Bartholomew's Notes

From the Daily Telegraph:

Nigel Farage has questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us” over the Southport stabbings.

Speaking about the 17-year old-suspect, the leader of Reform UK said: “Was this guy being monitored by the security services? Some reports say he was. Others are less sure. The police say it is a non-terror incident just as they said the stabbing of the army lt colonel in uniform on the streets of Kent was a non-terror incident.”

“I wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us. I don’t know the answer to that but I think it is a fair and legitimate question.”

“Just asking questions”, as they say. Farage made the statement in a video.

It’s not clear what “reports” Farage has seen: there was an internet rumour that the suspect had been on an an “MI6 watchlist”, but the same rumour also misidentified the suspect with a faux Arabic-sounding but nonsensical name and falsely stated that he was an asylum seeker. The reference to “MI6” rather than “MI5” was also a red-flag of misinformation.

This rumour was spread around social media and written up, possibily with the help of AI, by a website called “Channel3 NOW”. As noted in a thread by Marc Owen Jones (here and here):

…@channel3nownews is obviously an illegitimate website. Indeed, I found four Facebook pages connected to them. One of these pages was repurposed – it used to be called “Funny Hours” in 2016, but changed its name to Fox3News and then Channel3Now. Those who operate it are reported to be in Pakistan & the US. Their website doesn’t have anything by way of a serious ‘about us’ page. The only author I could find through checking the sitemap… goes back to a LinkedIn profile of a guy running a lawn company in Nova Scotia.

In the US, the Channel3 NOW article was quoted at length by Robert Spencer on his Jihad Watch site; at some point he had second thoughts and deleted, although as per his usual practice there’s no sign of any correction. One big Twitter/X account that also spread the rumour but then deleted was “EndWokeness” (captured by John Bye here), an account that is regularly amplified by Elon Musk. In the UK, one person who apologised for spreading false information was Dave Atherton, although as regards the security services he backed down only so far, saying “It is not known if he was on an MI5/6 watch list” (1).

The rumour also got a mention in The Times, although in a context that made it clear it had no credibility:

A name being shared on social media as that of the suspect in the Southport knife attack is false, Merseyside police have said.

Some fringe news outlets and social media accounts claimed an asylum seeker who was on the MI6 watchlist was behind the stabbings. Some posts with the name were shared hundreds of times.

On the face of it, Farage’s “some reports” means nothing more than this debunked rumour – a lack of discernment and due diligence that looks like a pattern.

The idea of some sort of cover-up has also been fed by a Twitter/X post by Steven Barrett, a barrister who is part of the “senior leadership team” of Lord Cruddas’ Conservative Democratic Organisation. Barrett wrote that

I have been privately contacted by a Police Officer – which is rare for me

And told that what we are being told about the Southport stabbings is being managed

And that their priority is that our response is managed

After the post went viral, he added that “I have no intention or desire to be, or to stoke, drama”. Levins, a firm of solicitors based in Liverpool, was unimpressed:

This has now been QTd by Tommy Robinson. The police have a very serious legal duty to manage the information that’s released to the public. Quite what a rent-a-quote member of the Chancery Bar thinks he has to contribute is unclear.

The attraction of such rumours, of course, owes much to the fact that the suspect has not been named. Naming any arrested but not charged suspect is currently fraught with difficulty due to a civil privacy ruling in 2022 (recently invoked by Dan Wootton). Further, the phrase “cannot be named for legal reasons” is instantly familiar to anyone who reads or watches the news, and it is common knowledge that this always applies when a criminal suspect is under 18 years old, as is the case here. Nevertheless, some people who ought to know better have recently been spreading misinformation about this restriction: earlier this month, for instance, Isabel Oakeshott suggested that the identity of a 16 year old on trial for murder was “being covered up”; when corrected, she cited the naming of the 10-year-old killers of James Bulger in 1994, although she neglected the detail that they were named only after their trial had concluded with guilty verdicts.

Unsurprisingly, the information gap has been weaponized by bad actors: Tommy Robinson’s ally Katie Hopkins asserts that the attack was “Islamic Terrorism”, and that because of this the police have “conceal[ed]” the suspect’s identity and are “divert[ing] attention from illegals” (2). As for why they would do this, her explanation is that (dots in original)

The money is with the Muslim invasion. Follow the money. And there are surprising overlords – most of them religious …. Catholic Churches. Chief Rabbi .. heads of ‘charities’

Laurence Fox meanwhile argues that “we need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain”.

