Bird's Eye View

By James Cardinal

The riots that have taken place in the United Kingdom in recent days should provide a dire warning about what happens when online misinformation and prejudice mix. First, some backstory. In late July a 17-year-old man went on a stabbing spree in a small English seaside town, Southport. He killed three young girls and wounded eight others, all of whom were attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. It was a horrible crime. The young man who perpetrated this heinous crime was from a neighboring town and was born in Wales.

Almost instantly, there was misinformation online that claimed that the perpetrator was a foreigner, an asylum-seeker from Syria to be more specific. That misinformation was soon joined by calls for right-wing thugs to take up arms and hit the streets. The results were devastating. Hotels hosting asylum seekers had their windows smashed and were started on fire, cars were also set on fire, immigrant-owned businesses and mosques were vandalized, and the right-wing rioters clashed with police. The lawlessness spread to at least a dozen towns. Newly elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer mobilized 6,000 special duty officers to help establish order.

Make no mistake about it, the crime committed by the 17-year-old Welshman is horrific. But these riots are not about the tragedy in Southport. These riots are about xenophobia and the demonizing of immigrants and those who are deemed “the other” in society. A combination of housing policy failure, inflammatory rhetoric, and online misinformation have come together here to create a perfect storm for these riots. Unfortunately, we here in the United States share many of the factors that led to these riots.

Post-pandemic inflation hit the British economy even harder than it hit ours, and the lack of affordable housing in the U.K. has created animosity towards immigrants. America is in the middle of our own housing affordability crisis. On my recent visit to the area, I was impressed to see nearby communities addressing this crisis, specifically Abbotsford, Curtiss, and Stanley. It comes as no surprise that in these communities the new housing and immigration go hand-in-hand. More communities should look toward investing in creating affordable housing as a way to expand their economies and lessen existing tensions.

Another similarity between the U.K. and the U.S. is the rhetoric that some of our politicians use to talk about immigrants. Rather than fixing broken immigration systems, many of our leaders choose to create division and sow hatred. You don’t have to look any further than many of the political ads that have been playing on our televisions to see the kind of rhetoric that I’m referencing here. Immigration, like any policy, should certainly be subject to open debate. But the problem with much of our current debate on immigration is that it’s based on emotions, not evidence because politicians use rhetoric that plays to our worst tendencies and our base fears. We, as Americans, should understand that we have been blessed with economic opportunity and political stability (mostly). We have an obligation to our fellow humans to welcome those who are fleeing political persecution and violence. We also need to figure out how to best welcome those who are seeking a better life, like our ancestors were when they came here. The reality is that we currently don’t have a workforce that’s expanding quickly enough to keep up with our economy, immigration is a solution, not a problem. But when there’s not enough affordable housing, it can feel like an economic threat at the moment and the rhetoric of some of our politicians only exacerbates those feelings.

The third factor in the riots that we share with the United Kingdom is the current lack of policing on social media. Elon Musk has become a hero of some because he bought Twitter (now X) and has made it a safe haven for racist and inflammatory speech. Musk himself often engages in inflammatory speech and has done so in reference to the U.K. riots, comparing the United Kingdom to the Soviet Union. Investing in affordable housing and refraining from hateful and divisive speech are relatively easy (if we have the will to do so), but the free speech issues on social media are tougher, especially in the United States with the First Amendment’s broad protections. It falls on us to be better consumers of media and careful stewards of our own profiles, making sure that we aren’t responsible for spreading misinformation and hate.

There are lessons to be learned from the recent U.K. riots, and we have an opportunity to prove that we’ve learned those lessons when we show up to vote in November. Will we vote for politicians who engage in fearmongering and divisiveness, or those who want to invest in our communities and expand our economy?