Matt Taibbi makes some critically important comments with respect to the fact Prime Minister Keir Starmer dove right in to allegedly create new Orwellian rules, some relating to pre-crime, as a result of the riots that kicked-off in Southport following the July 29th stabbing deaths of three young girls who have been named as six-year-old Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar. The girls had been attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event at a yoga studio.
Given many past and current events in the UK along with the current direction of travel, one must also have to wonder whether these allegedly new rules were ready and waiting in the wings for an horrific event like the murder of the three young girls to occur in order to provide a perfect opportunity to implement them.
Matt Taibbi has prepared an audio reading of his article which I have reposted in full below if you prefer to listen.
After nationalist riots in Southport, Britain's new Prime Minister announces plans for a "coordinated effort" to arrest wrongdoers "before they can even board a train"
Early Monday morning [July 29th] in Southport, England, three young girls were killed and eight more were injured in a knife attack at a “Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event.” Rumors circulated that the minor attacker was foreign, triggering anti-Muslim riots Tuesday evening that left 50 police officers injured, with officials blaming “thugs” who traveled from out of town “for their political purposes.”
This succession of awful events led Britain’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to deliver a press conference yesterday that was shocking even by current neo-Orwellian standards. Calling the riots an “assault on the rule of law,” he laid out as aggressive a vision of pre-crime enforcement as we’ve heard from a prominent Western politician. Starmer wrote a textbook on human rights law earlier in his career, but came out yesterday sounding like a starched cross of Dick Cheney and Justin Trudeau, pledging to use “shared intelligence” and “facial recognition technology” to capture wrongdoers “before they even board a train”:
These thugs are mobile, they move from community to community, and we must have a policing response that can do the same shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology and preventative action: criminal behavior orders to restrict their movements before they can even board a train, in just the same way that we do with football hooligans…
Start with the obvious: of course there’s no excusing hurling bricks at a mosque, setting cars on fire, brawling with cops, or vandalizing stores. The police and the public have a clear interest in stopping this sort of behavior, and England doesn’t exactly have a shortage of it. “I’m going to say this to you on and off the record: the British hooligan is particularly stupid,” is how Racket’s own UK-bred attorney Rob Garson put it, noting an instance in which a pediatrician’s home was attacked by rioters who reportedly didn’t know the difference between a pedophile and a pediatrician. While the U.K. has a long way to go before approaching American levels of violence (we have 18 times England’s murder rate), rising crime has led to discontent across the political spectrum, and inspired reforms that include some of the injunctive tools Starmer referenced in his speech.
Nonetheless, Starmer’s speech was striking. For one thing, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act went into force yesterday. The law prohibits “untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage” to “create or expand facial recognition databases.” The new Prime Minister pledging “wider deployment of facial recognition technology” on the same day Britain submitted to a law saying that exact practice “adds to the feeling of mass surveillance and can lead to gross violations of fundamental rights” is a bold move.
“Was Starmer extremely badly briefed on what he signed Britain up to today, or doesn’t he care?” asked Silkie Carlo of Big Brother Watch. “Alarming in either case.”
In a broader sense, Starmer’s “before they even board a train” address is worrisome as it comes in the context of a growing international movement to combine expanded definitions of incitement with “preventive” enforcement. Earlier this year, this site covered Canada’s still-pendingOnline Harms Act, which would create means for detaining people for crimes they haven’t committed yet. Starmer’s speech called for combining “shared intelligence” with existing tools like the above-mentioned Criminal Behavior Order (known as Crimbos, which replaced the Anti-Social Behavior Order or Asbo in 2012) and laws restricting the movement of soccer hooligans. The ASBO/Crimbo regime of “prevention injunctions,” ostensibly meant to be used to curb youth violence, was once criticized for being used against adults for everything from excessively loud sex to “dogging” (definition here) to singing “Wonderwall” and “Faith” too often for residents of a Birmingham housing complex. Now, apparently, Starmer wants to expand the concept in a more political direction.
