This article appears in the Summer issue of Searchlight

On Monday 29 July, a teenage boy armed with a knife entered a Taylor Swift-themed holiday dance class in Southport and attacked children and adults. Three young girls were killed, others seriously wounded. It was a terrible crime and a dreadful tragedy. A time for grief and mourning.

But some had other ideas. Almost at once far-right agitators and “influencers” went into online overdrive claiming that the attacker was a Muslim and a migrant who had arrived in the country on a boat last year. Some claimed he was Somali, others published an Arabic-sounding name they claimed was his.

All of this was false.

It triggered an outpouring of anti-Muslim hatred and violence that did not abate even when it was revealed that the accused was a 17-year-old, born and bred in Cardiff, whose parents had come to Britain from Rwanda. In other words, he was just as British as Rishi Sunak or Kemi Badenoch. Or Bukayo Saka. And he was far more likely to be Christian than Muslim. That meant nothing to the Islamophobes. The anti-Muslim campaign of hatred that they had dreamed of for years was unleashed and was not to be quelled easily.

The day after the killings, Southport itself was the scene of serious disorder, as racists launched an attack on a local mosque. Police who tried to hold a line defending the building were subjected to a brutal, sustained assault with bricks, masonry, wheelie bins, traffic cones and fireworks from around 1,000 racist thugs. Dozens of officers were injured. From then on, similar outbreaks of violence continued unabated for over a week: in Westminster first, and then the following weekend and subsequent days, in towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland.

So who was behind it?

Fascist groups including Patriotic Alternative (PA) and Britain First, who have done their damnedest to incite such angry racism for years, were secretly whooping with delight at what was taking place. But let’s not make the mistake of believing that they actively organised it.

Some members of these groups were spotted at particular incidents (no one wears a Free Sam Melia T-shirt at random!), but by and large they were just piggybacking events that were perhaps more football-hooligan flash mob in nature.

These parties (and especially their leaders) are very happy to stand back and let events take their course, without suffering any legal repercussions themselves, and without seeing their small memberships depleted by long prison sentences. And all the time, of course, wringing their hands and saying: “We warned you this would happen…”

PA Deputy Leader Laura Towler, for instance, the wife of race-hate jailbird Sam Melia, went online to specifically deny the group had organised anything.

For Britain First’s Paul Golding it was the predictable script: “I don’t condone violence, but can you blame them in Southport for attacking the police…?”

The British Democrats also sought to distance themselves from the violence: “While protesting and demonstrating are within our rights, we must not allow our anger or outside influence to turn the protest into a riot.”

But don’t be misled. This arse-covering blather was purely for public consumption. They may not have been orchestrating things, but privately they were delighted at developments.

And even out on the further reaches of the right, there was – predictably – nothing like unanimity.

Dover fascist Steve Laws, who was arrested at the London thugfest on the Wednesday, was disappointed “to see our own disavow the people willing to do what was necessary” (translation: attacking the Southport Islamic Society Mosque and battering the police).

But Peter Rushton, Deputy Editor of the neo-nazi umbrella outfit Heritage and Destiny, asked: “And just how does a bunch of rioters attacking a mosque (in response to a crime committed by someone with no apparent connection whatever to Islam), or burning a police car, take us any closer to getting our country back? Wasn’t last night a step backwards?”

Alek Yerbury, leader of the emergent National Rebirth Party, denounced the Southport rioters as “feral”, writing the morning after: “By all accounts, there is significant collateral damage to the local population, with gardens destroyed, property smashed and even a shop looted.

“Therefore my recommendation to nationalists in Merseyside is to go to the street in question and offer assistance to the predominantly white British population there in remedying that collateral damage.”

If you want to apportion blame for the rioting, then most of the opprobrium must fall squarely on the sun lounger-surfing Tommy Robinson, his sidekick Danny Tommo and their supposedly more “respectable” enablers such as Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins and UKIP ersatz leader Nick Tenconi.

