Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, wishes it to be known that he has canceled his summer vacation after all. Instead of dozing by the pool somewhere in the Mediterranean, the Labour leader will be working from home at Chequers, the prime ministerial grace-and-favor mansion outside London, as he tries to clear up after the worst outbreak of rioting in Britain in over a decade. The situation is so serious that his spokesman assured the media that Starmer will not be “working from home” in the way that most people do it, or like President Joe Biden does when he goes to his Delaware house and is photographed sleeping in a beach chair. Starmer will actually be working.

There is a lot of work to do. Labour won a landslide electoral victory on the Fourth of July. Little more than a month later, the honeymoon is over. Britain’s long-brewing crisis over immigration, Islamism, and crime has boiled over. Labour is not solely responsible for this toxic brew. From 2010 to 2024, the Conservatives were in power and continued the high-immigration policies that Tony Blair’s Labour government initiated in 1997. But Labour sought power and won it in July, so Labour owns the problem in August and for the next five years.

Some riots are premeditated. Much of the violence around the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was scripted on social media and even performed for it. Britain’s Black Lives Matter protesters took this fantasy to its illogical conclusion, mimicking the American chant “Hands up, don’t shoot!” as they confronted unarmed police officers. The same street theater has prompted the violence at “pro-Palestinian” protests since Oct. 7 in Britain as in the United States. Real riots surprise everyone, including the rioters. This organic and spontaneous rioting is what happened in Britain after a man with a knife murdered three girls, aged 6, 7, and 9, on July 29. 

From the start, however, the Labour government has attributed the rioting to organized sedition by the “far right.” Most of the old media have echoed this line and joined the government in identifying new media, and especially Elon Musk’s X, as the instigators. This is a familiar narrative. In June 2016, opponents of Brexit blamed Russian influence and online “disinformation” for the voters’ decision to withdraw Britain from the European Union. Later that year, the same claims attended the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Now as then, disinformation certainly exists. But now as then, there is no conclusive evidence to support any of these claims.

This has not stopped Labour from trying to stifle public debate by declaring the public’s legitimate concerns about immigration and crime to be fascist and racist, which is what “far right” means if it means anything these days, or from calling for Musk’s prosecution as an enemy of democracy. Not content with demonizing much of the British people and declaring war on an American social media company, the prime minister and the police have warned the British people that they face prosecution for expressing the wrong opinions online. This is the biggest peacetime threat to free speech in modern British history and an ominous indicator of the government-driven attack on free speech across the liberal democracies, the U.S. included. 

On July 29, a man wielding a knife attacked a Taylor Swift-themed children’s party at Southport, near Liverpool. He murdered three girls, aged 6, 7, and 9, and wounded eight more children and two adults before he was arrested. As a crowd of angry locals gathered, the police refused to name or describe their suspect. They insisted his identity should remain private as he was under 18, a minor in British law. They, however, described him as a Welshman.

The Welsh are famous for mining, rugby, and singing. With the police withholding critical information, the mob at Southport, and a larger army of social media users, decided the murderer was of immigrant and Muslim background. This, a court confirmed three days later, was half correct. He was Axel Rudakubana, the Welsh-born son of immigrants from the almost entirely Christian country of Rwanda. He was not, as it was suggested on social media, a Muslim asylum-seeker. Unlike, say, Ahmed Alid, the Moroccan asylum-seeker who last October murdered a 70-year-old white man in the northeastern town of Hartlepool by stabbing him in the back with two knives because he was angry about the fighting in Gaza and who told detectives that he would have preferred to have gone out with a machine gun. 

Over the next several days, similar racist and anti-Muslim rioting broke out in other cities in northern England and the Midlands and in Belfast in Northern Ireland. Counter-mobs of Muslims took to the streets, often because the government and media had warned that the “far right” was about to invade neighborhoods in dozens of cities. These invasions never transpired, but the Muslim mobs beat and stabbed white people anyway. 

