The Right-Wing Migrant Crisis in Britain

A Tory Councillor's wife is under arrest for calling for asylum hotels to be burned with people inside. Her excuse? Bad info in the web. No sale. Here's why.

Ah, there she is. And here’s what she had to say on X—which, of course, Elon had NO qualms about publishing:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. … If that makes me a racist, so be it.”

Well, yes, Lucy, it does.

So now Lucy, wife of a Tory Councillor Mike Connolly and a childminder by profession—oh, joy, let’s do pass this mental illness on to the next generation of bigots!—is under arrest. And here’s how she got there:

The Inciting Incident

On July 30th, a 17-year-old Briton named Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff Wales to Rwandan refugees, attacked a Taylor-Swift themed dance class for children 6-11 in Southport, near Liverpool. He killed three girls ages 6, 8 and 9. He attempted to kill 10 others—eight children and two teachers. He wounded all ten, including five children who were critically injured in the attack. All have since been released from hospital.

The Dirty Game on X

Initially the Crown Court in Liverpool withheld Rudakubana’s name because, at 17, he was still a minor under British law. He turned 18 on August 7th.

Now something would happen that would force the Crown Court’s hand. Misinformation raged on X, and, of course, Elon Musk did nothing to fact-check what was a media source that should never have been allowed on X to begin with. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism notes:

The Daily Mail’s front page [referred] … to its analysis of a suspicious news site called Channel3 Now, which published a false story about the Southport stabbings. Channel3 Now falsely claimed the suspect was an asylum seeker called Ali Al Shakati, who was “on MI6’s watchlist” – a claim that quickly spread through social media networks, promoting anti-Islam and anti-migrant views. In reality, the accused is Axel Rudakubana.

Channel3 Now is widely alleged to be a Russian disinformation media outlet—though its Facebook page would seem to implicate Pakistan intelligence disinformation.

And, of course, Andrew Tate, looking to offset his reputation as misogynist, rapist, and sex-trafficker, couldn’t wait to get into the fray and get his face smeared all over the world again. Like the Dark Tetrad narcissist he is, Tate thinks no press is bad press. When he gets sued for lying and inciting hatred and violence, he may change his mind about that.

He was interviewed by video from Romania, where he is under house arrest awaiting trial, by none other than Piers Morgan, another misogynist infamous for stoking hatred and potential violence against Meghan Markle.

The Independent UK reports:

The controversial social media influencer has been cited in recent days by Nigel Farage after falsely claiming the suspect had arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in a small boat.

As we pointed out in an article on Tate two weeks ago, Tate has an Online Dark Web following of 9.5 million men. And the part about the crossing the Channel in a small boat is 100% made up.

Now the anti-Muslim Radical Right Demands Blood—or, in this case, the ashes of people burned alive.

Instantly, the anti-Muslim attacks began. Some targeted mosques—spreading life-threatening danger to every Muslim in the UK.

But the most dangerous of all were the calls for mobs to torch hotels in which asylum-seekers are legally being housed awaiting hearings on their appeals. Police were barely able to prevent two of the attacks from succeeding.

Since when is it OK to effectively burn people at the stake who have knifed nobody? Since when is it OK to target Muslims, migrants, or any other group for the actions of one person?

What if someone named Ali Al-Shakati had done it. Well, the people who would have you burn asylum seekers are saying that Ali Al-Shakati is a “fake name.” Well, don’t look now, guys, but this name—Al-Shakati is a name common in Lebanon—is the name of any number of Muslim men across this world. There are approximately 7,500,000 Muslim men on this planet, and so I’m unconvinced that none of them has the name Ali Al-Shakati? The odds are that many of them do. And some even posted the image of a man, held in Irish detention for almost a year, as the Ali Al-Shakati who allegedly killed little girls.

Reuters fact-checked the claim, and never published it, but others did. This man’s photo is now attached to these murders.

The Real Issue

The real issue here is that the Radical Right “extra-judicial enforcers” have convinced themselves that if there is a Muslim involved or a black person involved—and many Reddit groups were fast to say “HE’S BLACK! HE’S BLACK!”—then it’s OK to burn people alive as revenge sanction only by your conservatism or your whiteness.

Let that sink in. These people decided it was OK to burn people alive because they were angry—but only if these people were targeted by hate groups already.

The comparative case is the Dunblane Massacre, which took place at Dunblane Primary School in Dunblane, near Stirling, Scotland, on 13 March 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton killed 16 pupils and one teacher and injured 15 others before killing himself. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history. And it resulted in the stunning Snowdrop Petition that resulted in two Firearms Acts that effectively outlawed the private ownership of most handguns in the UK.

No riots. No threats to burn people alive. No attacks on Catholic sanctuaries (Hamilton was Catholic). No shows of Class A Testosterone Damage. Men were not targeted as a group. Whites were not targeted as a group (Hamilton was white).

Ergo …

The cause of the Southport riots, the mosque attacks, and the attempts to burn alive asylum seekers in temporary housing provided by the British government was NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT the murder of three innocent girls at a dance class in Southport.

THAT WAS THE EXCUSE.

The cause was and is Radical Right racism—and the huge levels arrogant self-elevation with which ultra-conservatives have bestowed themselves, a narcissistic endowment of impunity that allows these people to think they are above the law by virtue of being white.

Now back to the odious Miss Lucy.

So, what Lucy is saying is that she is innocent because she was misinformed by social media. That’s not why she did it. It’s the EXCUSE she gave herself for dumping violence-inciting, racist and xenophobic hate speech on her social media pages—and this not the first time she’s publicly raged like this.

We don’t get these excuses. Social media disinformation—from sleazebags like Andrew Tate and supported by Radical Right extremists like Elon Musk—are not an excuse for any of us.

And what we’re going to find out is that Axel Rudakubana was probably targeted and bullied for being black and the child of migrants. And that’s no excuse, either.

Meanwhile, if the quotes above, attributed to Lucy’s social media pages, are found to be accurate, she is guilty of hate speech and incitement to violence under British law.

Luckily for Lucy, the Crown Court will have her tried on the evidence and sentenced under of a uniform legal code that protects us all and holds us all responsible in equal measure.

Nobody will come to her house and burn it down, having first made sure she’s inside so that she fries and boils to death.

Why would they? She’s white.