New Zealand's far-right responds to UK violence

On YouTube, the local far-right is energised by events in the UK

Scenes from rioting in Southport. Credit: StreetMic LiveStream

Over the past week far-right riots have spread across the United Kingdom following a mass stabbing in Southport, Merseyside. Misinformation about the stabbing spread quickly on Twitter, giving a false name for the attacker and claiming he was a refugee and a Muslim. (The alleged assailant was born in the UK to Rwandan parents, and is not Muslim. Police are not treating the incident as terrorism). After his purchase of the platform in 2022, Elon Musk reinstated the accounts of numerous far-right figures who had previously been permanently banned, including Tommy Robinson. Robinson was quick to fan the flames of hatred when unrest first broke out. “Anger is justified” in Southport, he claimed,  because the British authorities had supposedly “opened our borders,” resulting in “children being butchered and murdered.”

Robinson is one of a number of figures who act as “weathermakers”, according to Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, a UK based anti-fascism organisation. These weather makers inspire people to take ad-hoc action. The organisation Robinson once led, the English Defence League, is long defunct. Organised groups are no longer needed on the far-right, instead, loosely online networks, what Laurie Penny has called “gig-economy fascism” can lead to the kind of violence we’ve seen in the UK this month, or, for that matter, the violence we saw in Christchurch in 2019.

The modern far-right is global. While social media feeds filled with images of burning buildings and reports of violence against people assumed to be Muslim, Lee Williams, probably Tommy Robinson’s biggest New Zealand based fan, took to YouTube with a video titled “Britain. It’s just a matter of when, not if, it explodes into civil war.” His video spread the same falsehoods that had been circulating on Twitter. 

“Police constable of Merseyside Police, I forget her name- I don't care, I have no respect for this woman at all. She comes out and says this 17 year old who lives in, I think it was Banks, in Lancashire, but is  originally from Cardiff- originally from Cardiff! So, Brits especially would say, he's Welsh. He's Welsh and he ran into the little girls party and started stabbing people up. Is his name Evans, or Jones, or Williams, or Griffiths or Owens? No, I'm not gonna say any names because the name I got the other day. We're not really sure if it's true. But the police are withholding his name, withholding information because, we know, we know, what he is. Because apparently he was shouting that phrase, when he was doing the stabbing, and the police cover it up, the state covers it up. State apparatus, they cover it all up.”

Williams is the most followed far-right YouTuber in New Zealand, and has been since 2019. His channel was started a few weeks before the terror attack on Al noor Masjid and the Linwood Islamic centre in Christchurch. In a video posted in the lead up to that event, he told a rally in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square that “These [Muslim] wives are just knocking out babies with baby factories you know, and vastly outnumber the birthrate of native populations. This is in every country in Western Europe.” In the descriptor for this video, Williams implored viewers to “Stand up, get out, say it as it is and be proud of doing your bit to save your country from Islamisation.”

The timing of this video in relation to the terrorist attack is likely what led to police visiting his home in Rolleston, a satellite town of Christchurch in the aftermath. Williams' video about this visit, titled “Two fully armed police visits in 5 days. They asked me if I was a Trump supporter. This is NZ now!” went viral on the global far-right, being viewed over 78,000 times and massively increasing his subscriber count. In the video he claimed the police were acting at the behest of ‘globalist’ politicians who are “destroying nations by mass migration of alien cultures that will not integrate – and they will, at some stage, dominate.”

Under his video about the events in Southport, he pinned a comment made by a follower; “Every country Islam has infested has always ended up in civil war. Tell me one that hasn't.” Comments continue in this vein. 

“YES MY FRIEND ISLAM IS A DEATH CULT and I am a second class citizen of NZ and you are a fighter for common sense”

“We too are being invaded. The population of Wellington has doubled in the last couple of years!” 

“Here in Blenheim we have been slammed with "refugees" all Muslim, of course”

“WE'RE NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO VOTE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS”

Another response came from Mike Allen, a man who six months after the Christchurch shooting posted a comment on Facebook threatening to destroy “mosque after mosque until I’m taken out” Williams responds, “Hey bud, get in touch on whatsapp”. Allen had his weapons confiscated by police following his 2019 Facebook post, but they were later returned to him. He remains a licensed firearms owner. On the night of August 4th 2024, not long before rioters set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers, Williams posted a two minute video titled “UK protests/riots are getting stupid. They're playing right into the hands of tyranny” that appeared to walk back on some of his civil war rhetoric.