Speculation that the suspect was an asylum seeker was for the most part dampened by a statement from the Chief Constable of Merseyside Police that he was “born in Cardiff”. The statement did not refer his ethnicity, but the Daily Telegraph reported (as far as I know, before any other source) the added detail that his parents had come to the UK from Rwanda. This means that it is unlikely that he has a Muslim background, but the fringe-right has simply pivoted to claiming that his ethnicity establishes a link between the killings and “multiculturalism” in a more general sense. Given the lack of any details to work with, this is obviously a pre-existing one-size-fits-all agenda-driven assumption rather than an interpretation that had emerged out of any actual evidence.

The former MP Lembit Öpik – who these days is one of several British presenters on an Australian conspiracy website called TNT News – meanwhile formulated an anti-BBC attack line based on its delay in referencing the suspect’s Rwandan heritage. He argued that “born in Cardiff” was “risking anti-Welsh sentiment due to vileness of crime”, and when the Rwandan detail was later carried by the broadcaster he framed it as “BBC finally admits”. In fact, there was a very good reason for the BBC and other media to hold back from referencing Rwanda: editors considering whether to mention the suspect’s ethnicity would have had to weigh the public interest, as well as the risks of illegally facilitating “jigsaw” identification or inciting online misidentifications.

UPDATE: Farage has now retroactively reframed his question, in a new video shown on GB News:

…I also asked whether, amidst a sea of speculation, the 17-year-old involved had been under the watch of our authorities.

This is sleight of hand: “our authorities” can mean whole host of agencies (e.g. police, social services), whereas “the security services” has a strong implication of Islamic terrorism and interest at the highest levels. He’s also now giving the impression that he was merely asking in general terms, rather than raising a specific concern based on “reports” that in truth were never anything more than a malicious rumour.

Note

1. Atherton also claimed that “He appears to be a Jordanian Palestinian from his name”. How he got from the faux Arabic name to such a specific sub-group is mysterious.

2. Hopkins refers to “the attacker” rather than “the suspect”. The media’s more guarded language is based on the legal principle that guilt should not be inferred from the fact of an arrest or someone being on trial. This would be the case even where there appears to be overwhelming evidence of guilt, or where there would no such agnosticism if the suspect were dead. For instance, in 2016 the murderer Thomas Mair was described as a “suspect” even though his first court appearance was basically an uncontrite confession. Many of Tommy Robinson’s legal problems have arisen from his apparent belief that he has a right to describe defendants on trial as being guilty.

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Hope Not Hate has a round-up of yesterday’s Tommy Robinson rally in central London, including a section on what the organisation calls his “Christian turn”:

In recent months Lennon [i.e. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Robinson’s legal name] has begun to talk more regularly about God and Jesus and that was reflected today with numerous speakers and singers referencing Christianity and chants from the stage of “Christ Is King.” There was also a band from the Spirit Embassy London church in Bruce Grove, Tottenham.

However, perhaps the most extreme speech was delivered by Bishop Ceirion Dewar who screamed:

We are not at war with just the Muslim, we are not at war with just woke ideology, we are not at war with just cancel culture but we are at war with four hundred and twelve idiots that sit on those benches just up there. […] We are the defence walls upon which modernity and multiculturalism crash.

Bishop Dewar has previously addressed a UKIP meeting.

While the English Defence League drew on Christian and crusader imagery Lennon has never organised an event as overtly Christian in tone as todays.

There was some indication of this general direction at last month’s rally, which I noted here.

Dewar’s would appear to be an “independent” bishop: his website says that he was ordained in 1999 and consecrated in 2005, but does not tell us by whom. On LinkedIn, he describes himself as a Pentecostal, and posts on Facebook indicate that he is close to the American Prosperity Gospel preacher Mike Murdock (previously blogged here in relation to another British associate) and to various UK-based British-African church leaders. In 2012 Dewar was involved in a financial dispute with an elderly woman, in which a court ordered him to pay £1000.

