There’s no excuse for this thuggery

On Friday night, I watched the news with a sick heart. I watched masked men in Sunderland throw bricks and beer cans at the police and chant racist slogans. I recognised the setting. I grew up in Sunderland: I spent 15 years of my life there and still have family there. I was in Keel Square, where the disorder began, in the early hours of New Year’s Day this year.

There is no justification for the violence we have seen in towns and cities across the country this week. To attribute it to the tragic murder of three young girls in Southport on 29 July is mistaken, misleading and grotesque, weaponising the devastating loss their families have suffered for an extremist political agenda. Of course we can follow the chain of events: within hours of the killings, false and almost certainly malicious disinformation was circulating on social media that the suspect was a Muslim who had arrived by boat last year and was being monitored by the security services.