by Guillermo Alvarado

The United Kingdom is the scene of violent demonstrations by right-wing and extreme right-wing groups against irregular immigration, especially those of African origin who arrive on its shores after crossing the English Channel in fragile boats.

These demonstrations of hate, which included an attack on a hotel where those awaiting regularization are usually housed, have as their immediate motive a lie spread by social networks, which have once again shown their dangerous nature when abused.

You will remember, friends, the unfortunate episode that occurred when a 17-year-old teenager broke into a dance class in Southport, England, where he killed two girls and injured eight other minors and two adults.

News immediately began to circulate that the assailant was an undocumented immigrant who had recently landed on British shores, unleashing the wrath of the neo-fascist hordes.

The authorities' denials were in vain, as they proved that the young man, a descendant of a couple of Rwandan origin, was born in Cardiff, Wales, and therefore has British nationality.

 The problem is that we are talking about a continent, because this is not only happening in the United Kingdom, which is intoxicated by messages of hatred, racism, xenophobia and contempt for what is different or foreign, where increasingly aggressive ultra-nationalist ideologies survive.

Some governments are no strangers to this phenomenon, such as those led in London by the Conservatives Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak - the latter a descendant of migrants - who have sown evil seeds that are rapidly flourishing.

Both have devised abominable ways of dealing with those who seek a better life, or any life at all, in Europe, a continent that seems to be to blame for the misery suffered by much of Africa.

Locking them up in floating prisons subject to brutal overcrowding, or sending them to Rwanda while they await a hypothetical asylum, were some of the grotesque initiatives of the so-called "perfidious Albion," recalled a recent editorial in the Mexican daily La Jornada.

A lie spread on the so-called social networks, which, according to the writer Umberto Eco, have given the floor to a legion of imbeciles, has shown that evil is rooted in British society and that a spark is enough to unleash chaos and bring out the worst in human beings, selfishness, hatred and, why not, fear.