(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/wzytAKx9uyo )
Who cares if it’s true or not? If you’re spoiling for a fight then a nasty notion spread on the internet is a call to arms, and the mindless murders of innocent children in Southport has triggered an insane chain reaction. What’s worse, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, the government doesn’t have the tools to stamp it out.
Of course as violence erupts outside mosques and elsewhere across the country the police are on the case, containing the thuggery and making arrests.
But in the scheme of things that feels almost like an afterthought. Prevention would be preferable to such belated attempts at cure.
Time for a lightning recap. A seventeen-year-old boy stands accused of slaughtering several little girls and seriously injuring many others on a bloody rampage at a dance class last week.
It’s emerged in court that he has serious mental health issues. It’s also clear that his parents moved to UK from Rwanda many years ago, and that he was born in Cardiff.
No dispute about that. Or shouldn’t be.
Except that, within hours, far-right racist posts were on the web claiming he was an asylum seeker who arrived by boat last year. And, for good measure, they invented a Muslim name for him.
There are suggestions, given credibility by former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, that this was a fake news operation mounted by Russia, as part of its ‘grey warfare’ aimed at disrupting the West.
If so, they won this round, as the bogus material got millions of views and stoked racist hatreds. With a bit of online organisation by shadowy neo-fascist figures, the thugs were soon out on the streets.
And here’s the rub.
Back in the analogue age it wasn’t that easy to pass marching orders up and down the country. And suspect outfits had leaders would could be arrested and headquarters that could be shut down.
But, in the virtual world of artificial intelligence, bots and trolls, anything goes.
Naturally it’s part of the job of government to regulate online platforms like X, TikTok and Telegram, but legislation tends to take months to translate into law.
In short, the pace of change is such that anything as cumbersome and olde worlde as parliament is up against it, big time.
And right now there’s nothing really in place to counter online lies.
The influential Labour MP Josh Simons has called on the Prime Minister to set up a special unit to spot disinformation spikes in real time, and head them off before they lead to civil disorder.
In a hard-hitting piece in The Times last week he wrote: ‘Nothing less than the fabric of our society is at stake.’
Food for thought there for Keir Starmer, as he tries to contain contaminating outbreaks of violence and appear at the same time calm and in control.
But he’s not the only one who might be minded to put their thinking caps on.
Having spotted that her hardline rhetoric is too much even for more than a handful on her own side, Suella Braverman’s bowed out of the Tory leadership race.
But she might care to ponder on her references in the past to asylum seekers risking their lives to make it across the channel as ‘an invasion'.
Could be she’s minded to defect to the Reform party, whose leader Nigel Farage has opted for the term ‘swarm’.
These words matter because they imply that the men, women and children in question, most of whom actually are fleeing persecution, are somehow less than human. And a threat to our way of life.
Maybe it’s just coincidence that hooligans in the current crop of so-called protests have been shouting slogans like ‘stop the boats’ and ‘save our kids’.
Or maybe it isn’t. Hatred is an ugly and destructive emotion, but with some people it doesn’t take that much to stoke it up.
But, away from all that beastliness, it’s worth giving thought to a perceived truth that our new ministers definitely are keen to cement in the public consciousness.
They’ve already put two fingers up to the nimbies who prevented the last government from building anything like enough houses, and promised they will do better.
An awful lot better, they hope and pray, when their changes to the planning system clear the way for the construction of some one-and-half million new homes.
In addition, they’re committed to streamlining bodies regulating our public services, to get them to work better.
Also, and most importantly, they’ve undertaken to fix the nation’s finances and try not, in the process, to let their efforts inflict too much pain.
However, just as the reforms will take time to turn into tangible benefits, the Chancellor’s admitted that plugging the twenty-two-billion-pound hole in the public purse will mean taxes rises.
We’ll have to wait for the October budget to find out where Rachel Reeves plans to aim the axe, but it’s safe to say no one in the target area is going to be happy about it.
As to who’ll get the blame, that’s where the information mission heaves into view. Because Labour’s vital priority is to establish that it’s the Tories not them who’re not to be trusted with the money.
Brief history lesson here.
After the worldwide financial crash of 2007-8, the then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown not only bailed out the banks but also got his Chancellor to persuade other governments to do the same.
In so doing, they prevented the crisis from turning into a domino-effect catastrophe.
But because Brown was such a cack-handed communicator he failed to crush the concept that it was all his fault.
Illogical, of course, but it did happen on his watch, and Tory PM David Cameron later made a pretty good fist of suggesting the calamity was caused not in Wall Street but Downing Street.
The Conservatives’ job was made easier by the fact that the Labour party was too busy choosing a new leader to mount an effective rebuttal operation.
And the tattered Tory tribe might bear that pitfall in mind right now, as it’s a rule of thumb that once the public’s mind is made up it’s hellishly difficult to change it.
Which is why Ms Reeves is really ramping up the rhetoric, suggesting in no uncertain terms that the reason she’s going to have to take money off us is that the Tories have been cooking the books.
They deny that, naturally, and claim things only look as bad is they do because of choices made not by their lot but but the incoming bunch.
Nonetheless, many economists, notably top bods in the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, say Reeves is right, and they too were taken aback by the figures.
With that in mind, she’s gone so far as to accuse her predecessor Jeremy Hunt of lying. A naughty word, banned in the House of Commons as unparliamentary language.
Anyone who says such a thing in the chamber is immediately told by The Speaker to row back or get out.
There was one wonderful occasion, however, when an MP who’d said the forbidden thing got round the problem thus:
‘Very well, I withdraw the accusation. Let’s just say the honourable gentleman’s nose is growing.’
Oh how they laughed. All of them, including the Speaker.
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