Amelia and how the "Anti-radicalisation" brigade lost control of their meme
Let me make clear at the start that I am not in favour of racism against anyone, whether their skin is white, back, brown, yellow, blue or any other colour, whether they are Jewish, Muslim or a member of any other faith group or none, and whoever the racism is coming from.
Anyone may fall foul of the temptation to slip into racist modes of thought, anyone can be a victim of racism, and the suggestion that people of any particular colour are either uniquely guilty of or uniquely free from racism is itself racist.
I am in favour of sensible attempts to educate people against racism and extremism. However, all such programmes must be constructed carefully to ensure that they do not become subject to over-reach and in particular, do not appear to target what the majority of society would regard as legitimate mainstream opinions. The danger of this is all the greater because it is usually the product either of genuine misunderstandings and miscommunication or of unconscious biases on the part of the people constructing the training, which by definition they are not even aware that they have.
Let me give an example. A white teenage boy growing up in an overcrowded social housing home on the Woodhouse or Mirehouse estates in Whitehaven in a family in which nobody has had a permanent job for two generations, is one of the least privileged human beings in Britain. As a Cumbria county councillor I had part of one of those estates in the division I represented.
I have attended enough inclusivity training events in my time, and listened carefully enough to what was actually intended to be meant, that I get it that when people who run those courses say that such a boy has "male privilege" and "white privilege" they are not actually expressing the utterly ridiculous opinion that such a boy is really growing up in a privileged position in any meaningful sense. What they are actually trying to communicate is the far more reasonable point that the deprivation, disadvantages and quite possibly discrimination which such a boy may suffer is not related to his gender or his race.
However, I also know from having represented an area which contained such disadvantaged people, that when such a boy, or his community, hear themselves as described as having "white privilege" the suggestion that they are privileged is exactly what they think is being said. They think they are being dissed by ignorant middle-class snobs who know nothing about their community. And it breeds exactly the kind of resentment and anger that the training was designed to counter.
You cannot have better example of how the language, lack of mental flexibility, and above all failure to understand the aspirations and mentality of the people they are trying to educate can go horribly wrong that they way the "Amelia" meme has escaped the anti-extremism teachers who created it and become a weapon against them.
Like anyone who spends more than a little time online, I have seen a few "Amelia" memes recently featuring a striking young woman with purple hair, but had not paid much attention to them.
Many like these two images, appear completely harmless, and I absolutely refuse to be triggered by many of the statements I saw attributed to her before I dug a little deeper, such as "I like Shakespeare," or "I love England. I like having Fish & Chips and a pint at the local pub."
When you DO dig a bit deeper however, you often find cause for concern.
There are explanations of how the Amelia meme was created and how the creators lost control of her in the 31st January 2026 issue of the Spectator -
Amelia: the purple-haired goth girl who became a nationalist icon
and in the Guardian, as you can read at -
You can gather even from the title that the Spectator is much more amused to see the meme escape the control of its' creators than the Guardian is. Both agree, however that the character had its' origins in a video game called "Pathways: navigating gaming, the internet and extremism" which featured an early iteration of Amelia as the villain.
Pathways was developed last year and was intended as part of a counter-extremism teaching package in East Yorkshire, funded by the UK Home Office and created to deter young people aged 13-18 from being attracted to far right extremism in Yorkshire.
The Guardian says that "Certain scenarios simulated in the game result in a referral under the British government’s Prevent counter-terrorism programme."
I'm not quite clear whether that means within the game or that teenagers playing it who listen too much to Amelia could actually get referred to Prevent.
Matteo Bergamini, the founder and CEO of Shout Out UK, a political and media literacy training company that created the original game, said that the original initiative was never meant to be a stand-alone game. Rather, it was intended to be used in the classrooms alongside a suite of teaching resources, a fact he says coverage and commentary has ignored.
“There has been a lot of misrepresentation unfortunately,” he said. “The game does not state, for example, that questioning mass migration is inherently wrong.”
Others have suggested the initiative had backfired, not least by casting a “cute goth girl” as a negative character, leading to her inadvertently becoming a focus of admiration.
What everyone agrees is that the meme, boosted by AI, has exploded.
Some of the ideas associated it, such as the ones I quoted above, are harmless and legitimate.
Unfortunately there are also some people posting "Amelia" memes who are indeed putting up racist and extreme ideas.
The lesson from all this is that if people think that the establishment is trying to demonise their identify they will push back: and the internet and AI give them many more ways to do so.
When you try to educate people against racism and extremism you must do so with respect and without overstretch, or you will create more Amelias who will undermine everything you are trying to do.
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