The UK is at risk of sliding into a civil war, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said, commenting on the ongoing anti-immigration protests in the country that have turned violent.
Several cities in the UK, including Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, Belfast, Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool, and Hull, were plunged into chaos after a knife attack in Southport, England left three children dead and several others injured. The attack was carried out by Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Britain to Rwandan parents. Meanwhile, there are rumors circulating online that the culprit was a Syrian migrant who went to Britain by boat.
The tragedy has sparked numerous protests, with videos showing demonstrators chanting anti-immigrant and anti-Islam slogans, setting fires, and setting off fireworks as cars were burned and buildings damaged, though the protests have not all been violent. Some activists have clashed with police, resulting in dozens of arrests and injuries to officers.
Commenting on a video on X (formerly Twitter) showing the unrest which was shared by a social media user who suggested the chaos was caused by mass migration to the UK and open-border policies, Musk responded: “Civil war is inevitable.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned that those involved “in criminal disorder and violent thuggery on our streets will have to pay the price” and face “the strongest possible penalties.” The office of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who took up the post less than a month ago, said the UK government “backs police to take all necessary action to keep our streets safe.”
Richard Dearlove, the former head of the MI6 intelligence service, claimed without providing evidence that Russia was attempting to fuel the protests by spreading falsehoods that the perpetrator of the Southport attack was a migrant. He added that the fake news was being spread by the website Channel3 Now, which is allegedly linked to Russia. The Channel3 Now page on X has around 3,000 followers.
The Russian Embassy in London has dismissed the allegations, calling the claims “predictable gaslighting,” adding that Dearlove was among those who helped destabilize “entire countries and regions, setting in motion unprecedented refugee flows.”
Channel3 Now had named the suspect as Ali-Al-Shakati, an asylum-seeker who allegedly arrived in the UK by boat last year. He was reportedly “on the MI6 watch list and known to Liverpool mental health services.” Channel3 Now — which appears to specialize in covering shootings, mostly in America — later deleted the claim. The site appears to be an “aggregator,” which often publishes fake claims designed to go viral.
Channel3 Now registered under a Lithuanian domain in 2023, and British media has reported that it “has a single named author, called James Lawley, whose LinkedIn account states that he owns a gardening company in Nova Scotia, Canada… and the site is routed through a Massachusetts-based service that anonymizes website ownership details.”
Like the EU, Britain has been struggling with an influx of migrants for several years. As of June 2023, net migration to the country over the preceding 12 months was 685,000 people, with the top five non-EU nationalities being Indian (253,000), Nigerian (141,000), Chinese (89,000), Pakistani (55,000), and Ukrainian (35,000), according to official figures.
