James Johnson is co-founder of JL Partners. He was the Senior Opinion Research and Strategy Adviser to Theresa May as Prime Minister, 2016-2019
When terrible attacks happen on American soil, Britons naturally feel sympathy with the victims.
But Britain also has a habit of accompanying this with a condescending gloat. We see it after school shootings, we saw it after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The stupid Americans won’t do anything about all the guns they have that cause all these killings. Silly them.
There are many reasons this is a false premise: the U.S. Constitution, the limits on different aspects of US government under the separation of powers, and the cultural and historical connection to guns that make taking them away close to impossible.
We gloat because partly we struggle to understand America, partly because it makes us feel better about ourselves.
But we have nothing to be proud of. We are even more guilty of failing to tackle our tragedies and of denying their true causes.
THE DENIAL OF THE POLITICALLY CORRECT
So often in the last few years in the UK, the media, Westminster, and parts of the establishment have obfuscated and obscured the causes of violent attacks and murders on our streets.
The murder of David Amess MP is the most egregious example. The Member of Parliament was stabbed to death during his constituency surgery by Ali Harbi Ali.
In the days after, you would think this was about conduct from social media and language in politics. MPs on both sides and the media focused almost exclusively on decorum in democracy and measures to reduce the abuse of parliamentarians.
The reality of the attack was quite different. In 2014 Ali was referred to Prevent, the counter-radicalisation programme. He told the Southend police officer upon his arrest he committed “terror” and that his motive was “religious”. He was charged with terrorism.
While police and counter-terror officers did their work well, the result of the commentary was akin to cover-up. In the words of Nick Timothy: “Most ignored the motive of the terrorist who killed Sir David Amess: Islamism. MPs pretended it was about incivility on Twitter. Others said let’s have the debate after the trial. As ever, we didn’t. Islamism is a cancer. RIP David.”
There are plenty of other examples. We have also seen the police explain away violence and hateful imagery during protests against the Israel-Gaza War on the streets of London. In trying so hard to placate the protestors, the police ended up on the wrong side of common sense.
Such habits are divisive, fuelled by politically correct culture, and degrade trust in the system. They obscure the honest problems and debates we must have about integration, immigration, and Islamism.
THE DENIAL OF THE ‘LAZY RACISTS’
The reaction to the Southport stabbings, though, has showcased a different obscuring force at play. Unlike in the example of Amess or the Israel-Gaza protests, its ugly form of denial has sprouted from another side of British society.
After the attack – in which three young girls have died so far – there was a palpable hunger amongst right-wing social media personalities for the perpetrator to be Muslim. So much so, that they made it up. The (fake) name “Ali Al-Shakati” trended on X as the alleged identity of the attacker, alongside claims they were a Muslim asylum seeker.
Anthony Fowler, a British Olympian, tweeted a video from Liverpool asking “why our government has let a sick, demented fella from Syria into our country”. The video has 4 million views, no Community Notes, and can still be viewed in full today.
Last night the discourse moved from online to the streets. We saw scenes of sickening chaos in Southport. Thugs threw bricks at a mosque. There were chants of “Who the fuck is Allah”. People physically attacked police officers.
Here are the facts. The murderer was born in Cardiff. There is no indication in investigations or information made public so far that he subscribes to any particular creed and zero evidence of a link to Syria or Islam. He was a son of Rwandan refugees, one of the more integrated ethnic groups in the UK.
No, you could not have ‘sent him home’. No, there is no reason to believe he is representative of any wider group in society.
In the same way, we must condemn the wilful mischaracterisation of the murder of David Amess, we must do the same here. Many of the online and in-person responses have been disgusting, racist, and an insult to the dead and those grieving.
There has always been a far-right movement or a gang of thugs to whip up a storm. That is nothing new. But such trends are becoming more fashionable, more in vogue, moving beyond the realm of the skinhead rioter to learned society.
Scour Twitter these days and there are more openly racist memes. I have noticed more people I know sharing such content. Sometimes they morph from half-comedy to half-serious suggestions. Policy solutions amongst these packs have become more radical, with some even suggesting deportations of second-generation immigrants.
This is of course partly the fault of the first form of denial I talked about: that of the politically correct. It makes people suspicious of the police’s motives. I am sympathetic to the view that the ignorance of people’s legitimate concerns about the nature of unbridled immigration has helped some of the violence we saw last night to come to the surface.
But there is no excuse for this behaviour and nothing can legitimise it or legitimise sympathy with it. We can all think for ourselves. We should be able to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. Whether these people are marching on the street of Southport with the thugs, or quietly agreeing from behind the safety of their computer screen, they are participating in the laziest form of bandwagon-jumping, divorced from the facts.
What they are doing is not solving or ‘shining a light’ on anything. They are simply turning what should be a serious investigation on a horrific attack into a roadshow for an increasingly in-vogue casual racism. They are as bad as the politically correct elites and establishment figures they criticise for their response to other attacks.
We laugh at Americans for being unable to address the causes of their tragedies. But this week has shown Britain can be worse. We are being torn apart by a meek liberal consensus at the top of society and a cowardly nascent racism at the bottom. People only seem capable of calling out one and not the other.
It is a sorry situation. Today, at least, I’d take being American over being British.