What do social media misogynist Andrew Tate, arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage and a load of AI-powered bots have in common with the leader of a group of Islamophobic thugs that calls itself the English Defence League – a petty criminal named after a notorious football hooligan of the 1980s called Tommy Robinson, but whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon?

Yes, that’s right, they all at the end of last month chose to take advantage of the tragic murder of three children in the town of Southport in the northwest of England to promote conspiracy theories wrongly suggesting the involvement of asylum-seekers and Islamist terrorists in that appalling crime.

When the newly elected parliamentarian Nigel Farage demonstrated that he’s as irresponsibly opportunistic as he’s always been by suggesting that the police weren’t telling the public the truth about the terrible incident in Southport, he was described by the husband of a murdered MP as “nothing better than Tommy Robinson in a suit” – and his remarks were condemned as “right out of the Trump playbook”.

Mr. Farage’s mealy-mouthed use of nasty rabble-rousing insinuations was indeed hauntingly reminiscent of his friend Donald Trump’s insidious incitement of the attack on Washington’s Capitol in January 2021, a calculatedly deniable act of provocation.

While keeping themselves at safe distances, Farage, Tate, Yaxley-Lennon and their allies succeeded in mobilizing an army of hate-fueled extremists who descended upon the town to disrupt a peaceful vigil, terrorize a local mosque, and injure more than 50 police officers – and whose campaign of racist violent disorder was then swiftly spread by the neo-Nazis of social media as far afield as Hartlepool, Darlington, Aldershot, Sunderland, Stoke, Tamworth, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Weymouth, Rotherham, Plymouth, Blackpool, Bolton, Birmingham, Bristol, Belfast and London.

The fact that this was, at that point, the hottest week of the summer only stoked the flames of violence. The British tend to react badly to the shock of warm weather.

We can try to blame the unusual heat, but in the end the fact that an elected member of the UK parliament contributed to this horrific spectacle should be a cause for national shame.

Counter-extremism expert Dame Sara Khan said that politicians have a responsibility not to engage in inflammatory and dehumanizing language about asylum-seekers. Yet Mr. Farage and his fellow Reform UK MPs have done so again and again.

Certain members of the Conservative Party have also continued to contribute to this wave of hate, with the Tory MP for West Suffolk idiotically blaming multiculturalism for this bloody mess.

“If you are visibly Muslim, if you are Asian or black, you may well be apprehensive,” a BBC news presenter warned earlier this month, as more racist rallies were threatened. This is a warning we should never have expected to hear from a public broadcaster in a modern liberal democracy.

The news media have repeatedly depicted these violent scenes as acts of protest but the Prime Minister himself has been uncharacteristically clear in his condemnation of the targeting of Muslim communities and the rioters’ “Nazi salutes on the street”.

“This is not a protest,” Keir Starmer said. “It is organized violent thuggery and it has no place on our streets or online.”

Those engaging in valid political protest rarely, after all, come armed with fireworks, bricks and cans of lager, or smash through the windows of fast food outlets to grab themselves handfuls of high-calorie pastry treats.

Suggesting (as one BBC piece did) that immigration is a “root cause” of this violence is like blaming women for wife-beating and rape.

It is mindless, drunken, racist hooliganism which seeks to claim a concern for the security of Britain’s borders as its excuse.

To call these riots protests is to bolster the absurd myth (propagated by some news outlets) that there’s a secret woke agenda which prevents the police arresting peaceful protesters participating in legitimately organized demonstrations and obliges them instead to take action against looters, vandals and violent aggressors… as if that weren’t a defining feature of their job.

This is not, in Elon Musk’s foolishly incendiary words, a civil war. Riled up by Musk’s own social media platform, the extremists who’ve terrorized British towns and cities this month aren’t freedom-fighters. They’re the real enemies of democracy and freedom. 

One former police chief declared that they’ve “crossed the line into terrorism”. This is a view which the Director of Public Prosecutions has expressed a willingness to consider – although others have argued that this would merely dignify vandalism, theft and assault with the semblance of an ideological cause.

Pointing out that 70 per cent of those arrested already had criminal records, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police added that “these are criminals, they’re thugs, they’re not patriots”.

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Yet, by contrast, one of Nigel Farage’s party colleagues went so far as to suggest that these hooligans could be equated with “concerned British citizens”.

Meanwhile, another Reform UK MP was also busying himself propagating prejudice, ignoring the truth, and bringing further ignominy upon the seat of British democracy.

Even as the racist riots spread from Stockport, a Farage follower called Lee Anderson saw fit to respond to unfounded rumors that a hotel in his constituency was being used to house asylum-seekers by declaring that he didn’t want “groups of young men who have entered our country illegally roaming our streets”.

He added that it was “not racist or bigoted to say this” – apparently unaware of the fact that the people who most commonly find they have to deny racism and bigotry tend of course to be racist bigots.

Surely much to Mr. Anderson’s embarrassment, it soon transpired that the targets of his invective were not in fact refugees but were nurses working for the National Health Service.

But was it really to his embarrassment? No, apparently not.

Because it turns out that Yaxley-Lennon, Tate, Farage and Anderson all have something else in common with the bots.

When caught out for their lies, they never seem to express any actual remorse or shame. It doesn’t matter to them or to their target audiences whether or not what they’ve said is true. What matters is that they’ve said it: it’s that act of utterance which makes it true.

It’s like former UK premier Liz Truss continuing to claim that it wasn’t her fault that her attempted fiscal reforms crashed the British economy, or her predecessor Boris Johnson saying that he didn’t party through lockdown and that he’d never denied doing so either.

These remorseless monsters of ego, these conscienceless purveyors of hate, seem to lack the very human qualities which they seek to deny in the targets of their unbridled and deluded animosity. In short, they seem to have no inner lives.

Just as Anderson promoted lies about the provenance of a group of people staying in a hotel in his parliamentary constituency, Yaxley-Lennon – while sunning himself on a Mediterranean holiday – brazenly made false claims that the perpetrator of the Stockport attack was an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in the country illegally by boat. 

These fantasists’ followers believe their dangerous lies because they are precisely the narratives that they want to believe – the stories which confirm their prejudices and bolster their already blinkered views of the world.

These masters of hate would never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

So, when earlier this month Donald Trump thought it was acceptable to question the ethnicity of his Democratic rival for the American presidency – just as he'd once questioned the nationality of Barack Obama – he was utterly unrepentant in his simultaneous dismissal of truth, empathy and human dignity.

The man is, as Kamala Harris’s running mate has suggested, certainly very weird, and indeed rather worse than weird.

The final horror is that in both the United States and the United Kingdom this kind of monstrous discourse is now allowed to flourish in the political mainstream.

When British and American politicians next rail against the hopes of hostile states to wreck western democracy, they should perhaps be mindful of the fact that, with just a little international support,  we’re proving more than capable of doing so ourselves.

There are of course increasingly prevalent fears in the western world that artificial intelligence will eventually put us all out of work. Yet, in this respect at least, the likes of Farage, Anderson, Tate and Yaxley-Lennon have been making the propaganda bots themselves redundant.

These xenophobic rabble-rousers and their criminal disciples represent only a tiny proportion of people in the UK. Their views are considered shameful and toxic by the vast majority of the nation. These haters aren’t patriots – their views are, in truth, the very antithesis of Britishness.

After a week of violent disorder, many thousands of ordinary people came together to join peaceful demonstrations across the country – from Newcastle in the north to Southampton in the south – expressing the solidarity of their communities in opposition to racial and religious hatred. 

They were articulating the real heart of our United Kingdom. And, as the nasty little incidents they denounced have burnt themselves out, it remains vital that we all remember that.