The right has created a false reality – fuelled by toxic images delivered straight to your phone |
When voters in Makerfield head to the polls next week, their decision, as is increasingly the case across the nation, may come down to this: whether to be more swayed by a hopeful vision of the UK or by a narrative that defines the country as little more than the most shocking thing they have seen on their phone that day.
That quandary has been sharpened by something that has quietly become a regular fixture of social media: members of the public are now consistently fed a stream of exceptional images and videos that once might have only been seen by investigators or from the inside of a courtroom. It is so regular that it has become banalised, whether it’s of robbers smashing up a jewellery shop, or of extreme and graphic assaults akin to snuff films.
Much of this is broadcast in real time from the phones of bystanders. That includes the horrific footage out of Belfast this week, of a Sudanese refugee alleged to have carried out a knife attack on a white man, gleefully circulated on X by the likes of far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Considerations of the decency of sharing such footage, of how the circulation of graphic, violent crime images can indignify and rob victims of bodily agency, are nullified by what are considered greater political priorities: to identify and profile the ethnic violence that is supposedly tearing the fabric of the nation. And here, the result of an extreme incident of violence was racist riots – droves of meticulously organised masked fascists in Belfast who already had “hitlists” of the homes of migrants and ethnic minorities and set to burn them down.
That knife-attack image is potent. In solidarity protests in Southampton, the scene of riots over Henry Nowak’s murder last week, it is illustrated on banners. It has perfectly landed within a pre-existing online visual language that has, for some time, cast the........