ONE aspect of the Liverpool people-crunching episode which has set social media on fire is the alacrity with which the Merseyside plods released information on the nationality and ethnicity of the driver, said to be a ’53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area’.
Predictably, what has ignited the flames is the contrast with the reluctance to provide any detail on the identity of the Southport killer, on the spurious grounds that disclosure could prejudice the trial of Axel Rudakubana and potentially allow him to escape conviction.
As we know, those details, including the murderer’s name, were eventually released with precisely zero impact on the outcome of the trial, but not before the information vacuum caused by withholding the information had triggered much online speculation and had been a factor in provoking a series of riots.
The thing is, anyone with slightly more than two brain cells and the sentience of a somnambulant slug that had overdosed on temazepam could have predicted these effects, but – as I remarked in September – it took ‘terrorism specialist’ Jonathan Hall to say that the unrest in the wake of the Southport murders revealed the danger of an ‘information vacuum’.
This blindingly obvious statement, the veracity of which had eluded the finest minds of the Merseyside plod at the time, despite being led by that titan of DEI placements, chief constable Serena Kennedy, who has since announced her retirement to deserved but doubtless comfortably financed obscurity.
As reported by The Times, Hall was the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, and had been speaking to a conference organised by a think tank which went by the name of the Counter Extremism Group.
In his speech, he had referred to the Southport murders, telling his audience that ‘one of the problems and the consequences of the Southport attack was that there was an information gap, a vacuum, which was filled with false speculation’.
Hall added, with the prescience that a five-year-old child could have managed: ‘I personally think that more information could have been put out safely without compromising potential criminal proceedings.’
Now, presented by the media as if it were special and some great achievement, we see report headlines such as ‘Liverpool crash suspect response shows police have learnt from Southport’. That is from the Telegraph, the report sub-head telling us: ‘Authorities are desperate to avoid a repeat of riots triggered after misleading claims about the murderer of three children last year.’
From the very tenor of these headlines, though, it is painfully evident that even Merseyside plod – albeit under new leadership – had realised that, with the creation of another information vacuum, they could have ended up with the mother of all riots, fuelled by the anger of thousands of Liverpool football fans.
Yet, despite the staggeringly obvious need for such a step, the Telegraph’s Will Bolton – apparently the paper’s crime correspondent – managed to assert that ‘Merseyside Police have taken a bold, early step’, one, he writes, ‘that seeks to calm public unease.’ That it would have been cretinous, beyond even the capabilities of Merseyside plod, not to have done so seems to have escaped the attention of Master Bolton.
Leaping at the chance to be infuriatingly patronising, the BBC also dived in with an article on its website, this one written by Daniel Sandford, described merely as a lowly ‘UK correspondent’.
Under the heading, ‘Why police released details about Liverpool crash suspect so quickly’, the BBC made the usual assumption about its audience that we are a bunch of thickos who need informing in such a patronising manner.
We are thus advised that the decision ‘shows lessons have already been learned from the Southport attacks last summer, when online speculation and disinformation filled a void after the same force released little detail about the 17-year-old they had in custody’.
Usually when a suspect is arrested, the all-knowing Mr Sanford tells us, police forces in England and Wales just give out the age of the person and where they were arrested. ‘But’, he adds, ‘at 19:53 BST, the force emailed out a press release including the suspect’s age, nationality and ethnicity.’
It was, writes Daniel, ‘a clear attempt to damp down inaccurate speculation on social media that the Ford Galaxy driving into Liverpool fans was part of an Islamist terrorist attack, or was in any way linked to migrants.’
We are then treated to a comment from Liverpool mayor Steve Rotheram, used to reinforce the statement of the bleedin’ obvious, letting us thickos know – because we hadn’t been able to work it out for ourselves – that the Merseyside plod had acted ‘very, very quickly’ to stamp out speculation on social media that had caused ‘real consternation’.
Sandford then goes on to write: ‘By contrast, last summer in the aftermath of the horrific knife attack in Southport in which Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice Da Silva Aguiar were killed, Merseyside Police said very little about the suspect they had arrested.’
‘This meant,’ he continues, ‘that inaccurate social media speculation and deliberate disinformation about the suspect having a Muslim name and being a newly arrived migrant went unchecked.’
‘A consequence’, he concluded, ‘was a riot in Southport within 36 hours of the attack focused on the local mosque, and then further rioting across England, much of it aimed at hotels housing recently arrived asylum seekers.’
I somehow doubt that Sandford meant to be quite so candid but what, in effect, he is saying is something which we all knew at the time, that the failure of Merseyside plod to release the details about Rudakubana was a significant factor in the subsequent rioting. In other words, the police themselves caused the riots which they then had to supress.
One poster on Twitter looks at this in detail, starting with the Harehills riots that had taken place only a few weeks before the Southport murders.
At that time, he notes, Starmer and Yvette Cooper’s response had been flaccid by comparison with what was to come. The tone then was sombre, careful. There was no mobilisation of government power. No dramatic call to action.
This makes the contrast with the response to Southport all the more stark – and yet the Southport violence occurred in the wake of the murder of three little girls, not a dispute with social services.
Starmer’s response was aggressive and punitive. He went ‘full Robocop’, using the official Home Office account to publicly condemn the participants, fast-tracking people through the legal system, and making misleading statements about the riots’ origins and coordination.
Notably, the plod also pursued people who hadn’t been involved in the violence at all – but had simply tweeted inflammatory posts or possible misinformation – bearing in mind that the official information that was released (Welsh ‘choir boy’ and all that) was itself calculated to mislead.
Even with this response, though, the approach was not balanced: no effort was made to pursue those spreading false claims about acid attacks on Muslims. At the same time, there were violent revenge attacks on white pubgoers carried out by elements within the local Muslim community – but these received little to no attention.
It became quite obvious that the police were indifferent to protest about what was manifestly two-tier policing, says our commenter, likely because they’d already had their ritual ‘conversation’ with local community leaders – in practice, this often means a handful of elderly patriarchs within the Mirpuri-Pakistani diaspora.
The silence about Rudakubana, so easily broken at the instruction of a judge, created the perception of a conspiracy of silence.
In fact, there was a conspiracy, for exactly the same reason that the plod were so quickly forthcoming with details of Monday’s people-cruncher. The authorities feared a violent reaction and were seeking to manage the flow of information.
In fact, then as now, they were running scared, in the certain knowledge that they have lost the trust and the respect of the people, who will no longer afford them the benefit of the doubt.
Even now, the Guardian is wibbling about the precedent set, fearful that the next time a POC runs amok on a stabbing frenzy or other murderous activity, the plod will be obliged to reveal the uncomfortable details.
The paper quotes a ‘senior legal source’ who says there could be circumstances where naming the ethnicity of a suspect could cause riots rather than quell them.
‘What will a force do if they arrest someone in similar circumstances who is recently arrived on a small boat or who has a clearly Muslim name?’ he asks. ‘They will now be under huge pressure to name them.’
Predictably, therefore, we see the plod desperate to stay in control, saying: ‘Do not expect us to release every suspect’s ethnicity.’ It is fine to reveal information in order to ‘dampen down some of the speculation from the far right’, but control rather than informing the public is still the objective.
Possibly unwittingly, though, the plod have created a rod for their own backs. If, in the event of some future outrage, they are again reticent to reveal ethnicity and nationality of the perpetrator(s), we will all be able to draw the obvious conclusions.
As I am wont to say, ‘no description is a full description.’ And what will the plod do then, poor things?
