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.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe