UK Riots

This week we talk about Taylor Swift, knife attacks, and immigration politics.

We also discuss immigration rationales, riffraff, and terrorist plots.

Recommended Book: AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan

Transcript

American musician, singer, and songwriter Taylor Swift, at age 34, recently became the world's first music industry billionaire who's primary source of income is their music—as opposed to side-businesses, work, and royalties in adjacent or completely disconnected industries.

A lot of that wealth has stemmed from her incredibly successful, and ongoing—as of the day I'm recording this at least—Eras tour, which began in March of 2023 and which is her sixth tour, and by far the biggest in scope, scale, and success.

The Eras Tour, by itself, has surpassed a billion dollars in revenue—the first tour to ever hit that milestone—and it's had all sorts of interesting direct ramifications and repercussions, like bolstering Swift's music sales and streams, but also indirect ones, like creating a sort of economic weather system wherever these tour stops are planned: it's been estimated, for instance, that the Eras Tour contributed something like $4.3 billion to the GDP of the United States, and the WSJ dubbed these economic impacts "Taylornomics," as the combination of travel, food, entertainment, and other spending surrounding her tour dates, folks coming from all the around the world to visit the relevant cities, attend the concert, and spend on those sorts of things while in town, has all had a meaningful impact legible in even the huge-scale numbers of national income figures.

Swift, then, has been having quite the moment, following the several decades of work in this industry leading up to this tour.

And the swirl of activity—economic and cultural, especially—around her Eras Tour stops have made these events central to the collective consciousness, grabbing lots of airtime and watercooler talk wherever she shows up, because of how much of an event each of these stops are; and notably, they have been very well reviewed, in terms of the performance, the sets, the planning, everything—so it would seem that the attention being focused on these shows isn't superficial and reflexive, it's the result of having put together something pretty special for people who are willing to spend to attend that kind of event.

It maybe shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that there may be people out there looking to garner attention for themselves and their causes who see these events as an opportunity to do exactly that.

Three sold-out shows in Vienna, Austria were cancelled in early August due to a plot by what seems to have been several teenagers looking to kill as many people as possible outside the tour's local concert venue.

An investigation into this plot is ongoing, so there's still a fair bit we don't know, but what's been divulged so far is that three people have been connected to the plot and detained, the main suspect is a 19-year-old who planned to use knives and/or explosives to kill as many of the 30,000 or so onlookers who gather outside the show venues each night as possible—and another 65,000 people would have been inside the venue, so that's a lot of people, and a lot of potential for stampede-related injuries and deaths, alongside those that could be caused with knives and bombs—and that he, alongside two other suspects, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, was inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaida—the 18-year-old, who is an Iraqi citizen, apparently having pledged himself to the Islamic State.

Propaganda materials from both terrorist organizations were found at the 17-year-old's home, alongside bomb-making materials, and he was hired just a few days before being caught by a company that provides some type of service to the concert venue; specifics about what said company provides haven't been officially divulged yet, but the theory is that this job was meant to give him and his accomplices some kind of access, allowing them to do what they intended to do more effectively.

There were a lot of disappointed Swift fans in Vienna who in some cases spent thousands of dollars just getting and staying there for the concert, only to be told that it was cancelled; most of the response from those affected in this way seems to be relatively upbeat, though, considering the circumstances, pretty much everyone breathing a sigh of relief that this plot wasn't pulled off successfully, which could have resulted in something like what happened at Manchester Arena in 2017, when an Ariana Grande concert was attacked by an Islamic extremist with a bomb who killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000.

Swift's representatives have said that her next concert, scheduled for between August 15 and the 20th, are still on the books and ready to go, at London's Wembley Stadium, which will close-out the European leg of this record-setting tour.

London's mayor has said that local authorities are prepared for whatever might happen, having learned a lot from that aforementioned Ariana Grande concert in 2017.

What I'd like to talk about today is a bout of violent rioting that broke out in the UK recently, which is loosely connected to Swift and her music, though only adjacently, and is primarily focused on the roiling topic of immigration and its British discontents.

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At the tail-end of July, 2024, there was a knife attack in Southport, a town in northwestern England, in which three young girls were killed and ten other people, eight of whom were also children, were injured—some very badly injured.

This attack targeted a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance workshop that catered to children ages 6 to 11, twenty-five of whom were in attendance—hence that large number of young victims. And the adults who tried to stop the attacker were all themselves injured, in some cases critically, and the assailant was only ultimately halted when a pair of police officers managed to subdue him.

