Liverpool: If there is "two-tier" policing, the hard right is to blame.
Why the police can't win.
Last night, when the push notification about Liverpool appeared on your phone- what was your reaction? Horror, worry, disbelief, for sure; but I’d bet anything that there was something else, a very particular political angst in the pit of your stomach- at the very least there was for me. A sharp intake of breath accompanied by an anxiety: if this is terrorism, if it’s been committed by a certain type of terrorist (and even if it wasn’t)- what comes next? Barely a year from the Southport riots, are we heading there again?
As it is, Merseyside Police are not treating the incident as terrorism and say that it isolated. On Tuesday afternoon, they arrested the suspect with attempted murder, dangerous driving and driving while unfit through drugs. In nothing short of a minor miracle, despite the substantial numbers of injuries (two of which being serious), at the time of writing there have been no fatalities.
This should be a relief for the whole country. It did not feel like a relief for a substantial cohort of the online radical right, many of whom, within minutes of the news breaking appeared to be salivating at the prospect of an islamist style terrorist attack. Others made prophetic comments on something about which at the time no-one knew anything: one account with a substantial following posted a (now deleted) tweet saying: "This is horrendous. Everyone knows what's gone on. When will it stop [prayer emoji].” Another well-known provocateur sent a tweet which was viewed over one million times: “What is coming next is inevitable.”
The context of this is obvious: we are not yet a year on from the appalling events in Southport and the violence which followed. That violence was largely based on misinformation and lies and a campaign of mendacity which polluted social media. Those untruths were disseminated by high-profile political actors and far-right figures alike. None of these people have accepted any responsibility for the terrors which unfolded.
It is in this context that Merseyside Police took the virtually unprecedented step of identifying the ethnicity of the suspect within hours of the incident taking place- a 53 year old white British man, local to the Liverpool area. This highly unusual act takes place in the wake of a report by the police inspectorate which said that police forces have not kept up with the risks posed to the public by social media. The report found no conclusive evidence the disorder was co-ordinated by extremist groups but said it was mostly incited by "disaffected individuals, influencers or groups" online. They said that although the causes were "complex", the "overwhelming speed and volume of online content further fuelled its spread.” His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Andy Cooke called for police chiefs to be "braver" in countering disinformation and putting facts into the public domain.
In releasing the information about the suspect so quickly, Merseyside Police appear to have listened to Sir Andy’s recommendations. In so doing, they proved a truism of much of modern policing: that they face an endless string of no-win situations. No sooner had they done so but many of the same grifters who seemed desperate for a yet more catastrophic explanation moved instantly to criticism of the police: the familiar and often vacuous cry of “two-tier” policing went up. Why, they bloviated, did the police state the ethnicity so quickly, when they did not do so in Southport- when the suspect was not white?
If they weren’t so sinister one would be tempted to conclude that they’re just plain stupid (not that those two things mutually exclusive.) These people are arsonists who blame the firefighter for getting their house wet. The police did it because of them: precisely because they knew what the agenda of these people would be. They knew they had to act quickly lest millions of social media feeds be filled with innuendo, misinformation and untruths which can lead to mosques, hotels and homes being set alight. They knew that as a result of the consistent toxin which many of these people pump into the bloodstream of British politics, Britain in 2025 is just one viral, erroneous tweet away from race riots. These grifters, these attention merchants, these relevance chasers, pollute the body politic every day with their lies and half-truths for their own financial gain - and then blame everybody else for the disaster they’ve created.
Do not mistake me: it is both possible to think the police did the right thing in acting swiftly and regret that they had to do it. I can well understand the angst ethnic minorities might feel in the tacit message that this sends: that if the perpetrator is white, everyone can stand down. That is of course not what the police intend to say, and yet, in a sense, it is- and speaks to the highly charged times in which we live. It is also not to say or underplay the serious problem that Islamist terrorism poses to Britain, nor the legitimate worries many feel about who might be arriving in the country irregularly, but it is to say that the corrosive attitude the far-right has to Muslims and Islam both outrageously overstates Islamism’s potency within mainstream British Muslim thought and ironically this only makes that problem worse, where it does exist.
There have always been race riots, but rarely have there been so many non-elected political actors who (i) seek to racialise politics (ii) and are no longer, by dint of technology, fringe figures.1 Indeed, for the far-right, though the space is replete with grift, there is a clear ideological need to suggest that any incident like this must inevitably be Islamist. Their entire world view rests on the idea that Islam is a dangerous, radical religion and its adherents are a fifth column. They seek to prosecute the idea that there is a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and Western civilisation, and that Britain therefore is teetering on the edge of an epochal internal clash. Layer onto that Nazi-style conspiracies about the Great Replacement Theory and you can understand not just their salivation but expectation that any event like this will be, indeed must be an attack. For some of them it is almost providential.
Cooke is right in his report, the police and politicians have barely begun to grapple with this new media environment. In many ways it is chilling that in 2025 police felt compelled to make this clarification, but it was the right thing to do, the first proper reckoning with recent events. Nonetheless, it will set a precedent in future on which the grifters will attack and capitalise: but then, I suspect the police know, they always will. A no-win situation, indeed.
Indeed, the attempt to racialise, for political purposes is not confined to the right: many left-wing accounts yesterday claimed the police only cite terrorism when brown faces are involved. This is absurd: there is a definition of terrorism and the police clearly believe that yesterday was not it.
You capture my reaction exactly. But what concerns me most is the all-pervasive sense of hate, which is being both generated and stoked by those who want to create a weapon and point it at a target. Hate does not make for a healthy society.
Hi Lewis, I was on water street at the time and thought the same thing. People on the street even before any push notifications were out, the police formed a blockage and pushing the crowds back to create a cordon, people were shoving the police accusing them of protecting the perpetrator, ‘we know who’s done it, we all know, stop protecting him’, it was almost scarier with the aftermath and confrontation with the police, than the thought of the incident overall.