Tag Archives: right wing violence

One of the issues that has come to the fore following the appalling murders then just as appalling lawlessness in Southport earlier this week is the question of free speech. There can be no doubt that misinformation has caused much of the rioting and sheer criminality of the past few days. There are a lot of similarities between what happened in the 1981 Toxteth riots and what happened in 2024 in Southport but there is one crucial difference – social media and the various mobile phones and appliances that supercharge them. 

Just to recap within a couple of hours of the murders false information was put out through social media that the person who committed the murders was an immigrant who came over on small boats and was a Muslim. The Police are bound by law to restrict information about suspects, but they did release one nugget of information that, in a rational world, would have shut down the rumours. They said that the suspect was from Rwanda. 

The UK has few Rwandan refugees, and they came over 30 years ago at the time of the massacres and genocide in that Country. Rwanda is a member of he Commonwealth of Nations although we were not the colonial rulers. Commonwealth membership gives Rwandans greater rights to come to our Country just as we Brits have greater rights to go to their countries. So, the perpetrator was not a ‘boat person,’ his family came here with the support of the UK government all those years ago and was not a Muslim. 96% of the population of Rwanda are Christian and only 2% is of the Islamic faith.

I believe that this means that we must think carefully of the advantages and disadvantages of social media. I use social media a lot. I blog for example. I tweet. I regularly communicate with my grandchildren, using facetime. I email which is a process which saves so much time and paper. So social media must stay but there must be constraints on it.