8 hours ago
5
A thousand years ago, in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in a car accident – you may have heard about this – and the country went absolutely crackers. It was pretty spooky to watch, as people filed towards London’s Kensington Palace, her former residence, weeping and hugging, but it also seemed like maybe it was a good thing. Pent-up grief about who knows what other losses was expressing itself collectively, the upper lip for which the nation was fabled had unstiffened, it was conceivable, just about, that we’d emerge a more cohesive society.
And then – this is a deep dive – two Slovakians stole 11 soft toys that had been left among the flowers outside Westminster Abbey, and they each got a month-long prison sentence, though this was later reduced on appeal to a fine of £200. The original sentencing judge said he had a duty to “reflect the public sense of outrage”, which set off every tripwire: mate, no, you do not have to reflect the public sense of outrage. The public has gone wild and you are a judge.
This case came rushing back to me on Saturday, when the horrific stabbings on the train from Doncaster to London started to be reported. Nothing was clear, nothing made sense: at that point, there were thought to be two assailants, and so it was reasonable to wonder what their relationship was, and whether the motive was terrorism. By the end of Sunday, it transpired that the older man had nothing to do with the attack, and they were charging just one 32-year-old suspect.
The release of both men’s nationality (British), their skin colour and their heritage, was not reasonable, though. It was incredibly jarring to hear news reporters intone that one was Black and the other was of Caribbean descent, even before we knew that the second guy had nothing to do with it. Since when did we describe suspects by their citizenship status? Since when did we distinguish one British citizen from another by their skin colour? Since when has that been the country we are?
People immediately justified the British Transport Police statement, on the grounds that where information was lacking, disinformation rushed in to fill the vacuum. Look at Southport, where apparently the riots could have been averted if people hadn’t “got the sense that something was being withheld or fudged”, in the words of Jonathan Hall KC, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.
But disinformation and insinuation rush in anyway. Matt Goodwin, the GB news presenter who has a history of expressing anti-immigrant sentiments, said on X that this was the result of “mass uncontrolled immigration”. Grok, Elon Musk’s handy far-right AI chatbot, was immediately spreading Islamophobic falsehoods (I’m not going to provide a link but just trust me). Reform’s Zia Yusuf threw in a random parallel to a knife attack committed by an asylum seeker while talking to Laura Kuenssberg.
There is now a segment of British society that will use any violent crime as a stick to beat migrants with. It doesn’t matter whether an alleged suspect could be said to represent all immigrants or, indeed, whether they were an immigrant at all, some grifter will jump on a horrific scene, while it’s still fresh enough that society’s panic-brain is engaged, saying “mass uncontrolled immigration”. No information can be released fast enough for these people, because they’re not looking for the truth. No amount of transparency will appease them. “British born” means nothing to them. They’re always racing to a new low, blaming faith when nationality doesn’t support their generalisations, and race when religion doesn’t. Whatever the sea wall is between the anti-migrant faction and the rest of civilisation, you can’t expect it to be the British Transport Police, especially given the College of Policing released new interim guidance in August, advising that forces release the ethnicity or nationality of suspects where there was a risk of “misinformation or disinformation leading to community tension.”
What we can expect from the authorities, though, is that they don’t roll over to demands just because they are stridently made.
