What I got wrong about Southport
Pending new developments, I’ve said all I want to say on the fallout of the Southport murders over on X. A thread by Sam Bidwell, however, provides some important context.
Over the last three weeks we’ve seen Labour declaring their intention to free five thousand prisoners, while a report shows that the Met Police failed to solve a single neighbourhood crime in 166 areas in three years. A Jordanian refugee who attacked a female police officer was spared community service on the grounds that he did not speak English.
We’ve seen Bangladeshis rioting over political issues in Bangladesh, a riot in Harehills, a British army officer stabbed near a barracks, and (Muslim) protests breaking out after three Muslim thugs, later released on bail, attacked armed police officer.
We then see a drive-by shooting in Watford and a man stabbed to death in East Ham. A Kurdish migrant has been found guilty of attempted murder after pushing a postman onto a Tube track for giving him a “dirty look”. A machete fight broke out in Southend. Four people dressed in all-black were seen brandishing machetes and attempting to fight one another near the town's Adventure Island theme park.
Sam Bidwell remarks “I want to reiterate again - all of these incidents took place within the space of three weeks. Two or three decades ago, each of these incidents would have caught national attention and provoked a national conversation about the state of law and order in the UK.”
He adds “We don't have to accept this as the new normal - and in fact, we should not. There is a risk that we become numb to horrific stabbings, low-level disorder, and lack of enforcement on petty crime. This is how decline starts to set in, and once it starts, it's hard to reverse”.
That last remark hits hard. Or it did for me, at least.
I avoided making any comment about the Southport murders for at least twelve hours because the facts of the case were unclear. I was angry that the right were whipping up a storm on the basis of bogus, unverified information. At no point, though, did I express anger that three young girls were murdered.
In this game it helps to have some emotional self-discipline as a defence against getting carried away by misinformation, and a level of detachment is necessary to analyse the facts as they unfold. I think that’s a strength in a lot of my writing. But it’s also a weakness. I really am numb to this stuff now.
Bidwell’s selection of news articles is really just skimming the surface. I see a daily barrage of this stuff, to the point where I don’t even retweet it these days. A stabbing in London is as mundane as a rainstorm in Manchester.
I often write horizon-scanning articles on X about things that could happen in the not too distant future, and an incident not dissimilar to what happened in Southport is often on my bingo card. In February I wrote “Another Manchester style bombing is statistically probable. If such a thing happens in this political atmosphere, there's no telling how dangerous it could be. There will be no bleating of "don't look back in anger" next time”.
The point I missed in my writing over the last few days, is that the reaction to what happened was not so irrational. Misinformation and speculation aside, three young girls are dead at the hands of a monster. Regardless of the precise circumstances, this kind of thing, even in my lifetime once wasn’t a regular thing. The only thing comparable from my youth, thirty years ago, was the horrific murder of James Bulger, which shocked the nation.
This time, I just wasn’t shocked. So thank god that some people are. Because if everyone contained their emotion they way that I have, we’d simply resign ourselves to this. Somebody has to draw the line.
This still doesn’t excuse rolling up to Southport to throw bricks at the police, nor does it excuse the lawlessness and mindless thuggery in Hartlepool. But what’s worse is the political class's determination to bury this and move on, seemingly happy to quell any protest, evidently by any means necessary. The same police who ran away from Muslim rioters and knelt before the BLM mob, declaring themselves institutionally racist, will deploy force only usually seen deployed by French and German riot control.
While the undisciplined emotional outpourings have given Keir Starmer every excuse to crack down on protest, it’s better that people are angry, and preferable to simply accepting third world levels of violence. There’s a time and place for emotionally remote analysis - but this isn’t one of them. Moreover, if Keir Starmer thinks this can be managed and tidied away with additional policing, he has dangerously misread the mood.
T E Utley (in 1974) said one of the duties of government was the promotion of "cultural and moral unity" without which the only way to govern was by tyranny. Immigration and multiculturalism (signalling that assimilation is not required) have brought us to increasingly tyrannical government as laws about hate speech, offensive communications and online "harms", surveillance powers and technology proliferate. Sir Kneeler's speech yesterday announced how much further this will intensify under Labour.
Just how much our country has been changed by succesive goverments' failure to promote cultural and moral unity is illustrated by two coronations fifty years apart: Queen Elizabeth in 1953 and King Charles in 2023. Search for pictures of both to see a difference. In 1953 police lined the procession route just as they did in 2023 but there is one highly significant change. In 1953 they had their back to the crowd able to enjoy the spectacle. In 2023 they had to face the crowd, their backs to the precession which they could not enjoy with the spectators, such was the need for 'security', a new normal and a massive contrast that received no comment from media or politicians. When terrorism is simply "part and parcel" of living in a large city, according to the London Mayor Sadiq Khan, when knife crime is a 'new normal', goverment merely plays whackamole with each manifestation of the breakdown of trust and social cohesion that successive governments have presided over from a policeman hacked to death on Broadwater Farm in 1985 to the Rushie riots in 1989 to Lee Rigby to... the list is too long to record here. Our armed forces can no longer wear their uniforms on the way home, the risk of attack being high, theft has become a decriminalised new normal, and our young are taught to be ashamed of our history. In the Olympics a man can enjoy punching a women in the face and Lisa Nandy thinks this is OK. Of course, Labour are planning to repeal the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act and are reviewing the education sysllabus (to extend to Academy schools hitherto able to educate rather than indoctrinate). Labour's first act is to grab control of the next generation.
The Manchester Airport incident shows the danger of partial, edited videos posted on social media, but it was the establishment, the merged blob of Westminster, civil service and media, that reacted uncritically without waiting for all the facts. The narrative was of brutality by institutionally racist police, but it was no such thing of course.
Control of dissent is to be by "intelligence", "data" and "mobile face recognition" and ramped up cooperation between police forces, a unified national force in all but name. We are destined to live under a Labout jack boot.
Against this context I do not condemn rioters throwing bricks at the police. It is foolhardy in that if you are white working class you risk punitive sentencing by the courts (in contrast to Black Lives Matter or Roma etc). Put up stickers saying White Lives Matter and get a two year prison sentence, as some poor char did in Nottingham, but get a slap on the wrist as the immigrant criminals in Mr Bidwell's list did.
I disagree that the Downing Street protest was a riot. There are enough videos on X to show that the police were agents provocateur brutally taking down people, seemingly at random and employing take downs on women in exactly the same way as on men, who were merely present at a peaceful demonstration. Even Martin Daubney in a suit was arrested (until recognised and a senior office thought better of arresting someone with a TV platform) who was clearly not rioting. The police played a part in contructing a narrative that is going unchallenged in the media.
With the governments plan for single sign on to goverment services, with digital currency on its way, with the plan to link various database to facial recognition, we are heading, no matter how politicians bleat to the countrary, toward a Chinese style social credit (and control) system.
In truth the goverment can do nothing else so balkanised has society become, at least that is all it can do if the secondary pheneomena are the sole focus as they will be. No-one has a solution to the primary problem of an aggressive, political religion out breeding everyone else and the ponzi scheme of ever more immigration (often of cultures hostile to our own). Whatever resistance we manage mnay be too little too late.
The reaction to all these events since Labour took office are hardly surprising and the overwhelming police reaction to the Southport and Downing Street riots when compared to Harehills, Whitechapel and Rochdale will inflame the injustice even more.
I’ve felt for a number of years that Britain has become ungovernable as a cohesive society but we have deteriorated fast in the few weeks of Labour. I wonder how far are we from anarchy and will the Generals stand by and watch this escalate?