There are two types of patriot: the kind who fetishise flags and the kind who prioritise people. In the UK, thanks to a toxic coalition of grifters, politicians and the richest man in the world, the first kind are currently enjoying a period of unprecedented dominance over the second.
It took me years to fully understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he described patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”. As a child, a love for your country comes almost as naturally as a love of chocolate, and you simply don’t understand that some people will use it to camouflage conduct that is self-serving, or even treacherous. But in recent years, Johnson’s warning has come into ever sharper focus as foreign-sponsored attacks on our democracy have been amplified and accelerated by people who drape themselves in our flags while actively acting against the interests of our country.
The links between various events – from Covid conspiracies, to violence on our streets, to Sir Sadiq Khan’s Ulez, to arson attacks on Sir Keir Starmer’s former home – are not immediately obvious, but they are real and they are profoundly dangerous.
Reports this week that the men convicted of torching Starmer’s property had been recruited by Evgeny Lyukshin, a 23-year-old Russian diplomat with family links to the Kremlin, remain unconfirmed. Thanks to research by this newspaper and the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, there can be no doubt about the conspiracy theory which grew after the arrests of the men responsible. Or about the identity of the accounts and people who propelled an extraordinary lie into the heart of public discourse: namely, that the criminals were prostitutes seeking revenge on Keir Starmer over unpaid bills.
It’s worth reading the last sentence twice and reflecting on how utterly broken a system must be for such obvious nonsense to take hold. And take hold it did. Just two weeks after the fires, posts on Elon Musk’s X platform promoting the “rent boy” conspiracy theory had been viewed almost 18 million times. Inevitably,a far-right influencer who kicked things up a gearby sharing it is followed by Elon Musk, while his fanboy, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the serial criminal who prefers to be known as Tommy Robinson, was still disseminating it yesterday.
If the dots are not sufficiently joined for you yet, Yaxley-Lennon was to be found in Moscow last week with Musk’s father, Errol, a man infamous for fathering two children with his former stepdaughter (#ProtectOurWomen #SaveOurGirls).
If the flags hung uninvited from lampposts up and down the land represent the migration of online bigotry and xenophobia into the “real” world, then outwardly unrelated incidents in 2023, the year after Musk bought Twitter and began moulding it in his own image, should have warned us what was coming.
When the Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, extended the Ultra-Low Emission Zone to all of Greater London, the online-inspired response was hysterical. Not only were cameras vandalised in their hundreds while Yaxley-Lennon adjacent provocateurs railed against them, the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith reportedly described himself as “happy” with the idea of constituents sabotaging them.
An actual by-election was fought and won by the Tories on the single issue of the chaos and cost that the Ulez scheme was set to bring to Uxbridge and South Ruislip. A year later, the entirely confected – and frequently racist (the ethnicity and faith of Khan featured heavily in criticisms of the scheme) – controversy had dissipated entirely and the seat reverted to Labour.
Similarly, people do not end up organically believing that 5G phone masts cause Covid, or that “wokeness” is their enemy, or that the justice system is “two tier”, or that “cultural Marxism” underpins public policy. These are positions into which people are carefully and consistently pushed. And it is perilously hard to persuade them out again.
The playbook is almost as old as humanity, but the methods now being deployed are brand new: opportunists and oligarchs use moral panics and false accusations to stigmatise opponents while insisting that liberals and minorities are secretly controlling society from the shadows. They promote distrust and paranoia, seduce people with the promise of “secret” knowledge and then sit back and watch disaster unfold. Possibly from the luxury of a Moscow hotel.
Civil disobedience on our streets is the most obvious physical manifestation of the disinformation proliferating online, often sponsored by Kremlin associates, almost always amplified by Musk, exploited by politicians like Nigel Farage and JD Vance and monetised by the likes of Yaxley-Lennon. But stories like Starmer’s arson attack and Khan’s Ulez remind us that the process of destabilisation extends far beyond attempted pogroms and race riots.
The Government deserves great credit for this week’s ban on social media access for under-16s. Countless young people engage with technology in ways that hurt themselves and each other. Meanwhile, grown-ups are on the same platforms parroting and profiting from dangerous lies that harm our entire population and our country. And all while professing to be the real patriots.
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