Coffee House Shots
How should Starmer respond to the Southport riots?
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Alongside that, you get a £20 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffee House shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics podcast. I'm Meghan Macquarie and I'm joined by Katie Bowles and Paul Brand, UK editor of ITV News. Last night, violence broke out in Southport after a vigil was held to remember the victims of Monday's knife attack. Paul, you were reporting from the scene last night. Can you tell us more about that and also the atmosphere today? Yeah, sure. So we arrived shortly before the unrest began last night. There had been a scheduled to be a protest at 8 o'clock in the evening. And when we got down there, about quarter to eight, it was already clear there were large crowds, mostly of men gathering. They were coming into the town from lots of different routes, several different streets and residents certainly were saying to me they didn't think these people were necessarily all local. And it didn't take long at all, actually, before the unrest began to unfold. So they began throwing bricks and stones and fireworks at a mosque, which is right in the middle of the town, and when police confronted them, trying to protect the mosque, the police then became a target of them as well. So again, we're talking bricks being stripped from people's gardens, coping stones, taken off the top of people's walls to hurt the police, to hurt at the mosque. And then eventually the police van was set on fire. And we now know, I think it's around 50 officers now have been injured, confirmed to have been injured. And three police dogs as well, also injured. So just absolutely horrendous scenes. And when I went down there this morning again, the absolute devastation that they left behind was just heartbreaking for the local community because they were the ones left to clean it up this morning. They literally got their brushes out and they swept the roads clear. So as if they weren't dealing with enough this week in Southport, they've had this on top of it all. And Katie, there's also been some discussion about the role that social media has had to play here. How did things get to this point? Well, I think as ever social media, not everything on it is true. And also lots of things on it are not verified at the time. So it could be, for example, I think sometimes journalists will have a higher standard in terms of what they would write in an article compared to what someone would post online. And it feels in certain social media groups, some on X, some on other forums, there's been various claims made about who was responsible for the murder, what we expect to be charged with, of these three young girls, obviously more still in hospital, horrific crime. And unfortunately, we still don't quite know how those others who are injured are going to fare. But we know that there was a suspect. We know that they can't be named because they are too young to be named. But there are lots of reports at the moment about their family. Now, the suspect was born in the UK, born in Wales, but the reports suggest that their parents are emigrated to the UK. And I think this has quickly been seized on by some groups to take an angle on this. And then you've had figures such as Tommy Robinson, obviously on social media and others. I think you can say, you know, making comments which are encouraging others to get involved and incite things. And you had the mother of one of the children who lost their lives saying that she was not going to comment on anything else, but her only thing was, please stop the writing. The police have been doing a fantastic job despite, you know, the awful circumstances that a person is in. So please let it be. Now, you've also had Keir Starmer go into the scene. He was heckled on the way out. And you've had a vet Cooper then, the new home secretary. And the, I suppose the other thing that's happening in terms of the political response so far is you've now had Jess Phillips and Nigel Farage coming to blows online. Now, this is slightly different, but of course, Nigel Farage, you know, with the videos of the, you know, the youth last night and, you know, those who were there last night, causing the commotion after the vigil, saying, you know, we've lost control of the country and so forth. So you also, on top of it, have the reform versus labour and they being accused of not being in control of it. And Jess was saying, well, we're in FLU because you are an MP but you didn't speak in the debate on the chamber. So I think it's starting to spill into a bit of a political blame game. But of course, I think that one of the concerning things here is information being spread that may not actually correlate to anything that's happening. And then people acting on that. And of course, a mosque is what was being attacked in the rights last night. I think that's really interesting, Katie, the way you talk about how this issue is being politicised. And I think actually it's a major test for Kia Stama as prime minister, right? Because not only is it, of course, a crisis that he's having to deal with, the mass murder of children within weeks of being prime minister, but also it's going to take real political leadership, I think, to come through this massively tense and tumultuous time where clearly the far right want to seize on a particular narrative, which, as you said, is largely false online in order to further whatever aims and goals they might have. But we've also got a Labour government here that's already grappling with the issue of immigration, it's already dealing with quite a fraught social situation around some of these issues. How is Kia Stama going to unite people and inspire people more than anything, actually, to follow a different vision of Britain, the one that the far right and other right-wing parties as well are pushing at the moment. That is a real test, I think, for Kia Stama. And may well highlight, potentially, some of the flaws in Kia Stama as a politician, because we know he's not particularly charismatic as a leader. Some people like that, they say he's sensible and boring is okay, but a time when you need to pull people away from simplistic ideologies and simplistic explanations for things, I think you often do need someone, actually, with a bit of charisma who can inspire people. So how is Kia Stama going to respond and make sure the country doesn't continue to go down this path of division and violence? This is something where she's seen it was often criticised for, which was obviously a different example, but to Paul's point about being a leader who can unite