The Spirit Embassy Church, meanwhile, is headed by a British-Zimbabwean businessman named Uebert Angel, who has the status of “Ambassador at Large” for Zimbabwe’s government. Angel was not himself part of the event, although clips show that a British associate named Rikki Doolan was on stage. Last year, Angel and Doolan featured in an Al-Jazeera documentary about gold smuggling and money laundering, in which they were secretly filmed; Doolan subsequently issued a statement denying any wrongdoing, although he admitted that as a businessman he has to say things sometimes that seem “ugly”. Around the same time, he was building links with Turning Point UK via anti-drag queen storytime protests alongside Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson.

Fox of course was also prominent at yesterday’s rally, and the night before he spoke at a function room in Hammersmith at an event hosted by the relentless conspiracist David Vance and someone named Sarah Jane Smith. The discussants also included Dave Atherton, Peter McIlvenna and David Scott; the football manager Joey Barton was originally scheduled to take part, but it appears he stepped back due to his latest legal difficulty. Smith describes herself as “a Quantum Healing Hypnosis Practitioner” whose “mentor” was the late Dolores Cannon, an American New Ager who specialised in past life regression and who published books of “communication from Nostradamus via several mediums through hypnosis”.

Footnote

A couple of weeks ago, a short video was posted online of a planning session for the rally at a serviced office in Fleet Street – familar faces included Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, Calvin Robinson, Gerard Batten, Mahyar Tousi, Richard Inman and Jeff Taylor; also spotted were “Stefan Tompson owner of @visegrad24… Paul Thorpe… Momus Najmi”. A document called “The Pledge” was shown propped against the windows.

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A much-discussed pair of posts on X/Twitter – first up, journalist Charlotte Gill:

Back to the UK tomorrow.
I’ve never had such dread about Britain.
Coming back to London and knowing how unpleasant it’ll be.
The demographic changes and feeling that 🇬🇧 is most against Brits.
The lack of functional media.
The feeling something big has to happen to restore order.

Then, commentary in support from right-wing populist academic and pollster Matt Goodwin:

London is turning into an unaffordable shit-hole with the “enjoyable” parts closed off to an elite minority. Everybody who lives there can see it even if liberal progressives will never accept it bc to do so would shatter their worldview. Charlotte is just saying out loud what we can all see.

Goodwin has since deleted the post, although he hasn’t explained why.

It’s possible to read too much significance into one off-the-cuff comment on social media in relation to someone’s overall worldview – indeed, I criticised Goodwin for doing just that in my previous post, although his “gotcha” was an obviously malicious misinterpretion of a joke whereas the above was published in earnest. Without overdoing it, it seems to me that his post is worth noting as representative of a trend within a political movement.

The profane expression “shithole” (fussily hyphenated by Goodwin) can reasonably be seen as signalling alignment with Trumpian rhetoric and attack lines; in May, Donald Trump Jnr expressed the view that the Democrats had “succeeded in their years long attempt to turn America into a third-world shithole”, and Trump himself was famously said to have described African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as “shitholes” in 2018. It seems to me that the collocation is so strong that the outdated term “third-world” can be inferred as the implied context whenever the word is used. The term “shithole” in relation to London is also a favourite usage of Laurence Fox, and it featured heavily during a tired and emotional phone-call to his fiancée that he filmed and put online after a car he was a passenger in crashed into a London bus on his way back from last month’s Tommy Robinson rally.

The phrase “third-world shithole” in turn evokes another anti-immigration mantra: “Import the Third World, become the Third World”. Reform MP Lee Anderson recently used a variant of this (“Import a third world culture then you get third world behaviour”) in relation to the disturbances in Leeds, after party leader Nigel Farage falsely attributed what happened to “the politics of the subcontinent” (background on Zelo Street).

Perhaps Goodwin deleted because he felt that he had strayed too far into “red meat” territory, both as regards the word and his endorsement of other elements of Gill’s Tweet. He also faced criticism; as expressed by Matthew Sweet:

If you don’t like “demographic changes” maybe you just don’t like cities. I’ve never heard a serious argument that uses the word “shithole”.

We might also ask what Goodwin means by an “elite minority”. Goodwin frequently bemoans the supposed influence of a “new elite” who hold harmful progressive views at odds with the common-sense instincts of ordinary people such as himself. However, “closed off” areas would refer to the gated communities of the super-rich – an actual elite who would much rather we focus our critical scrutiny elsewhere.

