For more than a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland have been rocked by riots. The far-right thugs who have attacked police, residents and their property claimed, initially, to have been roused to their destructive actions by the killing of three girls in Southport, Merseyside. But as northern editor and reporter Josh Halliday and Robyn Vinter explain on a visit to the usually quiet and friendly seaside town, that was a blatantly false excuse inflamed by online disinformation.
Our big story also examines how the violence has spread and what the government and police are doing to deal with the rioters. And Sunder Katwala, director of the thinktank British Future, deconstructs the narrative spread by the populist right of a broken society. This warping of public sentiment “should not be countered by government alone. How the rest of us talk and act can make a difference,” he writes.
