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who was in fact neither Muslim nor an asylum seeker.

Within minutes of the killings, rumors began circulating online that the attacker was either a Muslim or an undocumented immigrant or both. And, in quick succession far right mobs descended

Keir Starmer, himself a former crown prosecutor, has warned the racist mobs that the full force of the law will be brought against them. Earlier today, Starmer and Cooper participated in a COBRA meeting – COBRA being the committee used to bring key government and national security players together during national emergencies – and promised to unleash a “standing army” of specialist officers against the rightwing mob.

extraordinary speed with which misinformation now circulates through social media

it turns out, is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, to parents who themselves were of Rwandan origin: he isn’t an undocumented immigrant, he isn’t an asylum-seeker, he isn’t a Muslim. If Rudakubana were white, I suspect that discourse throughout the U.K. would surely be more focused on providing better mental health and social service interventions to people who are at risk of hurting themselves or others.

Instead, Britain’s homegrown fascists have opportunistically used these killings to whip up support for their racist effort to bar immigrants from the U.K. and to terrorize many of those already within the country.

This fascist rhetoric hasn’t emerged in a vacuum: for years, the Conservative government deployed inflammatory rhetoric against asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. They made “stop the boats” a political rallying cry, and they spent a huge amount of political capital attempting to implement a deportation policy

the secondary story — that may in the long run prove to be more significant — was the rise of Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform Party, which peeled off nearly half of the Conservative vote with its support for an immigration freeze, and its rhetoric about immigrants causing a cultural decline. For the first time, the Reform Party ended up with elected members of Parliament – five of them. More significantly, it received 14 percent support, more than 4 million votes, and came second in nearly 100 parliamentary constituencies, the vast majority of these being in seats that Labour won.