Nigel Farage’s video message on Twitter about the UK’s far-right riots, August 1, 2024

EA on BBC and India’s NDTV: Who is Stoking Far-Right Riots in UK?

Dressed in a modest black suit against a white background, the middle-aged man speaks to camera about the fatal stabbing of three children in Southport, near Liverpool.

Rather than offering condolences or support to the community, he whips up uncertainty and fear.

Was this guy being monitored by the security services?…The police said this is a non-terrorist-related incident, just as they said the stabbing of an Army Lieutenant-Colonel in uniform on the streets of Kent the other day was a non-terror incident.

I just wonder if the truth is being withheld from us.

Two days later, after far-right gangs have burnt out property and intimidated residents in Southport and other areas, he is back in a blue suit, flanked by two Union Jacks.

He excuses the violence as a “reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease”. He proclaims that “law and order is breaking down”, not because of the gangs destroying and burning out property and intimidating residents but because of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

He intones ominously, “What you have seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport is nothing compared to what could happen over the course of the next few weeks.”

This is Nigel Farage — Reform Party leader, UK Member of Parliament at the eighth attempt, TV show host, chancer, and demagogue — stoking rather than dousing the far-right fire in the United Kingdom which he has helped break apart.

The Far-Right Gangs

The first thing I noticed about the violence, now in its second week across the UK, is the relatively small size of the far-right gatherings. These are pockets of mainly white men, numbering no more than a few hundred.

But in their small numbers, they spread turmoil and seized headlines. In Rotherham, they tried to torch a Holiday Inn Express sheltering asylum seekers. In Sunderland, they ransacked a police station and burnt out a Citizens Advice Bureau. In Belfast, they destroyed local shops, including one set up by a Syrian refugee and another by an immigrant from the Middle East, and broke into homes. In Liverpool, Hull, and Plymouth, they injured police officers. In Leicester, they menaced neighborhoods, with Muslim residents fearful of leaving their houses.

Far-right rioters hurl a flaming garbage can at a hotel sheltering asylum seekers, Rotherham, UK, August 4, 2024 (Reuters)

Searching for explanations about the gangs, reporters and commentators have made abstract statements about “social media”, economic challenges, and societal divisions. Some have blamed summer heat or boredom.

Doing so, they have overlooked, perhaps deliberately, the concrete evidence: behind the racism, hatred of religious and ethnic minorities, and xenophobia of the hundreds are a much larger group which has embedded itself in British institutions.

GB “News”: Pouring Fuel on the Fire

On 29 July, the three girls were killed and 10 other people were injured, including eight children, at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop at the community studio in Southport.

Later that day, Channel 3 Now, a Twitter account linked to Russia’s disinformation network, boosted an unsupported assertion from a British conspiracy theorist — a “mother of three in her mid-fifties [who] enjoys walking, is married to an artist and counts an actor among her children” an hour earlier. The outlet declared — in a post that has now been deleted — that “Ali al-Shakati” was suspected of the murders.

Tommy Robinson, the white supremacist on the run in Cyprus from a UK court hearing, circulated the false claim and added the allegation of a cover-up protecting Muslims: “The police are ‘managing; what they tell us about the slaughter of children in Southport today. And ‘managing’ our response to it.”

He egged on his 925,800 followers, “What will it take for you to be angry enough to do something about this?…They target our daughters….There’s more evidence to suggest Islam is a mental health issue rather than a religion of peace.”

Far-right activist Tommy Robinson tweeted disinformation, stoking unrest, from a luxury hotel in Cyprus

Robinson was prominent, but far from alone. As he tweeted about a non-existent perpetrator, GB News, effectively the outlet of the Reform Party, was amplifying the suspicion, rumors, and disinformation: “WHO is the Southport suspect? ‘Frustrated’ Brits slam authorities for ‘clamping down’ on narrative” and “How do you know it’s not terrorism?”

