Belfast: Censor First, Govern Never

Following two nights of serious rioting in the Northern Irish capital — sparked by a knife attack by a Sudanese migrant that left a local man partially blinded — Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood before the cameras and declared the unrest “racist hooliganism.” Media regulator Ofcom, meanwhile, issued a pointed letter to social media platforms reminding them of their obligations under the Online Safety Act. The message from Westminster was unmistakable: control the narrative, suppress the footage, silence the anger.

It is a response that should alarm anyone who believes in open discourse — regardless of where they stand on immigration.

Let us be honest about what happened. An Irishman was almost beheaded by an African immigrant. He lost an eye. Video of the assault circulated online, and people — already simmering with years of unaddressed frustration — erupted. But to treat the riots purely as a law-and-order problem, or worse, as a misinformation problem to be solved through censorship, is to mistake the symptom for the disease.

A young Belfast man’s interview, viewed millions of times before the platforms could scrub it, cut through the government’s framing with uncomfortable clarity. “It’s the government’s fault,” he said. “The government has created this chaos by not listening to the people.” Evidently, many share this view. Across working-class communities in Northern Ireland and beyond, the sense is palpable that London neither understands nor particularly cares about the daily realities people face. That resentment did not emerge from social media. It was built, carefully and methodically, by years of dismissal by an aloof ruling clique.

This is where Starmer’s response becomes not just tone-deaf but actually downright dangerous. By labelling the rioters racists and threatening to police online speech, the government does precisely what it accuses the rioters of doing — it refuses to engage with complexity. The protesters are not a monolith. Among them, undoubtedly, are opportunists. But there are also frightened people, grieving people, people who feel that the social contract has been broken and that no legitimate channel remains to express it. Calling them all hooligans and throttling their speech does not make them go away. It radicalises everyone further.

The parallels with Southport in 2024 are not incidental — they are instructive. After three girls were killed in a knife attack, the government’s response followed the same playbook: condemn the protests, arrest the tweeters, signal virtue while avoiding accountability. Between 1,200 and 1,800 people were ultimately arrested for online posts in the weeks that followed. The underlying causes of the unrest — legitimate anxieties about public safety, about the pace and management of migration, about who bears the social costs — went unaddressed. And so the anger calcified.

A government that genuinely trusted its own record on immigration, public safety and community cohesion would not fear open debate. It would welcome it. The rush to censor is, in this sense, its own confession: an admission that the official account cannot survive scrutiny.

None of this is to justify violence, or to romanticise riots as political expression. It is simply to insist on an elementary truth: grievances do not vanish when you delete the posts that articulate them. They deepen, and they find other outlets.

The question Starmer should be asking is not how to silence the people in the streets — but why they are there in the first place.