Violent thugs and the misinformation that triggered them cannot be allowed to divide our country.

As a nation we should be grieving the heartbreaking loss of three young girls, Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice Dasilva Aguiar and mounting a vigil for the safe recovery of the other children and heroic adults seriously injured in Southport last Monday.

Instead, communities are living in fear, properties are being destroyed and police are being attacked by marauding yobs. There are many serious issues in this country. From the cost of living crisis, to the crisis in our NHS, through to the complete mismanagement of our immigration system over the last 14 years. That is why people voted for change here in High Peak and across the country only four short weeks ago. But there is no explaining or justifying the actions of these violent mobs. They are no better than (and many of them also are) football hooligans.

The Prime Minister has been clear that those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law. The police will be making arrests. The courts stand ready to work around the clock. Charges and convictions will follow. I look forward to seeing if they are so macho when facing up to ten years in prison for rioting and criminal damage.

The catalyst for this violence and rioting was misinformation spread on social media about the identity of a murderer in Southport. It is so difficult to stop the spread of such misinformation online, particularly where extremists and foreign powers use fake accounts to harness the algorithms powering social media to push the contents to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of users.

But we all have a responsibility to tackle this problem. As a Government, we must look at whether current legislation is fit for purpose. The social media companies must do more to manage the content and creators they are allowing to be published and publish on their sites. And as individual users we must be vigilant not to believe everything (or frankly most of what) we read online.

The violent thugs and those that seek to divide us cannot be allowed to win. We have also seen the best of Britain this week. The heroic dance teachers that risked their lives to save little children and communities coming together to stand up to the yobs and to put their communities back together in the mornings after.