Police on Merseyside, keen to avoid the vacuum which allowed the far right to decide who was responsible for the murders of three children in Southport last year, were much quicker to put information in the public domain following last night’s horrific incident in Liverpool.
Within two hours of a car driving into a crowd at Liverpool FC’s Premier League victory parade, Merseyside Police announced they had arrested a white British man, aged 53. At that point, police also said that the incident was not being treated as terrorism, hoping to stop any wild speculation leading into unrest, as happened last year.
Not that this stopped some of the right’s more dedicated conspiracy theorists. Ant Middleton, former TV presenter and putative Reform candidate for Mayor of London in 2028, weighed in on, inevitably, X, urging his 427,000 followers not to “believe anything that comes from police statements or the msm… Corruption runs deep and lessons were well and truly learnt from the not too distant past!
“God bless all the scousers and to all involved in this terrible ‘terror type’ incident, may strength be with you! You are in my prays [sic] this evening! Romans 8:26,” he added.
Pointed out to him that the suspect was a white Briton, Middleton – who himself has spent time in prison for the unlawful wounding of a male police officer and common assault on a female PC – responded: “It doesn’t matter his skin colour, it’s the motive behind why he done [sic] it. Which could be a number of things.
“This tactic being used multiple times as confirmed terror attacks who suggest it comes from that handbook and terror attack or not this should be treated primarily as suspected terrorist activity until proven otherwise.”
Meanwhile, Middleton’s Reform colleague and fellow noted national security expert Darren Grimes – formerly of GB News, now a Durham councillor – was irked by an initial BBC report that, with confirmation of the nature of the incident yet to come, labelled it a road traffic collision.
“Road traffic collision? Do the BBC know we’ve all seen the awful videos? I hope to Almighty God there is an explanation for what’s happened in Liverpool,” he wrote on X.
When it emerged that the suspect was white and British, Grimes complained: “Tonight has proven that the police can give out identifiable characteristics such as skin colour pretty damn fast when it suits the approved narrative.”
All very distasteful when people are still seriously injured in hospital. Still, those lucrative likes and reposts won’t harvest themselves.
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