People are rioting over the state of Britain – not Southport, says Tory peer
People took part in riots because of the state of the country and not over the killings of three girls in Southport, a Tory peer has claimed.
Craig Mackinlay said those involved in violent disorder across the UK after the killings of three young girls in Southport are not limited to extremists.
Mr Mackinlay, who lost his arms and legs to sepsis last year, was nominated for a peerage by Rishi Sunak in the dissolution honours after standing down as an MP at the election.
While the nationwide riots were organised by the far-Right, the 57-year-old said that “normal people” were attending to voice their dissatisfaction with the state of the country.
Speaking to GB News, Mr Mackinlay said: “If the far-Right are that good at organising things, then they’re far better at organising things than any political party or government that I know in the UK, so I actually don’t believe it fully.
“There’s always going to be some nutters and they should be dealt with very robustly. And they should be in prison where appropriate, I’m fully in favour of all of that.
“But if you look at some of these rallies that are going on, there are lots of couples [at] these rallies that you’d expect to go and see in The Dog and Duck on a Friday afternoon. These are normal people.”
The disorder started with a riot promoted by far-Right activists in Southport the day after the stabbings of three girls aged six, seven and nine.
A mosque was targeted by a mob following the spread of false rumours online that the suspect was an asylum seeker who arrived in Britain last year on a boat.
Mr Mackinlay argued that the riots had not been solely motivated by the Southport killings and were instead linked to wider social issues.
“This is almost one of those moments where I think a lot of people have said, forget what Southport was actually all about. It actually made people rather annoyed about the state of Britain today.”
The former MP went into septic shock on Sep 28 last year and Kati, his wife said she had been told his chances of survival were five per cent at best.
He subsequently had all of his limbs amputated, with replacement multifunctional hands costing him £100,000 through a private company.
Admitting he cannot defend the Conservatives’ record on mass migration or welfare while in office, Mr Mackinlay said record numbers of arrivals had worsened the worklessness crisis.
“We’ve got the boats and illegal migration, and then you’ve got the enormous numbers of legal migration and I’m not proud of it. I’ve never supported it, and I’ve been very robustly against all of these vast numbers that have been coming in.
“I’ve made a very easy connection. We have 9.4 million people in this country who are of working age, who are economically inactive. Surely, we’ve got a pool of workers available domestically to actually fill the jobs that are available.
“We’ve still got a very buoyant economy. I’m not going to defend the outgoing government on what they did on DWP [the Department of Work and Pensions] or immigration.”
Mr Mackinlay added that he will continue to chair the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, a group of MPs and peers he leads which scrutinises the Government on green issues, as a peer.
“The Net Zero Scrutiny Group will continue. We had a number of peers in it before.
“I intend it to continue – and perhaps even stand it up with some external funding – if we can fund it as a proper group, to actually tell the story to new parliamentarians about why the current thinking is so woolly and so wrong and so costly, and there’s a better way of doing this.”