The following evening Farage, in his hour-long weeknight polemic on the channel, ostensibly knocked back the chatter — which he had helped spread earlier in the day — but then used it to cover up the far-right nature of the violence: “The Internet was awash with rumors, all of which proved to be unfounded, but that’s what led to the riots last night.”

He then turned his vitriol on Brendan Cox. the widower of MP Jo Cox, killed by a right-wing activist in 2016; the advocacy group Hope Not Hate; and “double standards of policing” — a theme introduced by Robinson the previous day as “two-tier policing”.

The channel then wavered for 48 hours as the violence spread across the country, calling out the “rioting”. Host Michelle Dewberry said, “There can be no excuse for grown adults destroying their own neighborhoods and attacking frontline officers who hours before were trying to save the lives of these children.” Mark Dolan shouted, “British society is breaking down before our eyes.”

But it was only a brief wobble. By 2 August, GB presenters refocused their attacks on “multiculturalism”, “two-tier policing”, and Prime Minister Starmer. Daubney, having denounced the destructive “grown adults” 24 hours earlier, now defended them: “[Starmer] doesn’t seem to understand why people are taking to the streets.” Dolan found the enemy in a “diversity” which was not rooted in “British values of decency, fairness, tolerance, freedom, openness, commitment, and hard work”.

Within 48 hours, the absolution of the rioters was close to complete. Commentators said identifying the gangs as “far right” was “totally offensive”. They were “normal people” demonised by Starmer and the “establishment media”. Rioters in Belfast were vindicated as “anti-immigration protesters flying the Tricolour [Irish flag] and Union Jack together”. A purported academic, Matt Goodwin, was wheeled out both to deride legitimate protest and to repurpose the far-right gatherings: “So the Black Lives Matter injustice is valid and others aren’t?” David Starkey, once a historian on television, said everything was the fault of the “political class”.

GB News’s promotion of Nigel Farage’s programme on the far-right riots

Farage, the Reform Party, and GB News had excused and even legimitised the far right. So by 7 August, it could hold up the dual foes of “Two-Tier Keir” and “Two-Tier Policing” — including a featured spot for the deputy leader of Reform, Richard Tice, on its Breakfast program — while shouting about “Fears of Anarchy as Britain braces for 100 events TONIGHT”.

The Discord of “Talk TV”

Farage and Reform also have a platform with Talk TV and its “shock jocks” such as Mike Graham, Julia Hartley-Brewer, and Alex Phillips.

In the hours after the Southport killings, the channel agitated that the “Whole World is Spiralling Out of Control” and asked, “How Should the UK Government Respond?”

But by the morning of 31 July, Graham was obscuring the far-right violence. “People are RIGHT to be angry….It’s going to be CARNAGE,” he bellowed. “Anger is Completely Justified,” Baroness Claire Fox assured Hartley-Brewer. Reform’s former deputy leader Ben Habib feigned surprise: “I want to know what the hell the far-right is.”

From there, it was a quick leap to xenophobia, race-baiting and bashing of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. “Huge Level of Uncontrolled Immigration,” the channel headlined. It featured the declaration of “Caller Paula” that “White People Are Second-Class Citizens in the UK”. A “former Detective Chief Inspector” told Phillips that “killers were invariably ethnic minorities who are either Black or Asian…There are no white people stabbing children with knives.” A “GP and broadcaster” spoke of “riots which were not by far-right thugs but by the local Muslim population”.

And from there, it was a jump to “two-tier policing”. Host Nick de Bois went even farther, “Some people have been suggesting…that police are very heavy-handed and provoke the violence.”

Like GB News, Talk TV had its wobble when the gangs tried to burn the Rotherham hotel and trashed city centres. It even featured a local reporter in Sunderland who countered the channel’s narrative, “We want diversity. There’s nothing wrong with that at all”. Phillips acknowledged “downright criminality and attempted murder, trashing cars and shop windows”.