The person behind this attack, and those murders, is a 17-year-old British citizen who was arrested at the scene, and whose identity was initially concealed from the public because of how privacy laws work in the UK, related to minors; they tend not to divulge identifying details when crimes are committed by people who are legally children, though in this case they ultimately decided to do so, for reasons I'll get into in a moment.

Thus far, there isn't a clear motive behind this attack—the attacker has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and was apparently deep in the midst of some kind of self-imposed isolation leading up to his apparent decision to take a taxi to this workshop and kill a bunch of children.

He's been charged with possession of a bladed article, ten counts of attempted murder, and three counts of murder, and his trial date is currently set for the end of January in 2025.

This attack is currently not being treated as a terrorist incident, though again, no clear motive has been established, and there's a lot that's not known, and likely quite a bit that hasn't been publicly divulged yet.

This knife attack, unto itself, led to a lot of headlines and attention because of how just brutal and horrible it was.

But in the aftermath of the attack, possibly because the attacker wasn't named, again, because he was a minor, rumors and then outright misinformation began to spread around less-than-legitimate news entities in the UK, and across social media platforms and messaging apps like Telegram, many of them suggesting or directly alleging that the attacker was someone he was not—a false name was given to him by some of those spreading these rumors—and even in cases when a name wasn't misattributed or fabricated, he was alleged to be an immigrant seeking asylum—which is also incorrect; his parents are from Rwanda, but he was born in Cardiff, and is thus a British citizen.

Within days these rumors and this mis- and dis-information, this accidental and purposeful spreading of mistruths, began to reach a fever-pitch, the zone flooded with patently untrue claims and narratives, which is why the police decided to release the attacker's name publicly on August 1; it was going to happen within a week or so, anyway, because he was turning 18 on the 7th, so the idea was to get ahead of that impending forced divulgence, and to try to temper some of that false information spread within facets of British society in the meantime.

Most of the false stories, though, hung on, even after officials made this information public, and to understand why, it's important to understand what a political force anti-immigration sentiment has become in Britain over the past few decades.

The British aren't alone in this, of course: especially in wealthier countries, mostly but not exclusively conservative politicians and parties have been making hay with claims about folks from other countries coming into their territory, taking their jobs, gobbling up their social services, and changing their culture into something those who came before feel they no longer recognize.

Part of this is just the consequence of societies changing being reframed into something devilish and wrong, part of it is the reframing of stagnating economic conditions as something that's being done to their societies by outside forces, not by uncontrollable macro variables like pandemics, and controllable variables that are being mismanaged by those in power.

Part of it, though, is related to real-deal demographic shifts, as folks flee from repression, violence, economic deterioration, and dangerous climactic happenings in less-wealthy parts of the world to those that are currently not suffering from these things, or not to the same degree.

Thus, we see waves of people show up to the US's southern border, all hoping to get into the country, legally or otherwise, and the same is true of European nations with Mediterranean coasts, and, as is the case here, people arriving legally, by ship and plane and train into England, but also illegally, often in makeshift boats crossing the channel, the people who arrive in this way arrested and filtered into a system that often moves sluggishly and puts these new arrivals up in hotels or other housings for the duration of their processing at government expense.

From the perspective of someone in a smaller British town, then, where the economic conditions are not much better than those in a similarly sized town in a much poorer country—since London is the only city in Britain doing really well in that regard, right now—this looks like a bunch of people from elsewhere, who don't belong, taking resources that should go to them, should be spend on their housing and healthcare, should be making jobs for them, and the ones that are allowed to stay continue to take those resources, leaving a lot less to go around, again, in circumstances in which it already feels like there's not anywhere near enough—no chance for growth, few opportunities, and diminishing value in the social services they've been promised.

These are potent political topics, then, because in some cases these are real-deal issues already, and in others it can be useful and effective to stoke fears that this could happen in the future, if we allow these foreigners to keep flooding across our borders, legally or illegally.

In the UK, the Conservatives, the Tories, have used this issue as a very effective lever, and at the height of fervor about this topic, they seemingly accidentally led the country to a successful Brexit referendum in 2016, leading to the UK leaving the European Union, in large part because this would allow them to set their own immigration policies separate from those of the EU, which are much more open in terms of movement between member nations.