The riots fizzled out after a week. The police were getting tough, and the prime minister was warning that the courts would give the maximum sentences. Riots that go on for months are not spontaneous riots so much as a premeditated campaign of civil disorder, designed to advance a specific political program. Genuine riots usually run out of steam once the rioters have ruined their own neighborhoods or tire of attacking their neighbors or find, like cricket players, that “rain stops play.” 

The Labour government insisted from the start that the riots were premeditated and digitally manufactured. The violence had just begun when Starmer attributed them to the “organized, violent thuggery” of the “far right.” He offered no evidence for this. Nor did the prosecution at the trials that ensued. 

More than 1,000 people were arrested, and more than 500 were charged by Aug. 13. Exemplary sentences have been given for atrocious crimes such as attacking a mosque and trying to set fire to a hotel that housed migrants. But no one sentenced was shown at trial to be a member of a far-right organization. Some of them were clearly under the influence of alcohol and drugs. The youngest to be convicted was a 12-year-old boy. No one was shown in court, and no one was shown since, to have been influenced by racist material, in real life or on social media. 

Stacey Vint was one of six rioters jailed for taking part in “an organized and large scale act of public disorder” in the economically depressed northeastern city of Middlesbrough. Vint is a 34-year-old single mother with a history of drug and alcohol problems. She lately escaped from a 14-year abusive relationship and was homeless for a while before being put up by the local council in a hotel. On Aug. 4, she met up with some friends and got intoxicated. In the late afternoon, she charged at a police line with a wheeled trash can, injuring none of them and planting her face on the road. The judge conceded that Vint was not a racist and gave her 20 months in jail.

Others have been prosecuted for online statements that violated Britain’s speech laws against “hate” and “incitement.” Some have been jailed. Again, no one has been shown to have instigated real-world acts of violence. They have been convicted of illegal speech acts or, as Starmer calls them, “online violence.”

Jordan Parlour is a 28-year-old from another northern city, Leeds. When the riots began, Parlour wrote on Facebook that “every man and his dog should smash the f*** out of Britannia hotel,” a Leeds hotel accommodating more than 200 asylum-seekers. A mob broke the hotel’s windows during the riots. Parlour was unable to attend as he had broken his heel.

“The initial post received six likes,” Judge Guy Kearl said as he sentenced Parlour to 20 months for “publishing written material intended to stir racial hatred.” “However, it was sent to your 1,500 Facebook friends and, because of your lack of privacy settings, will have been forwarded to friends of your friends. The messages were therefore spread widely, which was plainly your intention.”

None of the six people who “liked” Parlour’s post has been charged with a real-world offense. No evidence suggested that Parlour’s post incited any of his 1,500 Facebook friends to commit crimes or if they forwarded it to someone who decided after reading it to riot at the Britannia Hotel. Parlour was convicted for “intent” alone, including learned suppositions about whether he intended to leave his privacy settings open.

Parlour’s post was an incitement to violence, but it said nothing about race. His other Facebook expositions on migrants show an unsteady grasp of grammar but an ecumenical disgust. He seems to dislike them regardless of creed or color, on economic grounds: “They are over here given a life of Riley off the tax of us hard-working people earn when it could be put to better use … come here with no work visa, no trade to their name and sit and doss.” If this is “far right,” then so are most British people. So are most Europeans. And so are most Americans. 

If you are the rookie prime minister of a state whose inhabitants are at one another’s throats, you might have more pressing problems than feuding with one of the world’s richest men. Especially when he owns the world’s largest news site. Though the amateur economist Parlour shared his thoughts on Facebook, Labour, the police, and much of the media are not calling for Mark Zuckerberg’s head. Instead, they are blaming Musk, rocketman and proprietor of X, who predicts “civil war” in England. 

In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, who published a novel in the first year of the Trump presidency in which Trump was assassinated, alleged that Musk bears “direct guilt” for inciting the violence. Humza Yousaf, the ex-first minister of Scotland who complained in 2020 that there were too many white faces in Scotland’s high offices, called Musk a “dangerous race baiter who must be held to account for his actions.” 

“I dare that scumbag to sue me,” Musk posted in reply. “Legal discovery will show that however big a racist he’s been in public communications, he is vastly worse in private communications.”