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Writing or saying something that imagines a real-world public figure coming to harm should not be done lightly – even when it serves some legitimate purpose, there is a risk of poor taste or, worse, that one’s words will be taken out of context by enemies looking for a “gotcha”. In such cases, a comment may falsely  be cited as evidence of malice, or even as a threat or as incitement to bring about such harm.

This is what happened when the commentator David Aaronovitch recently reacted to news about a recent US Supreme Court ruling that appears to give US presidents extraordinary latitude beyound the reach of the law. Aaronovitch’s response on X/Twitter was sarcastic and satirical, opining “If I was Biden I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security #SCOTUS”. A number of individuals pretended to believe that he meant this in earnest, and the story was picked up by some newspapers: Aaronvitch presents a programme for BBC Radio 4, and so the incident was useful grist to the anti-BBC mill.

The controversy died down, as these things do, but of course it flared up again when a couple of weeks later a young embittered nobody who in a non-election year would likely have massacred some schoolchilden or shoppers decided instead to grasp at posthumous significance by attempting to assassinate Trump.

David has written about his experience on Substack. The first round, he explains, was initially set off by Laurence Fox. After that,

the pugilistic owner of two pubs in Essex [Adam Brooks] – a regular contributor to GBNEWS – was on my case alongside his 300,000 followers. The disgraced former Sun employee and GBNEWS presenter, Dan Wootton was there too. A ludicrous Trump supporting survivor of Piers Morgan’s departure from NewsUK’s failing Talk TV station, Mike Graham, was fulminating. Several Reform party candidates weighed in… 

The story then got picked by Christian Calgie of the Daily Express, from where it jumped to the Daily Mail, the New York Post and even his former employer The Times. The headlines suggested that David had actually “called for” Biden to murder Trump, although The Times later modified their initial version. GB News meanwhile described him as “woke BBC presenter” – an adjective that served so explanatory purpose and would probably surprise a lot of people more likely to be described as “woke”.

Then, following the attempt on Trump’s life:

On the Laura Kuenssberg programme on BBC1 last Sunday Nigel Farage cited my tweet as an example of BBC-linked liberals wishing physical harm to their enemies… New online characters… such as a handsome but vacuous YouTuber called Mahyar Tousi were running whole discussions about it. Dim old luminaries like Henry Bolton.., renewed the demand for me to be fired… Katie Hopkins (remember her?) tweeted the head of Radio 4 wanting to know what he was going to do about me – an intervention. unlikely to damage my cause, I felt. Tommy Robinson added his pen’orth.

There was also, of course, a great deal of general abuse from lesser-known or anonymous individuals, some of it sinister. Even now, David’s Tweets on other subjects receive irrelevant and goading replies, sometimes featuring a screenshot of the long-deleted offending Tweet.

David doesn’t mention all of his higher-profile accusers and attackers, perhaps to keep his piece to managable length but also perhaps to avoid giving an impression of responding personally to certain individuals rather than offering public commentary of general public interest. However, there are two further instances that I think are worth noting.

First, Covid “lab-leak” exponent Matt Ridley waded in with a gratuitous goad after David reasonably suggested that being accused on inciting the attempted murder of a politician might be endangering.

Second, right-wing populist academic Matt Goodwin denied outright David’s explanation that the Tweet had been satirical, although he declined to be drawn on why he believes it was meant as a serious proposition. Last year, it may be recalled, Goodwin complained bitterly and Partridge-like that after debating David in London, David and the convener, Alan Rusbridger, had gone off to dinner without inviting him. After the shooting, Goodwin decided again to amplify a screenshot of the Tweet, as provided by the dubious Visegrád 24 outfit.

Goodwin also expanded on his theme with his own Substack post, in which he opined more generally about how the shooting had occurred because Trump has been the victim of unfair vilification. There’s currently no evidence that the shooter was inspired by any anti-Trump polemics, but either way this was ludicrous cant and opportunism. Sky News ran a piece pointing out Trump’s actual violent rhetoric, although it was forced to amend its headline after being accused of “victim blaming”. In the US, Rolling Stone showed a bit more gumption with the headline “Trump Allies Try to Bully Dems, Media to Shut Up About His Fascist Plans”, followed by the observation that “Republicans are seeking to capitalize on Trump’s assassination attempt — using it to demand everyone stop talking about his threats to democracy”.

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