and have that moment to calm tensions. When we had lots of pro-Palestine protests meeting with those from the Jewish community protesting about the hostages, lots of people said, "Where is Rishi Zunak? He seems to be out of action." Blatedly, I think it was quite a long time after he gave this big speech outside of Downing Street, talking about these populist, nationalistic forces and how they used to come together and centre and all these things. I don't think that speech was bad, but in the context, I was like, "Well, if you were going to get that speech, perhaps it should have been back when all this had started rather than it spiraled." This is obviously a very specific case in terms of the horrific depths that we have seen in terms of what was the Taylor Swift themed music class and the attack there and lots of details I have probably still to come out. But I think you saw March on Saturday, also in London that Tommy Robinson was talking about. I think that if you step away, I think probably from one incident, I think something that Kierstammer is going to have to contend with is, of course, what do you do about these certain groups taking to the streets? Is Kierstammer the type of person come? Because he keeps giving speeches about how he's going to stop populism, making this across Europe, and is not quite yet clear how he really plans to do that. Paul, what do you make of that? Where does Kierstammer go from here? But also, you're still in Southport. What does Southport do now? I think the vast majority of people in Southport, and this is genuine. This is not just me trying to come up with some kind of heartwarming narrative here, but the people of Southport really are pulling together. Given the violence we saw against the police last night, it was amazing, actually, all through today, every few minutes, I've seen regular residents here coming out of their homes to give police officers sandwiches, whether they're police officers, whether the sandwiches are not, sweets and drinks and all sorts of things. They were pouring out water into buckets for the police horses and all sorts. So I think the people of Southport just want to pull together and have time to grieve right now and move on. This is a lovely town. The people here are lovely people. This is not a place that is driven with divisions in its community, actually. It's a very well-to-do, well-heeled, leafy town on a beautiful seaside coast, and I think people here are pretty shocked by what descended on their town last night, and they don't want to be a part of that, and as I say, they're pretty hacked off, actually, that they've been the ones left clearing up today after they trashed the town center. So I think that's where Southport wants to go. There are going to be other protests we anticipate on Saturday, so it may be that people continue to use this town as a means of making a broader point, whatever point that might be. And I think you asked where does Tia Starma go from here? I think, as Katie said, she's absolutely right, in my view, that this is a test of whether he can take on populism. I mean, we've got to be careful here that there's a big difference between the ETL. Of course, there is mainstream, if you like, populism in politics, and there are legitimate debates, absolutely, to be had around illegal migration and all of those sorts of things, and these things all get muddled up together, and it's hard sometimes to separate them out and be clear about those dividing lines. But Kia Starma, generally speaking, has said that he wants to take on that sort of right-wing sentiment in the country that may be heading in a populist direction, and he's going to have to work out whether he faces that head-on in a way that Rishi Sunnak actually didn't want to. He didn't face down, perform UK today during the general election until right at the very end. Is Kia Starma going to come out of the blocks a lot harder and say, I don't want this to be the direction of the country and stand by the principles that we know that he adheres to? Yeah, and I think just finally, I think Kia Starma is going to have to have the balance of one of the things we're seeing in lots of these online things is the sense that journalists are lying, and the MSM doesn't say things, and therefore, of course, the media wouldn't report the reality about X, and then that stirs up discontent. I think similarly, if politicians don't think they're talking about some of the themes that are just floating around in these online movements when it comes to immigration, integration, and so forth, and if you look as though you're perhaps too much brushing over it, there's also a problematic thing, so it's obviously one of the more chewy and complicated things they will have to come up with, but it's clearly going to be a theme over the next couple of years. It's a real challenge as well for not just politicians in the media, but also the police, and I've noticed a trend in recent months and years, actually, where the police don't come out quickly enough to put enough information in the public domain, these other theories develop online. We saw it a week or so ago with what happened at Manchester Airport, where a police officer kicked somebody in the face on the ground, and this is a live investigation now, and Manchester Greater Manchester Police didn't come out and give us any broader context, really, particularly to what had happened with that. There was a little bit of narrative that was released, but it took until last weekend when a bigger clip was released that showed what the lead-up was to that incident. When we got a much broader picture of what was happening and people started to see maybe there was a little bit more context to that incident, it wasn't just necessarily cut and dry, a case of his police brutality with no explanation about how it had come about, and similarly with this incident, obviously a completely different scenario, but the same theme running through it, with the problem where the police have put a certain amount of information to the public domain, it's made harder by the fact that the suspect is under 18, therefore we can't name him for legal reasons, but there's a vacuum that's left, and that is filled online in this day and age, and it's just unrealistic, I think, for any organisation to say, let's hold back, that's not release information, it's better to get it right than to, I don't know, put the wrong thing out there, because the wrong thing is going to get out there, someone else is going to fill that vacuum, and once that starts, you can't put it back in the box. Thank you Katie, thank you Paul, and thank you for listening. [Music] (gentle music)