The Southport Riots Cover-Up Committee

Sajid Javid has assembled a group of immigration apologists to investigate the causes of last summer’s Southport riots

In The Parasitic Mind, Professor Gad Saad coined the term “Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome” to describe how followers of an infectious ideology will reject evidence which challenges their received wisdom. It doesn’t take a sage to see that demographic and cultural change have stratified Britain into ethnic silos, sundered unspoken sentimental bonds, and eroded trust in institutions. But the members of a new Independent Commission on Community & Cohesion (ICCC), intending to investigate the “root causes” of collapsing social trust following last summer’s Southport murders and subsequent riots, look to have their ears full of sand. It emphasizes its “independence” to manufacture the impression that it is legitimate and good faith. But those chosen to participate in this “national conversation” by former Home Secretary, Sir Sajid Javid are the architects and unrepentant champions of mass immigration and multiculturalism, which have brought the country to the brink of imminent ethnic conflict.

The ICCC’s funding sources are opaque, but its secretariat is the Together initiative: co-founded by the husband of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, Brendan Cox. His sister-in-law is Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who brought forward the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) private members bill. Together is partnered with a number of state bodies, businesses, charities, and newspapers, including the BBC, NHS, National Lottery, National Fire Chiefs Council, UK Sport, Refugee Council, Royal College of Nursing, British Chambers of Commerce, Red Cross, ITV, the Mirror, and the Sun.

Other ICCC stakeholders include British Future, founded and run by former general secretary of the socialist Fabian Society, Sunder Katwala; and Belong – the Cohesion and Integration Network, which contributed to the 2024 Khan Review. Katwala is one of the ICCC’s commissioners, giving “the [Southport] riots, a shocking scene of racist disorder we haven’t seen in my lifetime” as the reason for his involvement. Before the ICCC have conducted their research, they have already ruled those participating in the unrest to be racists, and thereby illegitimate and immoral.

In September 2024, the three organizations co-authored a report called “After the riots”, recommending the government launch a “national cohesion strategy” to build “young people’s resilience to online misinformation and extremist narratives”; and for schools and Police and Crime Commissioners to “promote cohesion” and “foster good relations” by protecting ethnic and religious minorities, per their “duty required by the Equality Act 2010”. The groups sponsoring the ICCC’s response to Southport was to call for “The Government should continue to put pressure on social media companies” to censor online speech, and to pay “closer attention to anti-Muslim prejudice” by reconvening the Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group (a recommendation that Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner acted on, to generate a new definition of Islamophobia). They also characterized “Counter-protests [as], by contrast, large and predominantly peaceful.” This is despite a Dartford Labour Councilor threatening to “cut all their throats” of “disgusting Nazi fascists” demonstrating opposite; and mobs of Muslim men occupying roundabouts, slashing the tires of a Sky News van, intimidating a reporter on air, and lacerating the liver of a publican. This should dispel anyone of the illusion that the ICCC is interested in accurately assessing the causes of civil disorder, rather than preserving the status quo.

British Future has received £750,650 in government grants and contracts since 2021. Belong have received over £44,000 in government grants since 2023. They used this to sponsor a Muslim star-gazing group in Rochdale, host an Gaza and Israel Conflict Roundtable, and produce a report on community cohesion with councils in Bradford, Manchester, Calderdale, Kirklees, and Walsall — all districts blighted by Pakistani rape gangs. A previous report complained about white men’s “relative complacency about the seriousness of discrimination affecting others”, and demanded more state resources be poured into combating racism and Islamophobia. Belong is another patronage scheme to redistribute taxpayer funds to Muslim activists, and the ICCC appears to be a front for the state to launder its pre-formed conclusions through the pretense of independence and neutrality.

Alarm bells should ring upon hearing that Dame Sara Khan, the former government Counter-Extremism Commissioner, and Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience, is a member. Khan was appointed to the Home Office’s Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Working Group in 2005, following the 7/7 Bombings; and has presented herself as an authority on moderate Islam ever since. Her charity, Inspire, launched the #MakingAStand campaign supported by then-Home Secretary Theresa May. May later appointed Khan as the government’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, under then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd. A 2015 Home Office document, titled “Prevent Strategy: Local delivery best practice catalogue” referred #MakingAStand as a “RICU Product”.