Those last three were at “The Fugitive’s” Trafalgar Square rally two days before the Southport killings, giving Robinson’s hate-filled activities their shabby seals of approval. Even before that, they had been lionising him on social media. They bear a heavy responsibility.

When the Southport murders were reported, they lost no time joining in peddling the lie-filled narrative doing the far-right rounds, that the alleged killer was a Muslim and an illegal migrant.

L to R: Katie Hopkins, Laurence Fox, Nick Tenconi

“Hatie” Katie Hopkins: “His name is Ali al Alketi… The police are… covering up for illegals.”

Laurence “Looza” Fox: “Enough of this. We need to remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely.”

Nick Tenconi alleged that the Southport killer was acting “under orders”.

And then there was Nigel Farage.

On the Wednesday, this irredeemable wretch of a man went on TV to ask if the public was being deceived about the motive for the Southport attack. Like other attacks, he said, the police have said it was “non-terror related”. Why, he asked, were we always told that such attacks were “non-terror related”.

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

Let’s bounce that back and ask: “Is Nigel Farage a child molester? We don’t know the answer to that, but it is a fair and legitimate question…”

Neither of those is, in fact, even remotely a “fair and legitimate question” because, of course, there is not the faintest shred of evidence to support either proposition. Both are false. It is just an utterly dishonest way of floating a scurrilous suggestion in the hope that it will gain some traction.

Days later, interviewed by Tom Swarbrick on LBC, Farage doubled down, claiming that he was simply echoing questions being raised by prominent people online, and that the identity of the attacker should have been made known immediately, as it was, for instance, in the case of the London Bridge attackers in 2017.

What he omitted to mention was that the London Bridge attackers were all shot dead at the scene and would never face trial. The Southport attacker was in custody and was, in any case, a young person whose anonymity at this stage was protected by law. But then, Farage was never the sort of person to let the facts discourage him from outright deceit. He ploughed on presenting this as concealment by… well, whoever.

And when challenged about the “prominent” people who were the sources for these claims, he came up with just one name: Andrew Tate, the misogynist “influencer” currently facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania. It was not until August 5 that Farage issued a statement deploring the violence. And, even then, he seemed more concerned about the fact some people were calling these dreadful events “the Farage riots”.

In the background, of course, is the poisonous influence of ‘respectable’ politicians like Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, and other leading conservatives who have relentlessly cranked up fear and hatred towards migrants and asylum seekers for their own malign ends. The widespread acceptance of the message peddled by the likes of Farage, Hopkins and Fox has been reliant on the medium of 14 years of bigoted government.

Although Braverman looks now to be ploughing a different furrow, the noises coming from several of the candidates for the Conservative Party leadership prompt a feeling of weary resignation that we are in for more of the same from the Tories.

But the men who bear more responsibility than most are Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and his mate and right-hand man, Danny Tommo. Tommo (real name Daniel Thomas) is a criminal lowlife with a conviction for attempted kidnap at knifepoint. He has become, more than ever, Robinson’s UK representative since Robinson fled the country the day before Southport.

Yaxley-Lennon (left) and Danny Tommo (Daniel Thomas)

It was Tommo who broadcast the first call to riot online on the Monday night. It was directed to his 68,000 YouTube followers and thousands more on Twitter, many of them their mates in various hooligan gangs and football firms round the country – the dregs of the now disbanded English Defence League – and was the rallying call to which the racist hooligans and far-right thugs responded.

Just recall what he said, filmed fuming in his car:

“Every city has to go up.

“Get prepared. Be ready. We have to.

“It has to go off in different cities.

“We have to show them we’ve had enough.

“I’m ready to go. I know that a lot of you are. I’m speaking to other people at the moment.

“We’re ready to go. We are, literally, ready to go.

“Just get ready.”

It goes without saying, though, that when it did “go off” in Southport, Tommo was nowhere to be seen.

