BRENDAN O’NEILL: After Southport: the rage against the throng.
Something extraordinary happened in the UK this week: the murder of three working-class girls was turned into a moral panic about working-class communities. Ruthlessly, with something approaching relish, the media elites dragged the public gaze from the frenzied stabbing of girls in a seaside town to the supposed frothing bigotries of the seaside town itself. In elite circles, angst over the evil visited on the children of Southport gave way to a foreboding over what lurks within Southport. In those terraced houses, with their white working-class inhabitants, so susceptible to online lies, so given to racial animus. These people want us to fear not the wicked individuals who terrorise our towns, but the towns themselves.
It has been a chilling spectacle. I am struggling to recall the last time the moral narrative around a horrific event was so mercilessly rewritten by those with cultural power. The week started with the grim news that a young man had invaded a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in north-west England and used a curved kitchen knife to assault its attendees, leaving three girls dead and others seriously injured. And it ends with the elites focussing their fury and energy almost exclusively on the civil unrest that followed that act of barbarism. On the ‘moral deviance’ less of the killer who laid waste to three precious lives, than of those small sections of working-class society that erupted in fury at his killing. The establishment is back in its comfort zone – fretting over the alien morality and unwieldy energy of the white working class.
As this awful week draws to a close, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are ruled by people who fear the anger of the masses following acts of inhumanity more than they do the acts of inhumanity themselves. You can deplore the riotous disorder that followed the Southport massacre, as I do, and still ask why that disorder elicited a more zealous reaction from the opinion-forming classes than did the slaughter that provoked it. To my mind, the street violence in Southport, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Manchester and central London was wholly destructive. Groups of men hurled projectiles at cops and, most despicabably, threw bricks at mosques. This was a betrayal of the quiet dignity the good people of Southport have shown following the horror that befell their community. And yet it is curious, concerning in fact, that this criminal behaviour seems to be occupying Britain’s moral guardians and policymakers more than the murderous nihilism inflicted on Southport’s girls.
And it will likely only get worse:
UPDATE: Starmer’s honeymoon period over as approval rating plummets.
If only Starmer had heard of Norm MacDonald:
And:
Or as Julie Burchill writes in the New York Sun: Britons Are Stranded on Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,’ as Fresh Riots Erupt Every Night.
The country is like a melting-pot, yes — but a melting-pot of molten anger. The government has laid the blame with everyone from “the far-right” to “the Russians” but this is to woefully and willfully misunderstand the unprecedentedly fractious and factional nature of modern Britain.
Vast levels of immigration — bringing cheap labor for the rich and decreased wages for the poor — is at the core of much of this anger. “White Riot, I want a riot of my own,” the left-wing Clash sang back in the day, but now any white rioter will be called “right-wing” simply because of the color of their skin.
This is exacerbated by the two-tier policing we have had for some time here. When non-whites riot, police tend to retreat, whereas when whites riot, police tend to charge. Prime Minister Starmer’s first in-office nickname is “Two-Tier” Keir — not an auspicious start for a man who promised to bring national unity.
White working-class boys are currently the most likely to fail at school and the least likely to succeed in life, yet they are told that their skin color confers “privilege.” Now they’re being told by the liberal establishment that their riots are the “wrong” kind of riot — but after applauding the riots of Black Lives Matter, it’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle just because he’s paler than they would prefer.
—Sky News, June 9th, 2020.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I disagree with Brendan O’Neill that “quiet dignity” is an appropriate response to atrocities. The government should fear the mass of ordinary citizens, especially when it’s treating them with such contempt.