All of which, I think, helps explain what happened next, following that knife attack, and the torrent of false information that flooded the zone following the attack, which included all sorts of claims that the attacker was an illegal immigrant, that he was a Muslim, and that if nothing else, he was a black teenager who had brutally murdered several young, British girls.

On July 30, a crowd in Southport gathered outside a local mosque and started causing trouble and making threats. The police showed up to keep the peace, and the protestors attacked them, set fire to a police van, and damaged the mosque—in the process injuring more than 50 police officers and three police dogs.

This initial group of protestors was formed around a nucleus of people belonging to the English Defense League, which is a far-right, anti-Muslim organization, and members of Patriotic Alternative, which is a neo-Nazi group.

Similar protests that became riots popped up in cities across the country in subsequent days, and amidst all the resulting tumult, a police station was set on fire in Sunderland, and more mosques, alongside businesses and homes owned by people who were purported to be, often incorrectly, immigrants, were also damaged or destroyed.

Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and something like 750 of these anti-immigration rioters have been arrested, thus far.

The nature of these riots changed on August 7, when a protest, populated by the same sorts of people as were seen at the other ones, mostly anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi, and far-right folks, was met by a group of anti-racist counter-protestors that dramatically outnumbered them. The police helped support the peaceful anti-racist protestors, and since that day, most of these would-be riots have been quelled by oversized groups of counter-protestors augmented by a police presence.

Before that tactic arose, though, several cities saw a handful of nights in a row of rioting by those far-right groups, many of them pillaging and burning shops, and attacking strangers and the police, and the government has gone out of its way to really throw the book at folks they've arrested, handing down significant punishments to some of the instigators of these riots, in particular, while also publishing their names and faces, in an attempt to embarrass and make examples of them.

As of the second week of August, we're still seeing periodic attacks on mosques and attempted protests and riots by far-right activists pop up here and there, though they're happening a lot less frequently than in previous weeks, and peaceful anti-fascist, anti-racist protests have become a lot more common, in response to attempted riots, but also unto themselves.

There are several ways of looking at what has happened here, in response to that attack, and in response to the riots that followed.

One narrative of all this is that far-right politicians and ideologues int the country have attempted to convert a truly horrible event into something it wasn't for the purpose of regaining some of the power they lost with the last round of parliamentary elections.

It's been alleged by the new British Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, that these riots were instigated by far-right troublemakers like Nigel Farage, who was one of the key proponents of Brexit, and who has recently reemerged in British politics as the leader of a vehemently anti-immigrant, further-right than the Conservatives party in the country.

Farage and similar anti-immigrant leaders flooded the informational zone with disinformation and nudge-nudge-wink-wink innuendo that implied this was one of the consequences of allowing immigrants into the UK, and that, according to Starmer and other government leaders, led to some of this violence and destruction—they've even hinted that it might be prudent to clamp down on those sorts of posts and false claims, because of the real-world consequences that can follow; though that hint has been met with skepticism and worry from free-speech advocates.

It's also been alleged that foreign agencies, like those in Russia, have been helping amplify these false claims, as part of their larger effort to sow discord and to augment the potency of reactionary groups in countries they want to influence, and folks who have aligned themselves with global conservative movements, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have been accused of doing the same, Musk himself sharing a lot of misinformation related to this attack and the riots that followed on the social network he bought, formerly Twitter, now X, clashing with the new Labour government on the network while saying that he believes a civil war is inevitable in the UK.

So we could look at all this through the political-leverage lens, as there's a lot of power to be gained by successfully attaching reins to this sort of movement, and amplifying trouble for those in power, if those in power are your political rivals.

We might also look at this through the lens of actual on-the-ground issues, though.

There was a piece in the Financial Times, recently, in which it was posited that how we perceive these riots, and the people sparking and perpetuating them, will tend to depend on whether we subscribe to the "rational actor" or "riffraff" models of riot interpretation.

The rational actor model says people who riot are doing what they do because of real-deal grievances that they can't seem to get addressed in any other way, while the riffraff model says rioters are basically low-lifes who have nothing better to do, and/or who like to mindlessly give in to the animalistic urge to belittle, attack, and maybe even kill those who seem different from them and theirs, and all they're looking for is an excuse to do so.

Most social scientists, today, support the rational actor model, suggesting that even people who lean toward violence will keep those behaviors tamped-down most of the time, and only allow them out at moments in which they feel like there's no other way to get themselves and their grievances heard and addressed; and that's true whether we're talking about people of color rioting because they feel like they're being unfairly and violently targeted by police, or when it's mostly white, British Christians who feel like they're being elbowed out of society by Muslim immigrants and various other people of color.

