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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