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When I watched tv as a kid and a crime was reported on the news I’d tense - praying the suspect was not Black. Why? Because the negative stereotyping of Black people back then was the done
thing. Anything reinforcing those labels crystallised the false fears that the xenophobes were hell-bent to pushing. We are back there now because of Reform and the Far Right who are
determined to do the very same thing. We are there because a Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s repurposing of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech has helped to fuel it. We are back
there now because of the systematic attempts of the extremists in plain sight, determined to frame everyone non-white as a danger to you and this country. The racists and xenophobes want to
dress us all up as threats to be feared and fought against. So the speed with which the police revealed the details of a 53-year-old white man, charged after a car was driven through crowds
at last week’s Liverpool parade, is significant. They did it to get ahead of the liars and troublemakers on social media who would have poured the poison into the breach if, as in the past,
the particulars of the suspect had been withheld. The police did it because they knew that without those important facts, the misinformation specialists would have sparked the kind of
violence which saw Black and Brown people indiscriminately beaten in the streets after Southport last summer. It was falsely claimed last July that the three young girls killed had been
attacked by an illegal immigrant. The lie was amplified millions of times on social media before it could be proven untrue. By then the damage had been done. It is a damning indictment on
our society that releasing a person’s ethnicity immediately will now have to remain a strategy for UK law enforcement going forward. But when high profile commentators and politicians remain
determined to lie and misrepresent the truth as so many are doing on a day to day basis, police have no choice. Starmer revealed in January that the government would look to plug the
information vacuum that allowed the blitz-stirrers to wind people up last summer. But it beggars belief too that there is only calm on our streets because the person held after last week’s
Liverpool horror - the facts of which have traumatised us all - is not Black. We’ve gone back to the future. We are back to the days when extremists in the seventies put out leaflets
warning: “if you desire a coloured for your neighbour vote Labour”. You wouldn’t now suddenly think negatively of every 53-year-old white man but the racist agitators on social media want
you to judge every Black or Brown person on the basis of what any single person is suspected of.