Sorrow in Southport
I’ve not made myself very popular with many of my Twitter followers over the last twelve hours. They appear to have lost their marbles. In the wake of a senseless attack in Southport, in which three very young girls were murdered, the online right wasted no time at all in weaving their own narratives as to who and what caused it.
David Atherton, a self-described journalist, reported that it was a channel migrant known to MI5, that the suspect appeared to be Jordanian Palestinian, and that a migrant house had been raided. This is then retweeted by Allison Pearson of the Daily Telegraph (a newspaper of record), on the basis of no actual evidence.
Then, then from the same circles we saw calls for a protest in Southport, where opportunistic, low IQ thugs turned up to stir the pot in a community racked with shocked and grief, before the police even had a full picture of what happened.
Now, they’re all piling in bleating about multiculturalism when we still know nothing about the suspect other than he's Cardiff born to Rwandan parents. The Telegraph reports that the suspect was “introverted child” from a “normal family”, and there are no indications that multiculturalism, by its technical definition, has any bearing on the incident.
From the nanosecond the story broke, right wing pundits of Twitter were hoping the suspect would be a muslim/recent immigrant/channel migrant. They were salivating at the thought. The presumption drove them to just make up a story (albeit with reasonable odds it could be true), without any regard to the facts, most of which are still not known.
Authorities now have every excuse to crack down on right wing discourse and will lean on social media companies - all because a few people with big accounts, who should know better, couldn't wait just a few hours to verify what they were tweeting. the debate will now centre on the far right, rather than the causes of this monstrous attack.
Of course, the continual stream of migrants through Dover made something like this an inevitability. On an occasion when the perpetrator actually is a Channel migrant, there will be an almighty riot. As far as riots go, what we saw in Southport yesterday was just a skirmish. What last night shows is that public patience is at an end, and they won’t wait for clarifications. That should be at the forefront of the government's thinking.
As to wider context, there will be same interesting parallels to be drawn between how the authorities reacted to natives kicking off and when Muslims take to the streets, further illustrating the emergent two-tier policing, but intellectual honesty will be in short supply on all sides. It has not gone unnoticed that the police were ready with full riot gear in Southport, while police in standard patrol uniform could be seen running away in Harehills. The police are losing the propaganda war.
Naturally, the police are taking considerable flak, with some accusing them of suppressing details in fear of a right-wing backlash. But failing to release information is not the same as suppressing it. The police have operational constraints when dealing with a suspect who is a minor. They have to confirm everything before release and take care not to prejudice any future trial.
All the same, yesterday proved that withholding information in fear of a right-wing backlash (if that is the policy) doesn’t work. If the mob doesn’t have the real story, they’ll make something up. An information blackout will exacerbate wild speculation.
This is certainly not the first time when events have taken on a life of their own as authorities have lagged in getting the official version out. Just a few days ago, footage emerged showing a police officer kicking a suspect in the face. Only the next day did we see the unedited footage of preceding events when three Muslim men had attacked armed police officers.
Put simply, something with the current approach is not working. All too often social media outreach is something delegated to juniors when it really should be a command priority.
As to Southport, speculating on the available reports from the mainstream media, the suspect may turn out to be a deeply troubled young man, with unique motives, or it could have parallels with the incident in Nottingham last year; a stabbing spree probably triggered by a drug-fuelled psychotic episode. Either way, any connection with Islam has already been ruled out.
Reports suggest the subsequent riot started following the arrest of an apparently Muslim man carrying a flick knife in the vicinity (A few hundred yards away) of a vigil, but as yet police have not made an official statement connecting the two incidents. The incident is being used to excuse the rioters, and if such reports are true, then it puts a different slant on what happened, but pundits would do well to reserve judgment until the facts are known. Either way, there’s going to be a lot of egg on a lot of faces by the weekend.
Violent disorder is usually counterproductive in the UK though there is a long history of when it has worked from the St Scholastica Day riots in 1355 to the poll tax riots of 1989 via Broadwater Farm when a police constable was hacked to death in 1985 and that led to investment in the estate where the criminality had coccured.
In recent times, the narratives, the overrarching aims and values involved in media accounts and goverment comments, vary according to who is involved in the violence. Rioters are thugs if white working class, but members of an aggrieved community if non-white and especially if they are muslim.
The triggers for a riot are secondary. They may be real or imagined. In Harehills social services really were removing some children (not that rioting is a justified response to lawful local authority activity) but imaginary in the case of Southport. Yes, there are credulous fools involved but the deeper question is why the false accounts about the identity of the Southport criminal were so readily believed. Fifty years ago news of one individual's killing spree would not have provoked a riot. Today, the belief that an immigrant is involved, even second generation (like the 2005 bombers), is all too probable.
EDL supporters, if that is who the rioters were, are responding after Lee Rigby, the Westmninster Bridge and London Bridge attacks, the Manchester Airport violence, and the recent attack on a soldier. It is these background conditions that need to change, the feeling that nothing does change to the detriment of the indiginous working class. Anger and resentment are permanently present, never far below the surface. It is a failure of politics and politicians that leaves these people feeling abandoned. The blogging, tweeting class can condemn them for their lack of political nous - many are simply uncouth indeed - but one can also sympathise as well as deplore.
Some good reflections there Pete - thankyou for them.
I often think people put the cart before the horse when it comes to martyrdom/causes etc. What we need to understand before going any further or leaping to conclusions is the mental health (or otherwise) of the perp here, their history of drugs taken (both prescription and recreational).
This is far more relevant than whatever 'cause' or otherwise this was apparently done in the name of. Wacky causes attract wacky people and always have, the myth of 'radicalisation' is largely that, peddled by people who perhaps don't want to confront uncomfortable truths.
The sight of anyone exploiting the grief and misery of people who are clearly in shock, for political purposes, has always struck me as something that should put requisite chills down spines. Perhaps I'm being soft or naive, but there are clearly some twisted people out there who de facto celebrate this sort of thing happening and want to latch onto it. Just sick really.