So tweeted former U.K. MP Anna Soubry on July 6, hailing the election of Keir Starmer’s technocratic Labour government and the sweeping away of those awful, culture-warring Tories. It was a sentiment echoed at the time across an insufferably smug commentariat.
“Safe.” How that take has aged. For today we are picking through the smouldering ruins of England’s second major riot in as many weeks. And a nation remains gripped by anger and confusion after the cold-blooded murder of three young girls, and the wounding of nine others, by a 17-year-old knifeman at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on Monday.
Tuesday night, a few hundred scumbags descended on the Merseyside seaside town — many seemingly from outside the area. Following a 1,000-strong vigil around the corner, the troublemakers began throwing bottles and bricks at a nearby mosque, chanting “who the f*** is Allah” and clashing with police. A police van was set on fire and around 50 officers were injured.
In this, the rioters were echoing the BS that has been circulating online, pushed by hard-right accounts, falsely claiming the Southport suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who was on an MI6 watchlist. Local Police had already made clear on Monday afternoon that he was in fact born in Wales (reportedly, to Rwandan parents). That MI5, not MI6, deals with domestic terrorists also didn’t stop influencers from peddling random claims they had found on a random website.
Now, those same accounts are presenting the nihilistic rioting of last night as the voice of the unheard, as an overspill of anger from concerned residents — even though many of them poured in from out of town and were later seen smashing up residents’ garden walls in order to throw bricks at the mosque and the cops.
In this, they are playing into the hands of the establishment. They are making the conflation the political class always makes at times like this — bundling in the legitimate, peaceful fury of ordinary people with the bigots hoping to revel in the chaos. We can now look forward to days of posturing against “far-right thugs” and zero reckoning with the slaughter on Monday. There’s already talk of a social-media clampdown — the censorious elites’ answer to absolutely everything.
But the public will not be easily silenced this time. The barbarism in Southport has touched upon something very deep. Not just in Merseyside — where residents heckled Keir Starmer on Tuesday, as he showed up for his obligatory, sad-faced photo-op — but also across the country, working-class people can see society unravelling while politicians just mouth platitudes.
It’s been almost a month since those “grown-ups” returned. So far, we’ve also had the Harehills riot. A knife attack on a soldier in Kent. Thousands more people arriving in small boats. To top it all off, a balaclava-clad man with a flick knife was arrested just yards away from the Southport vigil last night. A few hours later, in Southend, a machete brawl broke out.
There’s a visible fraying of law and order that you hardly need to be a right-winger to be concerned about. Knife crime has become the background noise of city life. As have other, semi-random acts of deadly violence. Meanwhile, violent criminals are being routinely let off with little more than a tut, as the state prepares to ease pressure on prisons by… releasing prisoners.
Of course you can’t blame all of this on the new prime minister. It’s just that we all know he will be even more unwilling than his predecessors to deal with the deep social decay that set in under the Tories. The past 48 hours have almost made me miss those feckless Tories. At least they’d have made a Very Important Speech about all this, before doing absolutely nothing.
For his part, Starmer has tweeted how “appalled” he is about one horrendous incident after another, before pivoting back to his carefully arranged media grid. Watching the news yesterday was like peering into a parallel universe, where Rachel Reeves podcasted with Emily Maitlis about her tax plans, all while a nation reeled from the senseless murder of three girls.
We still don’t know what motivated the killings in Southport. Police say there are no signs yet of a terrorist motive. Racists continue to post about mass deportations and Islam, even though the suspect is a born Brit who reportedly “has no known links to Islam.” But there’s certainly a similar whiff of resignation, of “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” to the official response to the slaying of these girls, just as there was after the Islamist murder of young girls in Manchester in 2017.
Indeed, we get a similar shrug in response to all kinds of deadly social ills. Whether we’re talking about knife crime or terrorism or acid attacks committed by people who should never have been allowed to stay here, our inept, cowardly establishment seems incapable of tackling crimes if doing so might be difficult, expensive or — worst of all — politically incorrect. Victims and crimes that don’t fit The Narrative are blithely ignored.
What’s more, those who do raise concerns about what’s going on are either demonized, silenced or “managed.” This has been particularly pronounced and catastrophic following the Southport attack. The information vacuum left by police — partly, but not entirely, due to legal restrictions imposed by the age of the suspect — created a vacuum that was filled by speculation and misinfo. So fearful are the authorities of their fellow Brits, so convinced are they that your average citizen is as volatile as those rioters, they try to limit information and shush discussion for fear of the “backlash.”
Long before the trouble began last night, citizens were being told to calm it down — to mourn, but nothing more. Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram was asked by Channel 4 News Tuesday afternoon what he made of the heckling of Starmer and the general sense of anger out there in the community. His response? “I don’t understand (why) people want to weaponize the deaths of three children before the investigations have concluded.” How dare they be so angry about the murder of defenceless, tiny kids.
This won’t be tolerated anymore. Ordinary people can see that an inept, virtue-signalling political class has abdicated its responsibility for protecting the citizenry. Whatever we come to learn about the Southport killings, their motivations and grisly details, I dare say they will go down as the point at which the trust and patience of millions of people with their rulers finally, irreparably shattered. If only some grown-ups were in charge, we could begin to put the pieces back together.
-spiked
Tom Slater is editor of spiked.