RICU is the parent body of counter-extremism program Prevent, and manipulates media coverage and public perception in the aftermath of terror attacks. It uses “controlled spontaneity” events, flashmobs, photo-ops, hashtag campaigns, and prefabricated newspaper front-pages to contain public outrage and protect Islam from criticism. The image of a woman in a Union Jack hijab, produced for #MakingAStand, was published on the front page of The Sun newspaper on October 8th, 2014, after British aid worker Alan Henning was beheaded on video by ISIS. It was produced by Breakthrough Media, a communications company affiliated with the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the UK Home Office, to “promote the true face of Islam among vulnerable UK communities”. Emails procured by freedom of information access requests show RICU monitored online responses to the front page, calling it “our product”. Sara’s sister, Sabrina Khan, was deputy head of RICU at the time.

As government advisor, Khan published a review of “Threats to Social Cohesion and Democratic Resilience”, which omitted any mention of anti-white racial agitation by Black Lives Matter and militants such as Sasha Johnson. Khan referenced the “far right” more often than Islamists, despite Sir William Shawcross warning a year prior that “Islamist terrorism is currently the largest terrorist threat facing the United Kingdom”. Under the Khan sisters’ watch, Prevent deprioritized Islamist extremism, while becoming myopically obsessed with the “Extreme Right Wing”. Islamists remain responsible for 94% of all deaths and 88% of injuries caused by terrorism since 1999, and comprise 80% of Counter-Terror Police and 75% of MI5’s open caseload, and 63% of terrorists in custody. However, of the 6,922 referrals made to Prevent in 2023 – 2024, 1,314 were for rightwing extremism, and only 913 for Islamism

This trend led terrorists like Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana and Sir David Amess’ murderer Abi Harbi Ali to evade interventions. Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times between December 2019 and April 2021, but officers “prematurely” dismissed the threat he posed, and misspelled his surname on his second and third referrals. Ali met with officers at a McDonalds in Croydon on 6 November 2014, before having his case dropped with little follow up on 5th June 2015. Instead, Prevent was too busy redefining readers of The Lord of the Rings, Douglas Murray, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as “actively patriotic and proud” far-right extremists.

Last month, Prevent was condemned by the US State Department for classifying “Cultural nationalism” — the belief that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” — as an “extreme right-wing terrorism” ideology. A leaked RICU report, written after the Southport disorder, dismissed two-tier policing and the Pakistani rape-gangs scandal as a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”. Prevent guidance is, however, adamant that “Islamist should not be interpreted as a reference to individuals who follow the religion of Islam.”

The Home Office Islamic Network has grown to over 700 members, with one arguing Prevent is “inherently racist because it focuses on Islamist extremism”, before laughing at an ISIS recruitment video in a training seminar and saying “He used to go to my school! I know him!” Other members have blocked persecuted Christians fleeing forced conversion from claiming asylum, been convicted for taking bribes to overturn Muslims’ denied asylum applications, and intend to frustrate the process of proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, accusing Israel of “war crimes”. The broader Civil Service Muslim Network was suspended on March 15 2024, before being reinstated under the new Labour government. Member Sami Rahman repeated Hamas propaganda, described the war in Gaza as a “fight between good and evil”, and referred to Israel as Shaitan (Satan in Islam) during a webinar last year. As one whistleblower said, “an Islamic lobby group inside the Home Office [that] represents a serious threat to the Government’s aims in combating Islamic extremism and granting asylum to those fleeing Islamic countries over religious persecution”. That fifth column has established itself on Khan’s watch.

