Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
After a week of violence and discord, it is clear that some politicians know images supersede inconvenient facts, and Labour has no good response.
When voters in Makerfield head to the polls next week, their decision may come down to whether to be swayed by a hopeful vision of the UK or by a narrative defining the country as the most shocking thing they have seen on their phone that day.
This quandary has been sharpened by a regular fixture of social media: members of the public are consistently fed exceptional images and videos that once might have been seen only by investigators or inside a courtroom. It has become banalised, whether of robbers smashing up a jewellery shop or extreme, graphic assaults akin to snuff films.
Much of this is broadcast in real time from bystanders' phones, including horrific footage from Belfast this week of a Sudanese refugee alleged to have carried out a knife attack on a white man, gleefully circulated on X by far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Considerations of decency and victim dignity are nullified by greater political priorities: to identify and profile ethnic violence supposedly tearing the nation's fabric. The result was racist riots, with organised masked fascists in Belfast having hitlists of migrant homes and setting them ablaze.
That knife-attack image is potent. In Southampton solidarity protests, it is illustrated on banners. It has landed within a pre-existing online visual language casting the UK as in decline and besieged by invaders, with ordinary white people betrayed by the state.
This visual language can be summarised by the ubiquitous Yookay meme, emblematic of urban decline accelerated by multiculturalism. It includes selective crime clips posted by far-right accounts, AI-generated images of migrant men assaulting white women or replacing British buildings with mosques, and fake videos of roadmen distributing machetes in the House of Commons. All this is consolidated by conspiratorial claims of state cover-up. When real but isolated footage lands, it feels indistinguishable from the slop content and narrative already established.
Perhaps the mobs in Belfast did not need online agitators to respond aggressively. Nonetheless, hard-right politicians seize such images to foment disorder. Where responsible politicians would not circulate violent imagery, Reform UK's Nigel Farage and Restore Britain's Rupert Lowe say, come, see how you have been betrayed. It echoes Enoch Powell's 1968 conviction that allowing immigration is like watching a nation heap up its own funeral pyre.
With a screenshot of the incident, Lowe writes, Millions must go. Farage, resharing via Politics UK, says the authorities must reveal the attacker's identity and status immediately. Reform's Zia Yusuf says your eyes must believe that the horror in Belfast is a direct result of treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy, partly overseen by Reform grandees Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman.
The gift of all this is that in an image allegorising civic decline, politics comes pre-formed, sustained by the image's existence, with no need to articulate an argument. The hard right can then provide blunt-instrument policy: a total ban on visas from Sudan, says Yusuf; the death penalty returned, says Lowe.
Labour leaders have a much harder job. They can take no victory in net migration falling by almost half. People do not live by data. The hard right is provoked to reach for more extremes. You cannot feel fewer migrants entering the UK, but you can be roused by the image of one committing an atrocious act. You can be promised a more vicious border policy.
Starmer's national telling-off in response to Belfast racist rioters and his appeal for calm, though correct, cannot subdue the angered response from those who view that image and see loss of dominion. Presented with that image, defending diversity without caveat becomes impossible.
It is hard enough to convince people of unreality; harder still to convince them a singular reality can be unrepresentative. One image of real violence can overwhelm statistical evidence that violent crime is down. It exposes a structural disadvantage for liberal politics. The hard right can point to images and tell a straightforward story. Liberal politicians must choose between explaining context and embracing complexity, or allowing the hard right to gain ground. That is the difficult task awaiting whoever leads Labour.
In Makerfield, Andy Burnham jettisoned previous pro-immigration stances, wagering the pro-leave constituency would not take kindly to compassionate policy. But parroting legitimate concerns is easy. Far harder is what few centre-left politicians have developed an answer for: how to win against visual politics in our image-saturated hate economy. Burnham, or whoever leads, will have to find solutions fast.
