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Following riots across the country in Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham and elsewhere over the weekend, the government’s COBRA committee has met up, and created a plan of action to deal with the matter.
Sir Keir Starmer spoke after the meeting on Monday morning, confirming his plans to punish those involved, both online and offline.
The plans include mobilising an “army” of riot police officers to deal with further violent protests, and Sir Keir has triggered a special judicial system so courts can sit for 24 hours to deal with the thugs involved in riots.
The prime minister also stressed that individuals inciting violence online would be brought before the courts.
Sunday marked the sixth day of violent protests in a row following the killing of three young girls in Southport.
Anti-immigration rioters in Rotherham smashed the windows of a Holiday Inn Express before starting fires, and a group of rioters in Middlesbrough smashed the windows of houses and cars and threw objects at police officers.
In this episode of The Standard podcast, the Standard’s Political Editor Nicholas Cecil explains what the prime minister’s plans are and why there’s a strong focus on social media.
In part two, the Standard’s Fashion Director Victoria Moss explains what Charli XCX’s latest music video ‘Guess’ tells us about sustainable fashion.
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Here’s a fully automated transcript:
From London, I'm Jon Weeks, and this is The Standard.
Following riots across the country in Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, and elsewhere over the weekend, the government's COBRA committee has met up and created a plan of action to deal with the matter.
“We will have a standing army of specialist officers, public duty officers, so we'll have enough officers to deal with this where we need them.
The second is, we'll ramp up criminal justice.
There have already been hundreds of arrests.
Some have appeared in court this morning.
I have asked for early consideration of the earliest naming and identification of those involved in the process, who will feel the full force of the law.
And thirdly, I've been absolutely clear that the criminal law applies online as well as offline.
And I'm assured that that's the approach that is being taken.”
So, Keir Starmer spoke after the meeting this morning, Monday the 5th of August, confirming his plans to punish those involved both online and offline.
Yesterday marked the sixth day of violent protests in a row following the killing of three young girls in Southport.
Anti-immigration rioters in Rotherham smashed the windows of a Holiday Inn Express before starting fires.
And a group of rioters in Middlesbrough smashed the windows of houses and cars and threw objects at police officers.
Ahead of the Cobra meeting this morning on BBC Breakfast, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said there will be a reckoning for criminal behaviour.
“There is no excuse for that kind of behaviour, throwing bricks at police officers, the targeting of mosques, the looting of shops.
It was total disgraceful criminal behaviour.
And we should be clear there will be a reckoning.
Those criminals will pay the price.
There have already been hundreds of arrests.
We have made clear to the police they have our full support in pursuing all of those involved.”
Joining me now to examine the Prime Minister's plan of action is The Standard's political editor, Nicholas Cecil.
So Nic, following the COBRA meeting this morning, what did you make of the PM's proposed action plan?
Well, so Keir Starmer is very much in his element here.
So, it's a major crisis, which has happened earlier on his watch.
But it's a criminal justice crisis.
And obviously he is a former director of public prosecutions.
So, if this was an economic crisis, financial markets and meltdown, that might be a bigger problem for him.
But it is very much an area which he knows very well.
So, he's come out with this plan after a meeting of Whitehall's COBRA emergency committee.
And this includes, in his words, an army of specialist police officers, kind of public order experts.
You might call them riot police.
So there'll be this standing army of officers who can be deployed to wherever they are needed.
The phrase army in itself is quite interesting because the government always steers away from suggesting that we're bringing in the army in Britain because we have a very clear divide between our police forces and our military in this country.
And the government is always very keen to stick to that.
So that was interesting language.
He's also stressed that the criminal justice system is being ramped up to deal with these thugs who went on the rampage as quickly as possible.
And he wants these individuals named and shamed in many ways as quickly as possible.
So he doesn't want them to be able to hide behind kind of legally court system.
He wants their names out in the public there.
So if one knows who these thugs are, so their neighbours and all their friends and family will know that this individual went on the rampage, did some looting in this shop, engaged in some racist activity and so on.
And then finally, one of potentially the most interesting ones is the role of social media here, because people incited this violence on social media.
And the government has talked tough for a long time about cracking down on social media and its negative impact on society, but has really struggled to do very much so far.
That's it.
And do you think that was quite a big focus of the meeting this morning, the impact, I suppose, of social media and people inciting this violence to happen in the first place?
Yes, very much so, because people behave very differently on social media as they do in real life.
People kind of hide behind this veneer that you can behave differently and in many ways more aggressively and more unpleasantly on social media than you would face to face with individuals.
So it's definitely played a significant role in these riots, partly due to false information put out early on suggesting that the Southport suspect, the guy allegedly involved in these appalling stabbings in Southport, was an asylum seeker who had come over to Britain on a small boat crossing the Channel and was being watched by the security services.
Now, this has turned out to be completely wrong, but there's some quite prominent people actually who've been promoting these falsehoods.
And obviously they've been done on social media platforms.
So what are the companies doing?
And these companies are making millions or billions and billions of pounds, yet they're clearly not policing their platforms well enough.
And dealing with these riots is probably the biggest challenge Sir Keir Starmer has faced as PM so far.
How do you think he's done in response to these riots so far?
He was Director of Public Prosecutions in 2011 when they were the London riots.
So not only has he got expertise in dealing with incidents like this, but he's actually was at the helm of the CPS the last time we had such a disorder on this scale.
So he's got the knowledge, he's got the expertise.
And I think so far, he's acted quite swiftly, although, interestingly enough, former Home Secretary, James Cleverley, has suggested that the Cobra meeting should have been called earlier.
But now the latest step that we've heard from the government is they have triggered what is called the Additional Courts Protocol.