“I would personally like to see more use of those orders in the same way that they’re used in football hooligan cases,” said Starmer, adding he’d like to “stop people traveling, identify and prevent their patterns of behavior.” This came in response to a question from Sky News reporter John Craig about whether Starmer would consider “banning some of these far right groups”:
The appalling nature of the knife attack and the Tuesday riots exposed raw feelings, and it’s in these times that politicians tend to propose (and the public often calls for) the most extreme measures. The troubling angle to the Southport story is how heavily authorities and the media emphasized “disinformation” as the problem. Elon Musk, the nationalist/far-right activist Tommy Robinson, and online provocateur Andrew Tate were mandatory elements in most writeups, as rumors that U.K.-born suspect Axel Rudakubana is foreign and/or a Muslim were said to have driven the protests.
On X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, users shared false information about the attacker…
Starmer’s warning to “large social media companies and those who run them” that “violent disorder clearly whipped up online… is also a crime” seemed like thinly veiled shots at Musk. When Robinson posted the Starmer clip, Musk replied with a pair of exclamation marks:
The U.K., which doesn’t have anything like the First Amendment tradition in the United States, already has aggressive laws against offensive words. Garson points to section 5 of the Public Order Act, which bars utterance of words which cause “harassment, alarm or distress.” A septuagenarian preacher named John Sherwood was arrested a few years ago under the act for apparent overzealous preaching of the “God created mankind in his image, male and female he created” portion of Genesis.
Starmer’s warning to social media companies that “inciting violence online is a criminal offense” and “not a matter of free speech” therefore needs clarification. Most of the complaints were not about calls for violence exactly, but apparent misinformation like Tate’s complaint about an “undocumented migrant” who “arrived on a boat.” Will England lead the way in trying to make posts like this criminal?
The episode brings to mind anti-disinformation laws implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic and the multiple January 6th cases (including the indictment of Donald Trump) that put “false claims” at the center of criminal charges. From China to Indonesia to Russia to the U.S, Germany, France, and now the U.K, authorities seem keener by the day to criminalize “disinformation,” which of course would put them in the position of determining truth and untruth. Britain has deployed numerous initiatives in this direction, including a “Rapid Response Unit” set up to combat misinformation that was shut down in 2022.
That official truth would put the press out of business didn’t seem to bother reporters at the Starmer press conference. English journalists demanded to know if Starmer planned to “clamp down on the far right groups,” how he would “stop the far right from hijacking narratives,” and if he planned to “haul in the social media companies” and “restart the rapid rebuttal unit.” One asked Starmer if he was “happy” with a judge’s decision to release the knife suspect’s name (the judge said he did it to preventthe spread of more rumors). As was the case in the U.S. during the early War on Terror years, the press increasingly seems less interested in getting information than egging politicians on, asking why they haven’t cracked down harder and faster, cut more corners, assumed more authority.
Back then, it was unpopular to wonder about the rights of Muslims. Now the reverse is true. Is that better, or just a different version of the same thing? Britain keeps a register of soccer hooligans under various travel bans. Why not have similar lists for online extremists? It sounds like minds are already moving in that direction inside the new British government.
Ironic, isn't it, that the man responsible for organising two peaceful London rallies in a bid to unite his fellow citizens of all colours, ages, religions and walks of life behind a common set of shared British values is being scapegoated for the sudden upsurge of violence now blighting the nation.
One popular newspaper has disgraced its profession - and possibly even flouted the law - by deliberately leaking the location of the overseas resort where former leader of the decade-long-defunct English Defence League, Tommy Robinson is (sorry, was) enjoying a family holiday, thereby putting their lives in obvious danger.
Upon his return, Mr Robinson is due to face a (contested) contempt charge, for which he says he has yet to receive an official summons, and whatever other lawfare a rotten-to-the-core Establishment can dream up as an excuse to lock up their much-reviled nemisis and (in their wettest dreams) throw away the key.