Last December, Khan co-authored a report alleging Britain “faces a chronic risk of democratic decline due to the spread of extremist narratives and conspiracies”, with the communist group HOPE Not Hate. While Khan was in charge, HOPE Not Hate received Home Office grants of £50,000 and £141,380 to “brief multiple departments… on emerging trends in UK hate”. The report advised the government to dedicate Cabinet Office resources to combatting online misogyny and Andrew Tate, while ignoring the threat of Jihadists in Britain’s midst. It dismissed “Cultural Marxism”, the “Great Replacement”, and the “Great Reset” as antisemitic conspiracy theories, without citations or engaging with opposing literature. Khan also wrote that “contemporary Far Right narratives on asylum seekers allude to them as ‘Muslim invaders’, with small boat crossings being characterised as an ‘invasion of fighting aged men’”, despite the Home Office knowing that people-smuggling networks use footage of British women filmed without consent, drunk and dressed immodestly by Islamic standards, to market their services to North African illegal migrants.

HOPE Not Hate have conspicuously evaded prosecution for spreading false information about acid attacks on Muslim women during the Southport riots, which led to armed Muslim militias taking to the streets and attacking British bystanders. Their operative, Harry Shukman used a fraudulent passport to entrap subjects of their documentary Undercover: Exposing the Far Right. Despite police complaints, Shukman was not charged. Though the Attorney General, Lord Richard Hermer condemned complaints about two-tier policing as “frankly disgusting” and “wrong”, HOPE Not Hate is a clear example that it exists. Perhaps Hermer finds the accusations so “offensive” because he worked at Searchlight magazine while HOPE Not Hate’s CEO, Nick Lowles was editor. Hermer was still part of Searchlight’s Research Associates team as late as 2016.

Not only has Khan been a handmaiden of the divided, febrile social environment she is being asked to investigate: she is also clearly not independent, as she was employed by the Home Office for twenty years. The same can be said of Javid himself: whose brother Bas was appointed boss of immigration enforcement at the Home Office in 2023. Sir Sajid’s own record is mixed. As Home Secretary, he stripped ISIS bridge Shamima Begum of British citizenship, on the grounds her return was “not conducive to the public good”. Former MP Douglas Carswell has proposed passing “Shamima’s Law”: using the precedent set by Javid to expel Islamic terrorists, grooming gang perpetrators, and unassimilable immigrants who renounce foreign nationality to frustrate deportation orders, but who would be eligible for citizenship elsewhere.

Javid also commissioned research into ethnicity data for the Pakistani rape gangs, and ignored now-Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s accusation that doing so “panders to the far-Right [and] increases the risk of violence and abuse against minorities across the country”. After Javid left the role, civil servants tried to block the release of the report; before distorting the data to present white men, rather than Pakistani and “Asian” offenders, as the perpetrators of grooming gangs. The report frequently cited Dr. Ella Cockbain, who wrote the subsequent Guardian article, “A new Home Office report admits grooming gangs are not a ‘Muslim problem’”, boasting that “a powerful modern racial myth has been exploded”. It has since been condemned in Baroness Casey’s audit for a conclusion that “does not seem to be evidenced in research or data”.

But Javid has demonstrated cognitive dissonance around the root cause of the rape gangs: mass immigration and multiculturalism. Writing about the ICCC in The Times, Javid and his co-chair, former Labour Communities Secretary Jon Cruddas say that “Beneath the surface lies a deeper shift: weakening trust, deepening polarisation, growing concerns about the scale and impact of immigration and a decline in our social connections.” But when the 2021 Census revealed that Britain’s largest cities are now minority white British, Javid responded, “So what?” He has not retracted his apathy about the impact that rapid, unwanted demographic and cultural change has on social trust. How can Javid be counted on to come to an evidence-based conclusion? How can Cruddas, when he collaborated with Nick Lowles of HOPE Not Hate on Home Office strategies to contain “culture wars around identity, religion, even welfare, race, Europe, [and] nationhood”?