And this means that courts can sit for longer, in theory, for 24 hours a day if needed.
They probably won't be needed, because I suspect this violence is likely to dwindle in coming days.
It may not.
But often with these violent episodes, you get a burst of violence, and then the police clamp down on it.
And it's partly also the reaction from local communities.
We've seen around the country, violent protests, and then communities coming out to clean up the mess afterwards and being very strong in their condemnation of those involved in the violence.
We saw Malaysia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs issue an alert to Malaysians living in or visiting the UK to stay away from areas where protests have been carried out and riots have been carried out and to remain vigilant.
If riots do continue, are we likely to see more of these from other countries?
I think that the key words there were, if they do continue.
So obviously, if they did escalate, then I suspect you'd have other countries issuing warnings to their citizens.
And the thing you've got to remember here is that the images that get beamed around the world are of these violent incidents of thugs going on the rampage in towns and cities.
If you're in Britain, you know, actually, these are very, very limited and there are a very small number of thugs involved.
But if you're living abroad, you've got no idea about the scale of this.
And for example, some people might be scared about going to city centres and so on.
It's happened with London.
People were worried about going to London in past years.
But kind of, if you're in London, you know that kind of the city is very safe in the vast majority of areas, even when there are these incidents taking place.
Let's take a quick break in part two, Charli XCX's latest music video and what it tells us about sustainable fashion.
My initial reaction to the video, although I really liked the song, was that it just made me feel a bit icky really.
Welcome back, joining me now is our fashion director, Victoria Moss, who's written a piece focused on the latest music video from Charli XCX, featuring Billie Eilish for their song Guess.
So Victoria, first of all, why has this music video in particular prompted you to write a piece about it?
Well, I think, you know, I watched the video on Friday and it's, you know, I love Charli and I love Billie and they're both great.
But suddenly these scenes of them sort of jumping around and cavorting in these just almost AI looking piles of underwear, which turns out to be 10,000 pairs of knickers and bras.
And it just really reminded me of the piles of fashion waste that kind of wash up on beaches and all over the place in the global south.
And the whole thing just made me feel really just quite uneasy.
And it just felt very representative of this attitude we have to fashion and to garments and to textiles, that it's disposable and we can just create these piles and mounds of them.
And it doesn't really matter where they've come from or where they're going to.
And that was my initial reaction to the video, although I really liked the song, was that it just made me feel a bit icky really.
That's it.
But at the end of the video, to be fair to it, it does say that unworn underwear from the video will be donated to a charity for domestic violence victims.
I mean, that suggests the producers have put some thought towards that kind of side of things, right?
Yes.
And I think that's great.
And they've obviously, the I Support The Girls charity has obviously had the spotlight put on them because it was on their Instagram and people did pick up on that, the pieces were being donated.
I suppose cynically, to me, that just feels like a sort of PR move to stave off any criticism about it.
I think of, the underwear in that video has been piled up.
It's been mown over by a sort of giant pickup truck that Billie Eilish is driving.
I don't know if you'd really want to put on any of that underwear.
And of course, you can donate to a charity without having to pull those kind of stunts first.
And in your piece, you talk about some examples of beach cleans by the Orr Foundation, specifically in Ghana.
What have they been finding there?
I mean, the Orr Foundation is a really impressive and worthwhile organisation that does everything from beach cleanups on the Ghana coast near Accra.
And they also have recycling initiatives in the city where they turn textile waste into all kinds of things, which is, you know, it's a really worthy charity and it's a really worthy initiative.
And they've taken a lot of activism in order to kind of pressurise fast fashion brands to take responsibility because, you know, in Ghana, in Chile, in lots of countries in the global south, the clothing that we discard, that we think we've given to charity and we've put into one of those charity bins, in reality ends up being discarded in the environment and creating, you know, huge, huge problems of pollution and all the rest of it.
And as you said, Victoria, this music video made you feel a particular way when it comes to fashion.
Obviously, you're in the industry, so you know a lot more about it.
But what do you think needs to change to make our attitudes at large, to close less sort of throw away?
I think it's really difficult.
And I always feel that the honest, you know, as consumers, people are sold to constantly and even more so with social media and the internet.
We're sort of endlessly bombarded with new things and wanting this and these trends on TikTok and, you know, all these kind of endless pressure to buy something new.
And I think consumers are just behaving in a way that they've sort of been trained to by the way capitalism works, ultimately.
The fashion industry is really unregulated in terms of overproduction and sort of sustainable markers.
You know, it's one of the world's biggest global polluters, but it exists in this place where the supply chain is incredibly convoluted and opaque.
It's very difficult to break it up and to make changes there.
But I think ultimately what's needed is regulation on these brands and these companies.
Most of these big fast fashion, high street fashion brands, they don't have to declare how much they're producing.
They don't have to declare what they're doing with their stock or how they're creating it.
And I think that there just needs to be more pressure from government ultimately to regulate it better.
There's been a new report that came out last week from Fashion Revolution called the What Fuel's Fashion Report, which surveyed sort of 250 brands, all of the big ones that you'd have heard of, and it just kind of found this sort of litany of bad results in terms of climate targets and phasing out energy, coal energy and not having the renewable energy put into the supply chain.
And they're calling for brands to put aside 2% of their revenue to help rework that supply chain and look at the carbon emissions, which are really immense and quite scary.
So it's things like that, and it's kind of pushing those things forward, but ultimately, I do think the responsibility lies with the brands that are creating these things.
And it does, I think, ultimately lie with the governments to step in and to regulate those brands.
Head to standard.co.uk for more news, interviews and analysis.
Thanks for listening.
We're back tomorrow afternoon at four o'clock.
