As the Olympic flame has been burning bright in Paris, the fires of far-right thuggery have been raging across the English Channel . It has been an horrific spectacle, stomach-churning in its ugliness. Hotels housing asylum seekers have been targeted and torched.
Mosques have come under assault. People of colour have been encircled and set upon by racist mobs. There have been Nazi salutes in the streets and chants of “Stop the boats”, a populist slogan, simplifying the most complex of problems, which originated in Australia.
Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: This firestorm of anti-immigrant violence has been whipped up by an explosion of anti-immigrant misinformation. After the killings in Southport last week of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club, the 17-year-old alleged to have carried out the attack was misidentified as a Muslim asylum seeker who recently entered Britain by boat. Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, who has now been charged with the murders, was born in Cardiff, has lived all of his life in Britain and has no known links with Islam.
His parents, who came to the UK from Rwanda, evidently raised him as a Christian. Rightly, the vileness of far-right provocateurs, such as Andrew Tate, who propagated the false information, has been identified and admonished. So, too, the recklessness of Elon Musk, whose post on X stating that “civil war is inevitable” alongside footage of rioting in Liverpool has sparked a war of words with the new British Prim.