Losing control of the narrative

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” As Southampton simmers and Belfast erupts in fire, Gramsci’s words weigh heavily. We are in an interregnum, a chaotic gap between a dying social order, and a new Britain that has yet to emerge. 

The clearest sign of this was not in the horrors visited upon Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie on the nation’s streets, which are sadly far from new, but in the way British society has reacted. There are protests, many of them violent. There is a populist political party set to win potentially hundreds of seats openly linking the violence to immigration. Millions witnessed a dying Nowak being handcuffed by police officers, and millions watched Ogilvie being brutalised by an asylum seeker, as shocking videos spread across social media. 

Something has changed. Once, not long ago, this wasn’t how society reacted, with the British government maintaining strict narrative control over media and public responses to violent acts by immigrants. 

In 2014, as news broke that hundreds of British Muslims were fighting for Islamic State in the Middle East, and with videos circulating of a British aid workers being executed, an image of a Muslim woman in a Union Jack headscarf appeared on the cover of the Sun, with the headline, “United Against I.S.” When a Libyan immigrant conducted the Manchester Arena Bombing in 2017, killing 22 people, many of them children, Manchester crowds sang “Don’t Look Back in Anger”, and Muslim religious leaders joined the local bishop at a vigil. These were not simply spontaneous outpourings of public sentiment, but rather what government contingency planners call “controlled spontaneity”. Real stories are mixed with stage-managed events, and carefully tailored to create a narrative that channels public sentiment away from politically charged anger or civil disorder. 

It later emerged that the Sun cover was sourced from a PR firm called “Breakthrough Media”, an organisation that works closely with RICU, the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit, a crucial element in the British state’s counter-extremism. The Sun cover was the product of a Prevent PR campaign, and in the words of Breakthrough Media, “the UK authorities wanted to challenge ultraconservative and misogynistic interpretations of Islam – particularly those around women – in order to promote the true face of Islam among vulnerable UK communities”. 

There is a now widely understood sense that, whether explicitly or implicitly, the British state carefully manipulates and shapes the political narrative around shocking acts of violence involving immigrant communities

There is a now widely understood sense that, whether explicitly or implicitly, the British state carefully manipulates and shapes the political narrative around shocking acts of violence involving immigrant communities. Yet this fact, although made public in regards to the 2014 Sun cover, is little explored or investigated by the media. Part of the reason for this is that, as the Sun example showed, many in the press feel they have an ethical or political reason to reinforce government spin in emergency contexts. Part of this is that as many of these efforts happen under the aegis of a state security apparatus, there is little transparency or way to access firm information about what is being done. Freedom of information requests about the work of RICU have been routinely denied on the grounds of national security.

In other words we know little about how extensively RICU and government PR firms have been at work behind the scenes attempting to dampen tensions and guide public debates over terrorism, immigration and integration in the past decade. In the wake of Southampton and Belfast, the families of both victims released press statements asking his death not be used to increase “division, hatred or tension”. There was widespread speculation that these statements had come about through government or police prompting or intervention, especially in relation to the Belfast statement, which was delivered by a local MP rather than the family, and included lines about “peaceful protest” being “the only way forward”, as well as the idea that, “we have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work.” With so little transparency around government counterterrorism work, suspicion and paranoia have become rampant. Many found it implausible that a family in the throes of tragedy’s first thoughts would be for the importance of migration for the hospitality sector, but there is of course no evidence either way. 

Regardless of whether the statements were examples of true or “controlled” spontaneity, the political establishment was swift to use them to condemn anyone who tried to link the killings in Southampton and Belfast to migration policy. In parliament, Farage was booed when he asked if Nowak’s treatment by officers was an example of “two-tier policing”, the Prime Minister accused Farage of sewing division and dishonouring the wishes of the victim’s family. 

The mood in parliament when Farage stood up was ugly. MPs hissed, murmured and jeered. He had expressed “pure, cold rage”. He had not called for calm, he had expressed outrage and demanded change. 

The grip of the British state on the press and public was being fatally weakened. A big part of the story was social media, especially Elon Musk’s X, where millions had viewed and shared the shocking body cam footage of a dying Henry Nowak’s handcuffing by police. This echoed the bruising events of last year, in which Musk and X had kicked up a storm of public anger over grooming gangs. 

Grooming gangs had been reported on again and again, but without result. In 2004 a Channel 4 documentary was planned on grooming gangs in Bradford. It was delayed by police who warned that it would inflame racial tensions, and did little to change public debate. When Andrew Norfolk exposed the Rotherham grooming gangs in 2011, he was subjected to death threats and accusations of racism. Social media has changed the media landscape. When Musk attacked the British government for refusing to launch a national inquiry, they were forced to commission a national audit authored by Baroness Casey, an audit which found that across multiple public services, fears of being perceived as racist, or causing racial division, had led to grooming gangs being ignored, data on ethnicity uncollected, and victims left to their abusers. 

