It is frankly an appalling and frightening scene. Video footage has been circulating on social media of a bare-chested man with a blade on the day he allegedly attacked five people in Edinburgh. “I’m protecting the country,” he is heard shouting in the video.
It reportedly began near a mosque on Friday evening, and the video footage shows him appearing to carry a weapon and battering the door of a pizzeria. The man has been arrested and charged, and counter-terrorism officers have joined Police Scotland’s investigation. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, posted on X that it “appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred” but that is pretty much all he has done. In total, 53 words have gone up on X from the Prime Minister, and the story, which has left the British Muslim community in shock, is barely being covered by the media in any prominent way.
It is a stark difference to what we saw less than two months ago, on April 29, when two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight in Golders Green, London. An emergency Cobra meeting was convened that same day and the terror threat level was upgraded. The Prime Minister and King Charles visited the scene. The attack ran across nearly every front page in the country.
By the time Sir Keir delivered his statement from Downing Street, it was not just a tweet but an address: a list of promises — visible police presence, investment in Jewish security to the tune of £25 million — built on a passage of real moral force.
There has been no Cobra meeting. There has been a short post on X from the Prime Minister. As of this weekend, not a single newspaper outside Scotland has carried the Edinburgh attacks on its front page. The government machinery that can move within a few hours has remained largely stationary.
The article spends an awful lot of time talking about the government and pretty much glosses over the media.
The government responds to public interest, if there is more public interest on a topic the government will spend more time addressing it.
Public interest is by and large driven by the media (and even when it's not it often appears to be so).
The problem here is that the media is not covering this widely enough. This is perhaps understandable with privately owned media, who have their own vested interests, but I think the bigger question is why state-funded news organisations aren't better at picking this up. That is a root cause and political issue.