He it was who also helped launch the call for another demonstration in London on Wednesday night, as did Robinson from afar. This, too, ended in violence and mayhem, but Tommo – predictably – was not among the 100 or so arrested. According to witnesses, at the first sign of trouble he legged it. The following weekend towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland were subjected to sometimes terrifying outbreaks of racist‑inspired violence. Property was destroyed, police officers were battered and injured, and communities, especially minority communities, were left traumatised and terrified.

And it wasn’t just mosques that were targeted: in Liverpool, a library and community hub were destroyed. In Sunderland, the offices of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau were burnt out. The true face of fascism was being revealed: racist yes, but also the deadly enemy of ordinary, decent, working people.

A few days later, Tommo’s video was taken down from YouTube (“by the uploader”), but not before Searchlight – and, we imagine, many others – had recorded it for posterity and for possible consideration by a jury. Tommo has tried to say that any suggestion he tried to incite riots is absurd and that he’d urged demonstrators to be calm and peaceful.

The simple question is: Which bit of “Every city must go up” is a plea for calm?

We trust the police will not delay too long before knocking on his door and inviting him to help them with their inquiries.

Robinson also started to panic. Two days before the Southport killings he had headlined an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rally of some 15,000‑20,000 people in London, the second such rally in two months. He was then due to appear in court in London on the Monday morning to answer a charge of contempt of court for which he faced a likely jail sentence.

On the Sunday, however, in a farcical series of events, he was first arrested at the Eurotunnel in Kent while trying to leave the country and charged with an offence under the Terrorism Act. Then, unaccountably released on unconditional bail, he promptly headed to St Pancras Station and jumped on a Eurostar train to Europe. Tracked down to a luxury holiday complex in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, he proceeded to post a series of increasingly eye-popping and desperate rants online, whining: “They’re coming to get me…They want to lock me up”, and then directly threatening the families of journalists who dared to investigate him.

The man of many aliases – but whose real middle name is “Gutless” – also tried distancing himself from his many incendiary online rants about Muslims and Islam, and from the criminal acts of those who attacked police officers whilst chanting his name. “We will not win our country back by throwing rocks. I fully understand your anger & I stand with the heartbroken & devastated community in Southport…”

A community whose heartbreak he and his vile chums had added to immeasurably.

Then, having been caught off-guard by the speed with which events had unfolded after Southport (and that is not intended as a criticism), the anti-racist movement stirred itself. Local racist rallies mobilised anonymously online were met on the weekend after the Southport attack with decent, if patchy, responses from local anti-racists.

Over the next few days, the movement mustered the most impressive response to racism and fascism that this country has seen since the days of the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s and 1980s.

When an anonymous post appeared that first weekend with a thinly veiled call for an attack on an Islamic centre in Belfast, Searchlight called for anti-fascists to turn out to physically protect the building. When a hit list of solicitors offices and immigration advice agencies was posted a few days later, calling for them to be attacked on August 7, that is exactly what the movement did. Anti-racists in their thousands turned out all over the country to surround and protect those targeted offices, in a massive, inspiring gesture of solidarity and support to the communities – and those helping them – who had come under such sustained attack over the previous ten days.

Huge crowds of decent folk turned out in their home towns and cities, seizing back the racists’ slogan and themselves saying “Enough is Enough”. Even the police were moved to comment that this had a major effect in turning back the racist tide. Special credit must go to Stand Up To Racism for pulling out all the stops and achieving such a magnificent, historic response.

The rapid processing of racist rioters through the justice system also had a salutary effect: sentencing was brought forward for guilty pleas and on several occasions televised live from court. Reports of grown men – oh, so brave a few days earlier, out in a mob throwing bricks or attacking passers-by – crying in the dock as they were sent down for two or three years will hopefully have the deterrent effect that was needed and intended.

For the moment, the tide has been turned. But the pressure against the fascists and their followers must be kept up in the following days, weeks and months. They have been driven back and marginalised, but they have certainly not gone away. And nor will we.

¡No pasaran!