When it emerged that Axel Rudakubana, the 18-year-old suspect accused of murdering three young girls in Southport, was facing two further charges related to producing the poison known as ricin and for possessing material likely to be useful to someone preparing a terrorist attack, the chief constable of Merseyside police, Serena Kennedy, called for people not to “engage in rumour and speculation”. Her warnings were futile. Soon after the news broke, social media was awash with a tide of speculation and, in some cases, overt racism.
One particularly troubling response came from Conservative party leadership candidate Robert Jenrick. Just 35 minutes after the Merseyside police published its official statement, he released a wildly irresponsible video stating that he was “seriously concerned that the facts may have been withheld”, and that the public “had the right to know the truth right away”. The message was conspiratorial, suggesting the possibility of a cover-up by the police. It echoed the position advanced by Nigel Farage, who has questioned whether the “truth is being withheld”, and was accused of inciting this summer’s riots. And it was just the latest indication that one wing of the Conservative party is becoming radicalised, in much the same way that the US Republican party has shifted towards the extreme right under Donald Trump.
The US border crisis is a portent of what is to come if we don’t act decisively.
— Robert Jenrick (@RobertJenrick) February 15, 2024
In an age of mass migration, only the most robust policies will suffice. You have to be firm to be fair.
As I set out @Heritage we must treat our border security as a national security emergency. pic.twitter.com/05S8qBNgiN
The police always face difficulties when deciding what information they can share with the public about active cases. Merseyside police were merely following the rules about contempt of court, and had been given extensive guidance on this by the Crown Prosecution Service, which they addressed in their statement before Jenrick released his video. “You may have seen speculation online that the police are deciding to keep things from the public. This is certainly not the case,” read the statement. Kennedy also called on the public not to believe “everything you read on social media”. Jenrick should have known better than to ignore her. He has been an MP since 2014, held numerous cabinet positions, and worked as a lawyer before he entered parliament. So why did he choose to frame this as a cover-up, and echo the conspiracies of the far right?
The short answer is political gain. Jenrick is playing to the furthest right of the Tory party membership, seemingly in the hope that it will advance his prospects to become leader. “Across the board, the hard reality of mass migration is being covered up. The public can see with their own eyes that they are being gaslit by the liberal elite,” he said in the video. He has a history of advancing and exploiting fear over migration for his own ends, once claiming that asylum seekers arriving in small boats “cannibalised” communities by importing “different lifestyles and values”. He advocates for leaving the European convention on human rights and the European court of justice and has bemoaned the role of “woke culture”.
This is the politics and rhetoric of the far right. But it also has an increasingly American slant. On a recent appearance on GB News, Jenrick said, “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump.” During a trip to the Mexico-United States border in February, he observed that there were aspects of Trump’s programme that we could learn from, “one of which is illegal migration”. He has indeed been learning from Trump’s prejudiced playbook. And he isn’t alone. A growing radical right wing of the Tory party combines assertive nationalism, identity-driven hostility to immigration and hatred of a confected “elite”. These politicians, who include Jenrick and the former prime minister, Liz Truss, consciously adopt the language of the American right to generate fear and anger here in Britain. To them, being anti-immigration is just one front in a broader “war on woke” that casts entire groups as enemies to society.
Many details of the Southport case remain unknown, including the motive behind the attacks. Among the only things we know about Rudakubana, the alleged perpetrator, is that he was born in Cardiff and raised as a British citizen. Jenrick’s suggestion that the attack was the result of “mass migration” can only be described as an attempt to stoke far-right conspiracies for cynical political reasons. Our MPs should never use such irresponsible or inflammatory language, but sadly Jenrick’s conduct comes as little surprise to those who have followed his trajectory. In the US, Trump has dangerously transformed the Republican party and dragged it to the right. Jenrick’s video this week shows that some parts of the Conservative party would like to head in the same direction.
Joe Mulhall is director of research at the anti-fascism organisation Hope Not Hate
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