Reform Supporters Drop Race Card After Learning Attacker Was White

A tragic attack, a flood of assumptions, and a silence that followed inconvenient truth

By Sean Ash

Today should have been a celebration in Liverpool. A Premier League title win, a victory parade, fans gathered in joy. But that celebration turned to horror when a car mowed down innocent civilians.

Before the facts were clear, Reform UK supporters and others on the far right rushed to social media. Not with thoughts for the victims. Not with concern or prayers. But with insinuation.

“Place your bets.”

“Probably one of the usual suspects.”

“Anyone got the ethnicity yet?”

“Religion of peace again?”

We have seen this script before. When tragedy strikes, the immediate instinct for some is to point fingers, always at minorities, always at outsiders. To them, every act of violence is another opportunity to reaffirm their biases.

But then came the truth.

A 53-year-old white British man.

Suddenly, the narrative collapsed.

The tone shifted fast. The same people who were fixated on identity now demanded that we stop talking about identity. “Why mention his race?” they cried. “Think of the victims!”

But just hours earlier, the victims were not their concern. The only thing on their minds was whether the attacker’s name would confirm their suspicions. The outrage was not about the horror of the act, it was about whether it could be used to justify a worldview.

Denise Perry’s message on X embodied the very hypocrisy on display. She lamented that no one was showing compassion for the victims, only celebrating that the attacker was “one of us.” But scroll back just a little, and you will find people like her itching to celebrate if it had turned out to be someone else, someone brown, foreign, or Muslim. It is not compassion she is mourning, it is the missed opportunity to weaponise tragedy. That is not British decency. That is tribalism, plain and ugly.

The real tragedy, beyond the injuries caused in Liverpool, is the revelation of just how quick many are to discard their so-called values when facts do not match their fantasies.

They want race to be invisible when the perpetrator is white. They want empathy to be universal, but only after their narrative collapses. Yet when the shoe is on the other foot, they are the first to broadcast ethnicity, religion, and immigrant status as though it were a criminal record.

We must stop this. The victims of this attack deserve our sympathy. The country deserves better than this reactionary bias.

If we are to call ourselves a fair society, then truth must matter more than tribalism, and compassion must come first, regardless of the attacker’s name, race, or background.

Until then, spare us the outrage. We see right through it.