Far-right thugs plotting weekend of violence across UK after police station torched and cops injured in Sunderland

THIS week’s riots in Southport and elsewhere were, of course, reprehensible.

To attack a mosque where ordinary Muslims go to pray would have been wrong even if it had been in response to an attack by Islamic terrorists.

That those lobbing bricks at the police and setting their vehicles alight were acting on disinformation makes them look foolish as well as disgraceful.

But if Britain’s liberal elite had been deliberately trying to drive people into the arms of the rabble-rousers they could not have done a better job if it.

They have done everything they can to fuel the underlying sense that the white working class is being treated very differently from the rest of the population.

On Thursday, the Prime Minister held a press conference in which he lost no time in asserting that the Southport riots were “clearly driven by far-right hatred”.

might have been motivated by reasonable concerns about the safety of children.

No, each and every one of them were just “far-right” thugs trying to spread hate.

Nor, by the way, did Keir Starmer mention in his press conference other recent cases of public disorder which had nothing to do with the far right, such as the machete fight in Southend on Tuesday night, the attack on police at Manchester Airport last week nor the riots in the Harehills area of Leeds.

Those equally concerning events don’t seem to feature even nearly as prominently on the radar of the liberal left because they don’t feed its preferred narrative that Britain is a happy, diverse community spoiled only by hate mongering on the part of the far right.

Starmer, to be fair, did condemn the Leeds riots at the time they happened two weeks ago, but he studiously avoided blaming any group.

On the contrary, a Downing Street statement demanded that people did not rush to speculate on the reasons behind the riots — which seem to have started after social workers removed children from a Roma family.

We know what to expect, because it has happened many times before.

Riots in neighbourhoods with high ethnic populations tend to be followed by inquiries which seek to settle the grievances which lie behind them — after the Brixton and Toxteth riots in 1981, for example, we had the Scarman report, while Michael Heseltine was dispatched to Liverpool to shower the poorer parts of the city with money.

Those efforts were warmly praised across the political spectrum.

Yet how has the Government responded to the Southport riots?

Not by calling an inquiry into what lies behind them, only by announcing stronger powers for police to track down perpetrators — all stick and no carrot, in other words.

The same seems to have happened on multiple occasions when working-class communities have protested, whether it be against low-traffic neighbourhoods, London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone or Covid lockdowns.

All have been dismissed as being incited by “far-right” conspiracy theorists.

Think what you like about councils erecting bollards and installing cameras to stop people driving to the shops, but those who oppose such measures hardly deserve to be treated like Nazis.

I haven’t heard anyone in power admit it, but there is an unfortunate backstory which may explain why people reacted to the killing of three girls (not to mention the injuries and mental trauma inflicted on many others) by seeking out a mosque.

For years, police, social services and other agencies failed properly to investigate gangs of men of Pakistani heritage who had been raping and sexually exploiting girls in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere.

Again, it cannot be emphasised strongly enough that it is very wrong to project the crimes of the rapists on to Britain’s Pakistani population as a whole — that is the point at which legitimate demand for justice spills over into racism.

But when these gangs were eventually brought to justice, it became clear from their trials that police and social services had been doing the opposite — they had been influenced by what the then Home Secretary Theresa May called “institutional political correctness” in failing to take the victims’ allegations seriously enough.

As the former Labour minister Denis MacShane put it “there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat”.

But it is that sort of attitude which hands over the issue of violence and sexual exploitation of children to the far right.

If people feel they cannot trust what the police and other authorities do and say they will end up gravitating towards other voices who do appear to be representing their interests.

Racists are to be condemned, and it is quite right that the Prime Minister should want police to have the power to tackle thugs, whoever they are and wherever they come from.

But the Government needs to recognise that the Southport riots did not happen in a vacuum.

We could do with a latter-day Lord Scarman to investigate what lies behind the riots and how best this can be addressed.

IN moments of crisis and tragedy, it's second nature for us to go on to social media to look for the latest information.

After we heard the first shocking reports that children had been stabbed in Southport, we went to social media to try and find out the truth – who did this and why?

But the problem with our reliance on social media as a source of information is that all platforms are designed in ways that show us lies first and the truth last.

Journalists working for a newspaper or broadcaster try to tell us what they can prove, which can be unclear in the immediate wake of a tragedy.

Social media platforms, instead, look at how much engagement their posts get.

That's because they don't actually care about the value to society of that information, rather the value to them.

Before anyone could report the truth in Stockport, selfish and cynical losers were using social media to exploit this tragedy and push hateful lies.

With zero evidence, they claimed that Muslims were behind the attack and that the police were hiding the truth.

And they know that the more outrageous the lie, the more people will see it.

The consequences were plain to see, as gangs of thugs descended on Southport, shamefully using the deaths of three young girls to whip up hate and attack the police.

Let's be clear, social media companies are to blame. They let people break their rules with impunity.

The reason they do this is simple: hate and lies are big business for social media.

That's how the truth loses, and the lies of extremists and weirdos enter the mainstream.

Social media companies pretend this is complicated, but the basic solutions are simple.

First, we need to force these companies to come clean on how their algorithms boost dangerous lies.

Second, we need to hold them accountable with fines and penalties.

American social media giants are to blame for this chaos. It's them, not the people of Southport, who should be paying for the cleanup and coppers' medical bills.