Javid is joined in his indifference to demographic change by former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who denies the English exist as a distinct ethnic group to which the British owes its allegiance. Nelson downplayed the Boriswave of record net migration after Brexit, emanating largely from the third world, as “an accident, not a conspiracy” — as if some force of nature blew a million Indians to Britain’s shores over four years. Unfortunately for Nelson, the Migration Advisory Committee’s 2018 report cautioned Home Secretary Priti Patel against establishing the uncapped health and social care visa, and putting no restrictions on the numbers of dependents that primary visa recipients could bring. Patel insisted that more “living bridges” to the Indian motherland be allowed to live, work, and vote in Britain. But observing the inevitable consequence of this policy — that white Britons will become a minority by 2063 — will get you labelled an “unpalatable nativist” by Nelson. Having someone so insistent on denying concerns about immigration as Nelson renders the ICCC unqualified to assess and address the causes of the Southport riots.

Other members include former Mayor of the West Midlands, Sir Andy Street, who denied that Birmingham has “no-go zones”, and said “a lurch to the right [on immigration] would be really the wrong reaction to our current situation” by the Conservative party. Despite 90% of constituencies wanting immigration reduced, the topic was not mentioned in Street’s lengthy interview with the New Statesman in May. Former Leader and Co-Leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas is also involved. Lucas has repeatedly advocated for illegal immigrants to be granted citizenship en masse in Britain, and condemned Keir Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech as “absolutely vile and hugely offensive”.

Then there’s Lord Woolley of Woodford, founder and director of Operation Black Vote, and former chair of the Race Disparity Unit’s advisory group. In 2019, Woolley complained about a “shocking” lack of diversity among local councilors, and said “”When you have local authorities that are more diverse, more gender, more disabilities and more minorities, everybody wins because the nature of debate is more inclusive and dynamic.” This is not the case in Rotherham, Oldham, Bradford, and other districts where councils have made their “number one priority [to] preserve and enhance the Pakistani heritage community”, over protecting girls from predation by the rape gangs. Or David Halpern, who founded the Behavioural Insights Team (the Nudge Unit), combining psychology with state policy to coerce the public toward making specific choices — especially during COVID lockdowns. All commissioners demonstrate a reluctance or refusal to address the root cause of civil unrest, and complicity in contributing to public distrust in the state, ethnic and cultural divisions, and suppression of free speech as a catalyst to violence.

The ICCC seeks instead to discuss what Douglas Murray calls second-order issues, like “economic hardship, institutional mistrust and the siloisation and misinformation generated by social media”. These are corollaries, which exacerbate underlying tensions between the host majority and indigestible tribal minorities that would not exist if it had not been imported against the expressed wishes of the British electorate in the first place. When polled, 64% of British adults believe the UK’s immigration policy was responsible for the Southport riots; and 46% said “Immigrants and asylum seekers themselves”. But there is no appetite among the ICCC to revisit the failed false premises baked into the multicultural settlement. Instead, they seek to replicate Singapore’s top-down Diversity management strategy: reconfiguring the “whole of society” to “build a vision for communities across the nation that all British citizens can buy into”.

The ICCC is a waste of time and money. It will doubtless conclude that we need greater restrictions on free speech, and more taxpayers’ cash spent on grievance-mongering diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Its ideological priors preclude it from recommending sensible measures like repealing antiquated human rights laws, deporting foreign criminals and illegal immigrants, and prohibiting deleterious practices like cousin marriage. It will likely encourage further cooperation with sectarian groups, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, rather than banning them. It will only obscure the lateness of the hour we are in.

As Dominic Cummings and Professor David Betz keep warning, we are on a collision-course for civil war due to “a combination of culturally fractured societies, economic stagnation, elite overreach and a collapse of public confidence in the ability of normal politics to solve problems”. Government ministers and civil servants have been made aware of this in private briefings. Paul Collier and Robert Putnam provided conclusive social science on the deleterious effects of diversity on social trust and cohesion decades ago — and were ignored. “Dear elites,” Betz says, “the consequences of your actions have arrived.”

If our political class remains clod-eared to how their ideological priors have brought us to the brink, then violence will be “practically inevitable”. But this committee shows that the British state are ostriches all the way down.