British media has been dominated for the past 10 days by coverage of violent disorder.

Across the country, groups of young men have gathered to take on the police. The scale of the violence has been shocking — the worst public unrest since London was plagued by riots in the summer of 2011. But equally shocking has been the suddenness of the eruption.

In a strictly chronological sense, it began in Southport, a seaside town near Liverpool, on July 29. Just before noon, a 17-year-old armed with a knife attacked a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Two young girls, aged six and seven, died at the scene, and a third, aged nine, died the following day. Police and emergency services arrived quickly. The suspect was tasered, disarmed and arrested.

Because the suspect was 17 years old, he came under the reporting restrictions in section 49 of the Children and Young Persons Act, and very few details about him were released at first. The police disclosed only that he was from a village a few miles from Southport, and that he had been born in the Welsh capital, Cardiff.

Misinformation and disinformation rapidly filled that void, and it was soon being reported (incorrectly) on social media that the suspect was a recently arrived Muslim asylum seeker who was known to MI5, the Security Service.

That was enough for some far-right agitators. The following day, a crowd gathered outside Southport Mosque, many of them members of the racist and anti-Muslim English Defence League. Chanting “No surrender!” and “English till I die!”, they quickly clashed violently........

© The Hill