When Morgan McSweeney was hired by Barking and Dagenham to defeat the BNP, he entered a world of resentment, rumour and mistrust. Antagonism between locals and newcomers was at a high-pitch; rumours about two-tier treatment were being fanned by the extremists and the Labour council seemed entirely powerless to do anything about it. A little over a decade and a half later, McSweeney, now the Prime Minister’s most trusted aide, finds himself facing the same challenge — only this time across the whole country.
Until McSweeney arrived, the council had been fighting the problem by publishing “rebuttal” books for the residents. Facts and figures were being churned out to debunk the idea that the estates of Barking were getting dirtier and dangerous. In fact, according to the pamphlets, they were actually clean and tidy. The trouble was, no one took any notice. The leaflets were binned; the facts and figures disregarded. The BNP, meanwhile, was loudly blaming the state of the place on immigrants and their accusations had a receptive audience.
McSweeney knew the political response needed to change. The residents were right that their estates had deteriorated, but they were wrong about the immigrants — the council was to blame. The only way to defeat the BNP’s racism, therefore, was to change the leadership. It wasn’t just a question of what was being said but who was saying it, McSweeney concluded.
Influential in McSweeney’s strategy about how to tackle the BNP was the book by American behavioural economist Cass Sunstein, On Rumours: How falsehoods spread, Why we believe them, What can be done. “Terrible events produce outrage,” Sunstein writes, “and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumours that justify their emotional states.”
It’s unsettling reading the book in the wake of the riots, which were inflamed by false rumours about the horrific murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class. Shortly after the attack, social media accounts began spreading speculation that the murder was a muslim immigrant who arrived illegally. As Sunstein spells out, some rumours are particularly powerful because they both rationalise the incomprehensible and relieve our “primary emotional urges” of horror and fury by offering an explanation for why we feel as we do.
The inexplicable horror of the knifing of those children as they danced with their friends is so hard to reckon with that the urge to find something to explain it is understandably overwhelming. It is not only the far Right who are susceptible to rumours at such a moment, we all are. It’s just that different groups believe different rumours.
We are particularly vulnerable today because rumours now “cascade” through our social media networks at vast speed, building momentum as they circulate. Sunstein’s book describes the danger of such cascading rumours, which turn private rage into public violence. “When we are individually inclined to believe that unfairness has occurred, our discussion will intensify our beliefs and make us very angry,” he writes.
But the problem for those in power right now is that, as Sunstein points out, there are few obvious lessons for what to do. Simply denying a rumour, for example, often has the effect of making people believe the rumour even more intensely. Imagine a politician calling a press conference to say there is no need to worry about the safety of pork sausages. Most people’s natural reaction would be to assume there must in fact be a problem — otherwise why the fuss?
The important point that Sunstein stresses throughout, however, is that false rumours only tend to take hold when they align with “prior convictions”. This means that the lie circulating about the Southport murderer’s background was not actually the most important trigger for these riots — that would be the rioters’ prior beliefs.
The irony here, then, is that the understandable desire to blame Elon Musk or Tommy Robinson for fanning the flames comes from an emotional place located close to that original desire to find a wider explanation for the knife attack. To blame Musk or even Vladimir Putin “rationalises and relieves” the fears many of us now feel about the scenes of disorder we’ve witnessed. For the majority of Britons who are appalled at the violence, the story that it is somebody else’s fault is an attractive explanation, especially if the strings are being pulled from abroad. This also helps explain why there are ever more instances of people not only blaming bad billionaires and thuggish individuals but also “the Zionists”. For these antisemites, no amount of explanation, fact-checks or lectures will convince them that the riots are not part of some wider sinister plot.
And people will do almost anything not to change their already-held beliefs. “A great deal of work demonstrates that people try to reduce cognitive dissonance by denying claims that contradict their deepest beliefs,” as Sunstein puts it. This is just as true for those he calls “the sensibles” as “the unreasonables”. For the unreasonables, the extraordinary turnout for the anti-fascist marches on Wednesday will not disabuse them of their core belief that they are in the silent majority. For the sensibles, meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance lies in dealing with what my colleague Aris Roussinos called the “ethnic conflict” evident in some of the rioting.
Similarly, the prior beliefs of the rioters help to explain why the discredited initial rumour about the attacker’s background has been so quickly replaced by a second grievance: the apparent “two-tier” justice in the UK. As this accusation has risen in prominence, Keir Starmer has sought to head it off. And yet, just as Sunstein describes, the fact that Starmer has denied the charge has only served to confirm it for many people.
The danger for the Government today is that it repeats the mistakes of Barking and Dagenham Borough Council by doubling down in its attempt to disprove people’s beliefs with facts and figures. Sunstein shows that even exposing people to “balanced information” doesn’t work and in fact only makes people more committed to their original belief.
To illustrate his point, he cites a study involving opinions on the death penalty. “After reading the opposing studies, both sides reported that their beliefs had shifted toward a stronger commitment to what they thought before they had done so.” In other words, we are now likely to see a hardening of attitudes in the UK among on the one side, those who believe multiculturalism is some kind of threat and on the other those who believe it is those who oppose multiculturalism who are the threat.
As McSweeney understood back when he was in Barking, the key thing is not what is being said, but who is saying it. The fact that Starmer has already been labelled “two-tier Keir” and — according to polls — is not thought to have handled this crisis well, should alarm the Government. The danger is not that the rioters have stopped listening to him — after all, they are criminals and should be in jail. The danger is that a much wider cohort of people stops listening to him.
The most important lesson McSweeney took away from Barking, though, and the most difficult for Starmer, is to prove that the state works for everyone, even when there’s no money. It’s a far bigger task than defeating the BNP in Barking.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/