But its perverse balance was immediate restored. The local reporter was immediately followed by a “former armed response officer” who mangled facts about net immigration to proclaim an invasion of “unvetted, young males”. Phillips played “both sides” by juxtaposing the attempted murders with “huge throngs of men”, presumably Muslim, “picking up weapons and charging like feral militias through our streets”. She was soon shouting, “Put Your WEAPONS back in the MOSQUE.” The organizer of “Hull Patriotic Protests” was given airtime to complain about asylum seekers, proclaiming that they were in “grooming gangs” and carrying out gang rapes:

What I am against is unvetted men coming across in this country, entering illegally, and being rewarded by being put in four-star hotels.

Talk TV’s Alex Phillips rewriting the story of far-right rioting across UK

On Wednesday, Talk TV’s “International Editor” Isabel Oakeshott was interviewed to proclaim, “Two-Tier Policing”, and to denounce Prime Minister Starmer: “He has inflamed the situation.”

At no point in the conversation was Oakeshott identified as the partner of Reform Party Deputy Chairman Richard Tice.

Nigel Makes His Plans

This spring, Nigel Farage was going to step back from British politics. He informed followers that he was not going to stand for Parliament in the General Election on 4 July. Instead, he would be working for the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump, where he had worked in autumn 2016.

But the Trump camp apparently told Farage that his service was more valuable in the UK. So he suddenly announced his candidacy for the constituency of Clacton, took over from Tice as Reform Party leader, and — his GB News program suspended for the election season — put himself across British TV and radio.

Farage was one of five victorious Reform candidates, including Tice and Lee Anderson, another presenter on GB News. But the party fell short of exit poll projections of 13 MPs, and it was overshadowed by Labour’s historic landslide and 172-seat majority.

Being an MP in Westminster is tough, especially if your party’s representation can be counted on the fingers of one hand. You have to strive to get on committees, to find traction on issues, to get noticed in the Commons. And Farage, as a member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2020, did not like that amount of effort. Instead, as one European Union official reflected, “He never did any proper work. He was really just there to disrupt things.”

Nigel Farage gesticulating in the European Parliament in 2011

Being an effective constituency MP is arguably even tougher. It requires getting to grips with local issues, spending time in your surgery listening to residents, and negotiating with councils and their staff. That is a stretch for Farage when he prefers to be in the US, on vacation (as he was when the Southport murders occurred), on his radio programme, anywhere but Clacton.

As Farage learned from Donald Trump, it is far easier to agitate before a camera or in a tweet. “Reform” comes not through legislation, interaction with community groups, or detailed study of issues. It comes through a polemical blast with no regard to the complexity of facts.

It is 7 p.m. on 6 August. A man in a blue suit sits in a London studio in front of a CGI backdrop of the Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament.

He acknowledges that “there are far-right thugs” and that “some of the actions, such as trying to set fire to hotels with people in them are truly disgusting and appalling”.

But “we can’t say it’s all on one side”, he asserts, speaking of “mobs of young Muslims, masked, acting in an intimidatory way”.

His primary concern? He is “disgusted by the comments of certain people…saying these are ‘Farage’s riots’.” For “the incitement of hatred” is not against Muslims; other religious, racial, or ethnic minorities; migrants; refugees; or asylum seekers. Instead…

Because of that level of incitement to hatred against me, I’ve had to have a significant change to my security situation over the course of the weekend.

I guess there are something who are frightened that, politically, one day I could benefit from what is going on.

For this is all about Nigel’s opportunism and opportunity. The murder of three girls in Southport, the far-right gangs, the response by Muslims to the threats to their communities, the police efforts to contain the violence: all of this is to be exploited.

And to be exploited, it needs to be stoked. For if and when the violence ebbs, if and when the emphasis is on dialogue rather than discord, if and when the political impetus is for reconstruction and civil society rather than animosity and Us v. Them…

…Then Nigel’s opportunity will be gone.