosaic than a TV drama. Some people who commit crimes simply don’t think before they act.

Tyler Kay, a 26-year-old from Northampton, posted on X that people should set fire to hotels with asylum seekers inside. Helpfully for Northamptonshire police, he also tagged them in his posts. On Friday, Kay was jailed for 38 months after admitting publishing material intended to stir up racial hatred.

The sheer volume of video footage can be overwhelming, and civil society groups such as Hope Not Hate and Tech Against Terrorism say police are sometimes restricted in ways they can monitor the footage. And finding the people who instigated and incited the protests in the first place is much more complex.

Teams in the 19 police forces in England and Northern Ireland where violent disorder happened since 30 July have been scouring social media videos and going through CCTV and body-worn camera footage. Forces in Merseyside, Cleveland, Greater Manchester and Avon and Somerset have all so far issued pictures of people they want to question.

“They’re going through CCTV, other images they’ve picked up, cross-referencing it with whatever they find on people, whether it’s tattoos or birthmarks,” said Dr Victor Olisa, a former Met police chief superintendent and now an adviser to Police Scotland.

Olisa, who was borough commander for Haringey in north London after the 2011 riots, said the volume of video had grown hugely since the disorder and looting that followed the death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham.

“You’ve got local authority CCTV, traffic CCTV, lots of business premises have it now, and the public has video doorbells,” he said. “That makes it easier for police to collect evidence and present evidence in court. People who have previous convictions will be in the Police National Computer.

“There will be masses of them. You’ve also got some officers who’ve got a brilliant memory for faces – the super-recognisers.”

Those wearing balaclavas or masks may feel safer, but Olisa said they could be detected by association. “You might have half a dozen young men and five are masked up and one isn’t. If you can find that one, say on the police database, then you can work your way back.”

Then there is facial recognition. BJ Harrington, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for public order, said that officers were using facial recognition software on the footage gathered, and the technology could identify people even with masks.

A mother-of-three who works as a swimwear designer has been arrested on suspicion of stirring racial hatred by spreading a fake Muslim name for the suspect in the Southport attack. Bernadette Spofforth, 55, was taken in for questioning by police on Thursday.

Foreign agitators, including the Russian state news channel, had leapt upon false claims the Southport suspect was a small boats immigrant and there have been claims this played a role in provoking days of riots and unrest.

Police said Spofforth had been arrested on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred, a public order offence under a 1986 law, and false communications, an offence created under the Online Safety Act 2023.

Last week The Times revealed that Spofforth, who owns a dog and enjoys walking, lives a well-to-do family life in a £1.5 million house in the rural north of England.

The businesswoman was a campaigner against Covid lockdowns and net zero policies, and until recently was the managing director of a children’s clothing company called Splash About International. She also has several US patents to her name.

She has been accused of writing on her account that Ali Al-Shakati was the Southport suspect, an “asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year”, and was on an “MI6 watch list”. “If this is true, then all hell is about the break loose”, the post, believed to be under consideration, said.

An hour after publishing the post at 4.49pm on Monday — she deleted it.

Spofforth denied she was the first to share the name, saying she copied it from a fellow lockdown sceptic’s account. She said it was a “really stupid mistake” that she regretted.

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The website Logically, which uses open source investigators and data science to report on misinformation, analysed the spread. It found the fake news spread around the internet at speed, suggesting it may have helped provoke the anti-immigration riot in Southport the following evening.

Archive

Staff at the DWP reportedly objected to the clothes of Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale, a trans woman who co-chairs the LGBT+ Civil Service Network

Plans for a network of radars tracking deep space activity to help protect the UK from “space warfare” are to go ahead in Pembrokeshire, despite the opposition of local campaigners.

The 27 radar dishes planned for the St Davids peninsula, which will be 20 metres high and can track objects as small as a football, are part of a network planned around the globe.

The Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (Darc) will be developed at Cawdor barracks in south-west Wales by the Ministry of Defence. Ministers have said the plans are crucial as long-term defence against the possibility of threats in deep space.

The plans to redevelop the barracks, which were previously set to close, are part of the Aukus defence partnership between the UK, US and Australia. They will involve a network of ground-based radars in all three countries designed to monitor, track and identify objects up to 22,000 miles (36,000km) away from Earth.

Senior police have described a “turning point” in the disorder seen across England in the past week, suggesting swift sentencing and a major public order operation acted as deterrents to far right-led agitators.

Thousands of anti-racist demonstrators gathered on Wednesday evening and created human shields to protect asylum centres, dwarfing a handful of anti-immigrant rallies.

But in a sign that unrest may continue, 5,000 public order officers will be on duty or on standby this weekend amid evidence of renewed plans by far-right activists to mobilise in cities across England and Wales.

“There are many potential events still being advertised and circulated online and those intent on violence and destruction have not gone away,” said Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

Stephens cited a range of factors for his belief that a “turning point” had been reached after a week of violence following the killing of three girls in the seaside town of Southport on Monday last week.

These included a significant police presence and the deterrent impact of offenders being sentenced in days for their part in the riots, peer pressure from families, friends and work groups, and “the disruption” of some online messaging.

While admitting that he had been “nervous” about the prospect of thousands of counter-demonstrators taking to the streets because it added to “the scale” of what police would have to deal with, Stephens also praised what he described as the stand taken by communities.

Elon Musk shared a fake Telegraph article claiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands.

Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted.

In it, Musk shared the image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which she captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”.

The fake piece, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Telegraph and mocked up in the newspaper’s style, said camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.

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Musk has not apologised for sharing the fake report, but has continued to share material criticising the UK government and law enforcement authorities’ responses to the riots.

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On Thursday, Musk shared a Sky News interview in which Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, said police officers were scouring social media for material inciting racial hatred. “This is actually happening,” Musk said. In a separate post referring to the same clip, Musk called Parkinson “The Woke Stasi”.

Musk has been embroiled in a row with Keir Starmer and British enforcement authorities since he claimed in response to the anti-immigration protests in England and Northern Ireland that “civil war is inevitable” and that the police response had been “one-sided”.

The sight of scurrying looters and widespread rioting across multiple English cities may be an unusual one. But the disorder has a 21st-century precedent in another overheated August.

The television images will take many back to the 2011 riots, which engulfed London before spreading to other cities and were considered the worst week of public disorder to hit Britain for 200 years.

Then, like now, Keir Starmer was involved in quelling the disturbances. In 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions who kept the courts open for 24 hours a day to process offenders and allowed magistrates to pass longer and tougher sentences.

This time, as prime minister, he has accused far-right agitators of mercilessly exploiting the deaths of three girls to fuel attacks on asylum seekers and people of colour.

Below, we examine the parallels and differences between the riots which happened 13 years apart.

Counter-protesters have turned out in UK cities amid warnings of at least 100 far-right marches being planned for Wednesday night.

People were on the streets of towns and cities including Bristol, London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Brighton.

More than 6,000 specialist police had been mobilised amid fears of a repeat of the violence seen around the country over the past week.

Some businesses closed early and others chose to board up windows ahead of an anticipated 8pm start time.

Solicitors and other agencies who work with asylum seekers had been warned they could be targeted.

But as the night progressed it appeared the mass far-right protests had failed to materialise, with counter-demonstrators instead taking the initiative.

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The Stand Up To Racism group tweeted photos of the counter-protests alongside the words "this is what a mass movement looks like".

archived 8 Aug 2024 01:21:23 UTC.
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