“The British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing,” the Spectator’s Douglas Murray told former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson. The comment might sound like a response to the recent riots, but was actually recorded last year (the edited clip of the old interview was uploaded on Anderson’s website last week, but has since been taken down).

By “these people”, Murray meant immigrants. “I don’t want them here,” he insisted. “I’m perfectly willing to say that, because it needs to be said.” The police, Murray argued, had lost control of the streets and “if the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves, and it’ll be very, very brutal.” The comments might sound like a prescient warning. They sound also like a dangerous apology for the violence.

It is worth recalling how the disorder began. In response to the horrific killings of three young girls in a dance class in Southport, many leapt to the conclusion that the murderer was a Muslim who had arrived on a small boat across the Channel. This bigoted speculation became the starting point for insisting the tragedy arose from “uncontrolled immigration” and from the refusal of immigrants to integrate.

The first “protest” was outside Southport mosque, windows smashed and a wall demolished. Even after the alleged killer was allowed to be named as Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to devoutly Christian migrants from Rwanda, protesters continued to target mosques, set fire to migrant hostels, assault black or Asian passersby. And many commentators continued to present it as the inevitable outpouring of rage against the “liberal elite”.

Liberal commentators have often been chastised, correctly, for treating working-class........

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