Between new forms of media, and new outlets like GB News, the information ecosystem once united in depoliticising migration and crime is now divided. The public debate is moving very quickly, with politicians sprinting to catch up with a shifting Overton window. Only a week ago, Kemi Badenoch was attacking Farage for calling for “rage”. Yesterday in Parliament, reacting to Belfast, she condemned rioting, but said, “people have the right to be angry, and I am angry”.

Where once migration was firmly delinked from instances of public violence, now people are speaking openly about it. The head of the DUP talked directly of an attack on “British values” and demanded answers of how the Sudanese knifeman had been allowed to enter Northern Ireland, and why he had been granted leave to remain. The government has again been forced to act, with the Home Office promising to “ramp up” action against illegal migrants in Northern Ireland.

Those in the political centre find the ground shifting beneath their feet, and are desperate to reassert control

Those in the political centre find the ground shifting beneath their feet, and are desperate to reassert control. Many in the press and politics pointed the finger at social media, with Lib Dem leader Ed Davey blaming the Belfast violence on “social media barons like Elon Musk, and their divisive algorithms”, saying that online rhetoric “is not free speech” , and calling on the Prime Minister to “crack down on platforms like X”.

The government seems set to do just that, with Technology Secretary Liz Kendall laying out plans to control online content “during times of crisis”. Many in the British establishment would desperately like to put the genii back in the bottle, and return to “normality”. 

At one level, you can fully understand and even agree with the aims of the authorities in wishing to prevent violence and rioting. Anyone who reads about the harrowing stories coming out of Belfast of people left homeless by arson, of whole families forced to flee in terror from their homes by mobs, can see why politicians and police have good reason to want to curb popular rage. 

The problem is that the government’s approach is not simply to appeal to people’s decency, or counter the spread of harmful misinformation. In fact, its strategy has historically been to create propagandistic narratives or to suppress inflammatory truths, even where this has meant failing to prevent or punish terrible crimes, as with the mass rape of white working class children by Pakistani grooming gangs. Even if this works to suppress tensions in the short term, like putting a lid on a boiling saucepan, it only builds up more tension in the long term. 

Once you pass a certain point of public awareness and anger over migration, integration and criminality, the tactics that once worked to suppress rage, will increasingly achieve the opposite of their intentions. There is some sign that authorities are starting to learn this lesson, and the rapid confirmation of the details of the Belfast case, including the ethnicity and migration status of the attacker, was indicative of an understanding that failing to disclose details, especially in the context of a widely shared and horrific video, was only going to fuel further speculation, paranoia and rage. 

Yet in large part the mainstream conversation remains hopelessly behind public opinion and an emerging debate occurring on social media and the right wing press, with many marooned by the whirlwind pace of discursive norms. In Parliament, Reform, Farage and Musk sometimes seem to generate more ire than the terrible violence inflicted on British streets, which is instead spoken of more in sorrow than in anger. On X, Owen Jones wrote a thread listing decapitations by white killers. Lewis Goodall, penning a Substack post from the Basque Country, suggested that concern over Henry Nowak reflected the “endless unreality” of the culture wars, and called suggestions that police anti-racism had any bearing on their decision to treat a prone and dying white suspect as a possible racist on the word of his killer as “fanciful stuff”. The Economist described right wing leaders as in the grips of “violent fantasy”, and members of the public who support them as “bastards”. At a certain point these kinds of responses from press and politicians are themselves dangerous provocations, creating a sense that mainstream debate and democracy are no longer paths to political change. 

There has not been a single leader in the past 15 years who has become Prime Minister without promising to lower migration and take control of our borders, yet in that same time both legal and illegal migration have risen to extraordinary, demographically transformative heights. The sense of political powerlessness and cultural alienation this has created is a recipe for civil unrest of the sort we saw in Southport in 2024, and Ballymena in 2025. 

Regaining public trust means taking meaningful action on migration, but it also means frank, uncomfortable public conversations about crime, integration and the impact of mass migration on British society. People feel, really profoundly, that politicians are not on their side, don’t listen, and don’t take action. 

A young man spent his last moments falsely arrested for racism, disbelieved and manhandled by police as his killer loomed over his dying body. Another man is currently in hospital, an eye gouged out of his head, covered in wounds inflicted in a frenzied attack perpetrated by a man with no connection to Britain or Ireland, no visa, no right or business whatsoever being in our country. It is time our leaders stopped blaming angry words for civil disorder — these crimes, and the policies that let them happen, are the reason British streets are burning.