They started coming almost as the new day dawned, bringing brooms and buckets, trays of drinks or just goodwill. The rubble was swept from Southport’s once-quiet streets and the windows shattered by rioters were fixed. Local builders volunteered to shore up a wall outside the mosque, smashed in the previous night’s orgy of self-righteous thuggery, while neighbours helped council workers clear up. A traumatised town was doing its best to show that the riots were not in their name; that they just want to support those who are suffering the unbearable loss of three little girls at a summer holiday dance class.
And that’s what civic pride, looking after your own, and all the other old-fashioned values the far right falsely claims to stand for, actually look like in action. If you really care about the victims of an unspeakable tragedy, you don’t use their suffering as an excuse to loot corner shops. If you really care about murdered children, you don’t terrify living ones by brawling beneath their bedroom windows on a night when they must have needed, above all, to feel safe. And if you really fear Britain descending into lawlessness then the last thing you do is throw bricks at the police, whether in Southport or Hartlepool, outside migrant hotels in Aldershot and Manchester, or outside Downing Street itself.
Of course there may be questions, once all the facts are established, about whether anything could have been done to prevent the Southport stabbings. Of course there are genuine broader worries about the prevalence of knife crime nationwide. But there’s something synthetic about these riots, something over and above the fact that they were supposedly a response to wholly inaccurate early information about the 17-year-old suspect’s religion and background. They reek somehow of anger willed into being from above or shipped in from outside town rather than spontaneously erupting at grassroots.
So don’t be fooled in coming days by lukewarm condemnations of the violence, which segue suspiciously fast into arguing that maybe underneath it all, the rioters had a point worth taking seriously – about knife crime, or the country supposedly falling apart five minutes after Labour got elected, or “mass immigration”, or any other hard-right soapbox issue. Don’t allow the normalisation of something still thankfully far from normal, even in an age of industrial-scale seeding of disinformation on social media by malign actors or of the homegrown extremism they have learned to exploit. The country is not “on the point of revolt”, as Nigel Farage tweeted – despite his best efforts. Most of us are overwhelmingly with the street-sweepers and tea-makers of Southport, who just want to rebuild and live in peace.
Keir Starmer will be very comfortable with the first step in helping them do so, which is swift justice for those directly guilty of violence and for any group found actively orchestrating it. Indeed, he is setting up a new violent disorder unit to this end. But the second step is more complex, even for a former human rights lawyer, and involves the rabble rousers and online grifters egging them on from afar – whose role can be hard to pin down in legislation.
Farage is now defending himself against accusations of inciting violence in Southport by insisting that the mosque wouldn’t have been attacked if the police had answered his questions – perhaps more accurately described as insinuations – about the stabbings and the 17-year-old suspect, now named as Axel Rudakubana, sooner. But Merseyside police working flat out on a murder inquiry shouldn’t have to waste their time dealing with an attention-seeking backbencher from Essex, particularly one who a few days ago wrongly blamed riots in Leeds on “the politics of the subcontinent”. And as a matter of common decency, officers putting their lives at risk in tense situations must be able to count on politicians not to endanger them or the public by escalating things.
These are basic unwritten rules but, like Donald Trump before him, Farage often pushes boundaries that a political system naively reliant on the “good chaps” theory, of voluntary restraint, never imagined being pushed. Barely a month into his Westminster career, he is developing a pattern of saying incendiary things not in parliament – where he could be challenged or compelled to correct inaccuracies – but in the more unrestrained badlands of X (formerly Twitter) or his GB News show. Parliament should consider whether it has the mechanisms to deal with someone potentially capable of bringing it into disrepute while barely setting foot there, just as ministers must urgently require Ofcom, broadcasters and the big social media platforms to produce plans for countering the clear threat to national security posed by fake news, hate speech and conspiracism.
The longer-term step, however, is to change the conditions in which these toxic forces flourish. Think of disinformation and populism as lit matches dropped in a forest: dangerous, but only capable of starting wildfires in parched conditions. The Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi is right that this week’s violence can’t be separated from a longstanding culture of Islamophobic prejudice, which creates fractures in our society for others to exploit.
How leadership contenders in her own party respond to the riots will be a litmus test for their future fitness for office. But this is a crucial defining moment, too, for the new prime minister, who has a wobbly relationship with Muslim voters post-Gaza, and a historical nervousness around issues involving immigration. Having been elected on a promise to fix the country, Starmer, should, however draw inspiration from Southport and the spirit it represents: from knowing that this country still contains many more people quietly working to put things back together than it does nihilists trying to smash them apart.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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