The Guardian view on far-right violence: digital radicalisation is threatening democracy | Editorial

Masked men who drive terrorised families out of their homes cannot be called protesters, since the word implies legitimate grievance. The outbreak of racist violence in Northern Ireland this week is connected to the politics of migration, but not in the way that the mob and those who incited it claim.

The ostensible trigger was a brutal assault, partially captured on video. A man of Sudanese origin has been charged with attempted murder. The footage was widely shared online. The attack was depicted as part of a wider threat to white Britons by foreign “invaders”. Far-right agitators summoned vengeful crowds. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the activist who campaigns as Tommy Robinson, was instrumental in this process. So was Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, whose platform helped mobilise racist fury.

Mr Musk habitually intervenes in UK politics. Last year, he addressed a rally organised by Mr Yaxley‑Lennon via video link. He called for the removal of the current government and warned against the threat from “uncontrolled migration”. He told the crowd “You either fight back or you die”. He reposted that line on Tuesday.

Mr Musk shows no interest in the reality of life in the UK, preferring to amplify dystopian myths. Mr Yaxley-Lennon styles himself as a patriot, but his racially charged ultranationalism is hostile to traditions of British pluralism and tolerance. His true ideological affinity is revealed by the trip he made to Moscow last week with the goal, as he put it, of admiring “the beauty of a civilised society”. That is not how most British people would characterise Vladimir Putin’s repressive authoritarian regime, which murders dissidents and invaded a neighbouring democracy to steal its territory.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Photograph: Getty

Mr Yaxley-Lennon doesn’t represent mainstream opinion, but his divisive politics are expanding from the fringe, facilitated by social media algorithms and, in the case of Mr Musk, one especially powerful and ideologically fixated oligarch. The result is a digital ecosystem where moderate conservative opinion has been crowded out by radical nationalism and, on the topic of immigration, a far-right worldview twisted with paranoia and racist hysteria.

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe act as conduits for that style in mainstream debate, channelling the idiom of the fringe into parliament and on BBC bulletins. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, condemns violent manifestations of anti-immigrant politics but fails to recognise that her own party has abetted the rhetorical vilification that turns minority communities into targets for mob rage.

Ms Badenoch also competes for attention in online spaces and in analogue right-leaning media, where politics is a feedback loop of radicalisation. When the economic conditions that incubate extremism are hard to fix, politicians are drawn to collude in the fiction that migration is the root cause and to excuse racism as a normal expression of social discontent.

This process has met far too little resistance from Sir Keir Starmer’s government. The prime minister issues insipid warnings to social media companies to behave responsibly. He condemns racist violence and urges calm on the streets. But he does not properly address the mechanism – the ideological capture of a digital information space – that is undermining social cohesion and sabotaging democracy at a systemic level. A contagious violent strain of far-right politics has been normalised online and is now spreading on to the streets. It needs to be beaten on both fronts.

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