Prior to his departure from the UK, the much-maligned “far right, former EDL leader” was subjected to a six-hour grilling by police on the unsubstantiated grounds that he may have breached terrorism legislation. Clearly, the “lout from Luton” has recently been gaining too much critical mass for the liking of the cack handed Westminster cabal whose irresponsible immigration policy has become one of his main targets.
Gallingly, for the self-serving leaders of the Parliamentary dog and pony show, Mr Robinson appears to have his finger firmly on the pulse of an increasingly disenfranchised and discontented working class (as opposed to a jackboot on their necks). Moreover, on the back of the success of his two remarkably well-organised and massively supported pro-British rallies, he threatens to add a political dimension to his populist appeal as a man of the people unafraid to speak truth to power.
The Establishment clearly cannot allow this pilgrim's threatening progress to continue.
No surprise, then, that hard on the heels of Government proposal to extradite anyone deemed to have incited the rioting elements, the BBC (who else!) has announced the issue of a warrant for Mr Robinson’s arrest. Talk about guilt by association!
This leaves the bankrupted, deplatformed and divorced 41-year-old father of three with a devil-and-deep-blue-sea choice. He can, and has said he will, return to the UK and pray that the music he must eventually face does not turn out to be a funeral march (he has survived several previous attacks, including one while incarcerated in a jail which just happened to have the largest Muslim population of any in the UK.
Alternatively, he can resign himself to a future as a fugitive from the beloved homeland whose culture he has fought all his adult life to defend, and the wracking prospect of indefinite separation from the family he so clearly adores.
Ironic, isn't it, that the man responsible for organising two peaceful London rallies in a bid to unite his fellow citizens of all colours, ages, religions and walks of life behind a common set of shared British values is being scapegoated for the sudden upsurge of violence now blighting the nation.
One popular newspaper has disgraced its profession - and possibly even flouted the law - by deliberately leaking the location of the overseas resort where former leader of the decade-long-defunct English Defence League, Tommy Robinson is (sorry, was) enjoying a family holiday, thereby putting their lives in obvious danger.
Upon his return, Mr Robinson is due to face a (contested) contempt charge, for which he says he has yet to receive an official summons, and whatever other lawfare a rotten-to-the-core Establishment can dream up as an excuse to lock up their much-reviled nemisis and (in their wettest dreams) throw away the key.
Prior to his departure from the UK, the much-maligned “far right, former EDL leader” was subjected to a six-hour grilling by police on the unsubstantiated grounds that he may have breached terrorism legislation. Clearly, the “lout from Luton” has recently been gaining too much critical mass for the liking of the cack handed Westminster cabal whose irresponsible immigration policy has become one of his main targets.
Gallingly, for the self-serving leaders of the Parliamentary dog and pony show, Mr Robinson appears to have his finger firmly on the pulse of an increasingly disenfranchised and discontented working class (as opposed to a jackboot on their necks). Moreover, on the back of the success of his two remarkably well-organised and massively supported pro-British rallies, he threatens to add a political dimension to his populist appeal as a man of the people unafraid to speak truth to power.
The Establishment clearly cannot allow this pilgrim's threatening progress to continue.
No surprise, then, that hard on the heels of Government proposal to extradite anyone deemed to have incited the rioting elements, the BBC (who else!) has announced the issue of a warrant for Mr Robinson’s arrest. Talk about guilt by association!
This leaves the bankrupted, deplatformed and divorced 41-year-old father of three with a devil-and-deep-blue-sea choice. He can, and has said he will, return to the UK and pray that the music he must eventually face does not turn out to be a funeral march (he has survived several previous attacks, including one while incarcerated in a jail which just happened to have the largest Muslim population of any in the UK.
Alternatively, he can resign himself to a future as a fugitive from the beloved homeland whose culture he has fought all his adult life to defend, and the wracking prospect of indefinite separation from the family he so clearly adores.
And you thought Wat Tyler had it tough!