That folks like Farage might step in and try to ride this kind of wave, then, might ultimately be less important than identifying a pressure-valve that'll allow these sorts of grievances to be worked out and addressed in socially positive, legal ways.

Government healthcare infrastructure in many of these areas is stretched to the breaking point, social safety nets are unraveling, and years of Conservative-instigated austerity measures have left these and other social baselines way below where they were in recent memory—and the messaging from the Conservative Party has been that immigrants are to blame, not their good and logical and responsible monetary policies.

Starmer, as the head of the new Labour government, which won the last election in a landslide, booting the Conservatives from their perch for the first time in a long time, has the opportunity to address these issues, then, but it's likely he'll have to do so in such a way that the actual problems are addressed—providing better funding for these services, helping stimulate more economic activity so there are enough, and high-quality enough jobs for everyone, and ensuring there's enough immigration so that systems that rely on folks coming in from elsewhere (which is especially true of the nation's healthcare system and its construction industries) can function properly—while also addressing some of the seeming issues, like cracking down on illegal immigration; which probably isn't the core problem it's been promoted as by the Conservatives and those to their political right, but is an issue, and is something Starmer has said he will crack down on.

It currently seems like he might aim to grease the wheels of the immigration system, so that folks applying for citizenship are processed faster, which will mean fewer resources expended putting them up in the country while they're waiting to see if they can stay—which would possibly help free up government resources, while also representing a kinder model for those who are otherwise left in limbo for long periods of time.

Whether this can be framed and communicated correctly by the Labour government so that it appeals to those who are worried about immigration is an open question, though, as it's possible that anything other than a hardcore lockdown of the borders and a denial of new immigration requests—which would cause even more chaos in the country's healthcare and other immigration-related systems—might seem like non-solutions, even if they technically solve some of the underlying problems the rioters have been complaining about.

Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Southport_stabbing

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/30/uk/taylor-swift-southport-stabbing-reaction-gbr-intl/index.html

https://www.thetimes.com/article/e87b09fb-b8fe-408d-a961-c89e6ae0f098?shareToken=620a021a38d86ed3af11587c36a52afd

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y38gjp4ygo

https://apnews.com/article/britain-unrest-riot-southport-police-response-ec348340c7d223f0117ae8c62638dd6f

https://newrepublic.com/article/184691/day-riots-stopped-uk

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-examines-foreign-states-role-sowing-discord-leading-riots-2024-08-05/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp35w0kj2y4o

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/8/why-is-elon-musk-clashing-with-the-uk-government-over-far-right-riots

https://archive.ph/vKdeu

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyg7dzr8wko

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/08/is-cocaine-driving-the-british-riots

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/august/this-time-it-s-worse

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/amid-chaos-far-right-protests-9459421

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/uk/northern-england-stabbing-intl/index.html

https://apnews.com/article/uk-southport-children-stabbed-dance-class-8a9c7d7ed01441ce96332cd3d1250e43

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Defence_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriotic_Alternative

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/southport-far-right-disinformation-russia-b2589041.html

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/30/misinformation-southport-attack-suspect-social-media-conspiracy-theories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit

https://www.ft.com/content/a0a4fb08-40cc-4627-a58f-b3a8d2d0e009?accessToken=zwAGH1UwRNrgkdOgpPsIQMxGJ9Olj7Oo0tDgCQ.MEYCIQChxhfA2SBamOb_Y_c0vQwPJmzXo0fHfucpW2v_dBGr2gIhANMcXEtBzZqY7R0Z9RkAZMkEoGMSy5P49MRnprFYWvAH&sharetype=gift&token=75895b79-b6c8-4e1f-a3ab-dc4d87161131

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taylor-swift-concert-terror-plot-austria-foiled-2-men-arrested-shows-w-rcna165591

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Arena_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift

https://www.investopedia.com/swiftonomics-definition-8601178

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_Eras_Tour

https://apnews.com/article/austria-taylor-swift-concerts-canceled-extremism-arrests-17b494f1a164b205128d7faeb607e731

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-vienna-terror-plot-third-person-detained-1235750067/

https://apnews.com/article/austria-taylor-swift-concerts-canceled-extremism-arrests-feff9108d0a14d9941c4bc416c0eb05f