“When people do what they are doing now, it's just, it's just not right. It's just not right. It's, yeah, It's going wrong now…you're playing right into the hands of Keir Starmer and the government, and the globalists who are really going to come down on everybody just because of the actions of a very few. You got it wrong fellas.”

One wonders how exactly Williams expected the civil war he was predicting to look like if not the violence now unfolding. In a text post made the next day though, he was back on form, talking about “mass uncontrolled migration” of “fighting age men” from Muslim majority countries. “I'm afraid the UK is now plunging headlong into civil war. The people have been ignored far too long. There's only one option left for them, or see their once green and pleasant land being completely transformed into you know full well what.” His next video elaborated further, making numerous hyperbolic claims about events in the UK and where they could lead.

“I haven't seen the videos because I'm not on Twitter but…I seen, or heard, from GB news and others other programs, Talk radio, outside a mosque the other day, many people gathered, native Brits, gathered outside a mosque in Stoke-on-Trent, and the police were there, and this is only what I have been told and just listening, reading between the lines, and many people came out of the of the mosque with machetes and knives, weapons of all sorts, and the police didn't do anything, just walked up to them and said ok, ‘can you please put your weapons back in the mosque, please?’ Can you imagine if the shoe was on the other foot? Can you imagine?”

His source for this claim appears to be a video from TalkTV, a conservative option orientated streaming platform. In the clip, one co-host says to the other, “but then I also saw videos of the police and it's something you posted on either- I retweeted you actually- the police saying to a group of Muslims outside of mosque who were tooled up ‘please’, you know, ‘we’re here to protect you please put your weapons back in the mosque’”. Local Stoke-on-Trent media quotes a statement from the CEO of the local City Centre Business Improvement District claiming both the groups involved in the clash around the Darul Falah mosque had weapons, but makes no mention of police asking weapons to be “put back” in the mosque. William’s next text post made the claim that “hundreds upon hundreds” of armed Muslims in Birmingham were “looking for anyone who looks native British.” In an august 5th video, titled “The UK is staring down the barrel of civil war not unlike the former Yugoslavia” he embellished further his theory that extreme violence from British Muslims was imminent. 

“I believe, just probably, maybe, not saying it is, but just maybe, containers loaded with weapons, all kinds of weapons are flooding into the UK, or probably even in the UK right now, and they are bound for a certain group- not native Brits, and at some stage the nod is going to be given to raid these containers by them groups and they're going to take major cities.”

Speculation piled on top of falsehoods. There is no credible evidence that containers of weapons are outside British cities awaiting “the nod” (from who exactly? Williams does not say) to begin an attack on “native Brits”. There’s a bitter irony in Williams’ Yugoslavia comparison. His only reference outside the title is a claim that the current unrest could lead to the “Balkanisation” of the UK. The actual breakup of Yugoslavia preceded genocidal violence targeting Muslim communities in Bosnia and Kosovo. There are parallels between Yugoslavia in the 1980s and the western world today. Much like the modern far-rights claims of a “white genocide” being imminent, Serb nationalists claimed a genocide against Serbs by Muslims in Bosnia and predominantly Muslim provinces of Serbia was a real possibility. In his 1998 book The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia Michael Sells writes: 

“By the time the Bosnian conflict began, the national mythology, hatred, and unfounded charges of actual genocide in Kosovo and imminent genocide in Bosnia had been shaped into a code: the charge of genocide became a signal to begin genocide”

What followed was a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The killing of over 8,000 men and boys in the town of Srebrenica was later ruled a genocide.

An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), published on August 6 2024, found that across nine groups on the messaging app Telegram dozens of posts featured either direct incitements to violence or instructions on how to commit acts of violence, such as instructions for building bombs, makeshift weapons and Molotov cocktails. The administrator of a group with 14,000 members called for a “Srebrenica 2.0”.

While YouTube guidelines prohibit misleading or deceptive content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm, at the time of writing all videos from Lee Williams mentioned above remain online. Google’s Australia and New Zealand press office has not responded to a request for comment. Comment has also been requested from New Zealand police. 

Further coverage of this story will be in Feijoa Dispatch in the coming weeks. This piece was only paywalled for 24 hours, then made free to read, because I believe it’s important it reaches a wider audience. Writing about the far-right has led to significant harassment which has hurt my ability to get a “normal” job. If you agree this kind of journalism is important, please consider a premium subscription.