Musk has said he bought the platform because he wants to protect free speech. He also said he believes the “woke mind virus,” spread by social media, “killed” his son by convincing him that he was a girl called Vivien. Starmer is the kind of sophisticate who thinks a woman can have a penis. Labour’s members of Parliament are deaf to Islamist incitement in their voting base and positively enthusiastic about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish marches that have taken over the center of London most weekends since Oct. 7. They are outraged, however, by the suggestion that sex is determined by chromosomes, not surgery, hormones, or “self-identification.”

It’s no accident that Starmer and Musk are on opposite sides of the transgender debate and no accident that the obscure confusions of a tiny minority have become the central issue in the culture war. To believe you can overcome your chromosomes and become someone else is to assert plasticity without limit. It is the supreme privilege of what the late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity,” the digital flux in which all identity becomes shallow and fluid. 

The modern Left believes in self-identification not just for confused teenagers but for entire nations. Labour is trying to transition, as the doctors say, Britain from a culturally homogenous, nominally Christian, and almost entirely white society into a racially varied, culturally fractured, and heavily Islamic society that, on current birthrates and immigration rates, is predicted to become majority nonwhite toward the end of this century. The same is happening in other Western European countries.

Nations have appeared and disappeared in history before. Perhaps this is how the English will fade out of history. It is clear that most of them do not want this future, but no British politician has any suggestions for how to avoid it. This puts the people and their government in a faceoff. The vast majority of people are revolted by random violence against Muslims: In a YouGov poll taken during the riots, only 7% endorsed the violence. But 42% thought the protests were justified, and 58% had “sympathies” with “peaceful protests.” A sizable majority, 67%, said they believe “immigration policy in recent years” bears “responsibility” for the rioting.

On Aug. 7, Stephen Parkinson, who holds Starmer’s old job as director of public prosecutions, said the crime of “incitement to racial hatred” involves “publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or is likely to start racial hatred.” Parkinson said that reposting footage of riots “potentially” committed that crime. One British police chief even suggested that the long arm of the law would reach all the way to the U.S.

In the age of social media, it is impossible to engage in democratic discourse without reposting footage, offering opinions on crucial issues, or even reposting or repeating erroneous information in good faith. In the age of mass immigration and cultural breakdown, however, these democratic exercises are considered too dangerous, too “divisive,” too likely to provoke sectarian and ethnic tension. Britain’s police and government feel that the stability of society requires the suppression of debate. The Conservatives passed the Digital Services Act in 2022 to do just this. Labour now talks of expanding it.

Labour also now talks of criminalizing “Islamophobia.” Critics of the draft proposal say it defines Islamophobia so expansively that any criticism of Islam or Muslims might be construed as insulting or a threat to public order. It is becoming too risky to apply the law equally within Europe’s balkanized jurisdictions. Societies divided into hostile factions can only be managed by playing favorites. This “two-tier policing” is what the British did with their Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh subjects in their Indian empire. It is what the British did with their black and white subjects in South Africa and with their Protestant and Catholic subjects in Northern Ireland. It is how the British now manage postcolonial Britain and how the Democrats manage their restive coalition in the big cities.

While illegal immigration and serious crime are out of control in Britain, Parkinson, the state prosecutor, warns the British that “dedicated police officers” are “scouring social media” for “insulting or abusive” material so they can “follow up with identification, arrests and so forth.” But the insult is often in the eye of the beholder, and legal definitions are not stable across jurisdictions. 

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On Aug. 12, Musk marked Trump’s return to X by hosting a chat. Thierry Breton, the unelected enforcer of the EU’s own repressive digital speech code, the Digital Services Act, warned Musk that X would be liable for “the amplification of harmful content” that might “generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security.” 

Musk, to his credit, exercised his rights under the First Amendment by replying with an obscene meme from the movie Tropic Thunder. If he were a British subject or a citizen of the EU, he could be prosecuted for disturbing the peace. If that is peace, it is the peace of the grave. And that is where Europe’s leaders, and plenty of their Democratic friends in the U.S., wish to inter free speech.