The right has created a false reality – fuelled by toxic images delivered straight to your phone | Jason Okundaye

After a week of violence and discord, this is clear: some politicians know images supersede inconvenient facts. And Labour has no good response

W hen voters in Makerfield head to the polls next week, their decision, as is increasingly the case across the nation, may come down to this: whether to be more swayed by a hopeful vision of the UK or by a narrative that defines the country as little more than the most shocking thing they have seen on their phone that day.

That quandary has been sharpened by something that has quietly become a regular fixture of social media: members of the public are now consistently fed a stream of exceptional images and videos that once might have only been seen by investigators or from the inside of a courtroom. It is so regular that it has become banalised, whether it’s of robbers smashing up a jewellery shop, or of extreme and graphic assaults akin to snuff films.

Much of this is broadcast in real time from the phones of bystanders. That includes the horrific footage out of Belfast this week, of a Sudanese refugee alleged to have carried out a knife attack on a white man, gleefully circulated on X by the likes of far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Considerations of the decency of sharing such footage, of how the circulation of graphic, violent crime images can indignify and rob victims of bodily agency, are nullified by what are considered greater political priorities: to identify and profile the ethnic violence that is supposedly tearing the fabric of the nation. And here, the result of an extreme incident of violence was racist riots – droves of meticulously organised masked fascists in Belfast who already had “hitlists” of the homes of migrants and ethnic minorities and set to burn them down.

That knife-attack image is potent. In solidarity protests in Southampton, the scene of riots over Henry Nowak’s murder last week, it is illustrated on banners. It has perfectly landed within a pre-existing online visual language that has, for some time, cast the United Kingdom as in decline, and besieged by “invaders”, with ordinary white people betrayed by the state that was meant to protect and privilege them.

What is that visual language? It can be summarised by the ubiquitous “Yookay” meme, an emblem of urban decline as supposedly accelerated by multiculturalism. It is of selective crime clips posted by far-right accounts and crime news aggregators on X such as @CrimeLdn; AI-generated images of migrant men assaulting white women or replacing iconic British buildings with large mosques; fake videos of young black men in balaclavas, “roadmen” , distributing machetes in the House of Commons – all of this is consolidated by conspiratorial claims of state cover-up, purported images of what the powers that be do not want you to see about the real state of the UK. So what happens when real, but isolated, footage of such crime lands on your feed is that it both feels indistinguishable from, and reaffirms, the slop content and narrative that has already been pushed and established.

Perhaps the mobs in Belfast did not need the direction of online agitators to respond so aggressively to this incident. Nonetheless, politicians of the hard right seize on such images to foment disorder. Where responsible politicians would not so casually circulate such violent imagery, the likes of Reform UK’s Nigel Farage and Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe say, come, Britain, come and see how you have been betrayed by the state. It echoes the conviction of Enoch Powell, when he said, in 1968, that allowing a growing immigration population “is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”.

With a screenshot of the incident, Lowe simply writes, “ Millions must go ”, while Farage, resharing the image via the rightwing-aligned news aggregator Politics UK ( co-owned by a Reform councillor ), says “the authorities must reveal the identity and status of the attacker immediately. The public are entitled to the truth” – a truth that, it must follow, is repeatedly being concealed from you. Reform’s spokesperson for home affairs, Zia Yusuf tells you what your eyes must believe: that “the horror of what you have seen in Belfast is a direct result of treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy” (policy partly overseen, of course, by Reform grandees Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, both Conservative ministers in the Home Office when the alleged attacker was granted leave to remain).