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.

Peruse the media and you will be left with the distinct impression that the true deviants of 21st-century Britain, the greatest threat to our way of life, are angry working-class men. The press is in the grip of an all-out hooligan panic, the likes of which we’ve not seen since the 1980s. The slain girls of Southport risk being forgotten in the media rush to denounce the ‘thugs’, the ‘far-right hooligans’ and the ‘fascists’ who they say swarmed the streets of Southport and other towns in the aftermath of the killings. Some even fear that the rioters were stooges of Russia – unwitting stooges, of course, given how dim they are. We’re told that those baseless claims spread by the far right, that the Southport suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker, came from a ‘fake news website’ with ‘links to Russia’, helping to give rise to those ‘violent riots throughout the UK’. This vision of Britain’s great unwashed being marshalled by Russia to spread mayhem across our isles is peak liberal hysteria.

That the elites’ anxiety over the Southport unrest is fuelled by prejudicial dread of the white working class is clear from how differently they respond to riots that don’t involve the white working class. Consider the riot in Harehills, Leeds in July, when largely immigrant communities rose up following the state’s attempt to remove four Roma kids from their family. There was a palpable streak of empathy in the media coverage of that outburst of street violence. There was condemnation from the political class, of course, but it felt perfunctory, nervous even. Our new PM Keir Starmer called the Harehills riot ‘shocking’, which feels positively complimentary in comparison with the seething rage with which he responded to the post-Southport disorder. For those riots, with their low-class white ruffians, he held a special press conference where he denounced the ‘mindless’ brutes and promised to set up a ‘national violent disorder unit’ to smash them. Why didn’t he do that after Harehills?

The disparity in the liberal media’s coverage of the Harehills disorder and the post-Southport disorder has been glaring. Prospect, every rich liberal’s favourite magazine, got all sad-eyed over the Harehills riot. Maybe it was down to the ‘economic pressures’ felt in such communities, it said. After all, when people are ‘stretched to breaking point… something has to give’. Prospect reminded us of the MLK line about a riot being ‘the language of the unheard’ and said: ‘Last week, Harehills spoke. But did anyone listen?’

Guess what it said about the post-Southport unrest? None of that, that’s for sure. Instead it had its editor, Alan Rusbridger, formerly of the Guardian, raging in Oxfordian tones about the ‘horrifying’ unrest, the ‘ugly riots’, the mayhem that was triggered by the ‘foul virus’ of lies and misinformation on X. Got that? When ethnic-minority people riot over the removal of children, it’s the understandable cry of the unheard; when white men in tracksuits riot over the murder of children, it’s basically fascism. How to explain this strikingly differential treatment of two riots, just a fortnight apart, other than as an expression of class hatred?

The more radical wing of bourgeois Britain has been even worse. There are leftists on social media who said nothing about Southport until the ‘gammon’ took to the streets. The sight of these ill-educated oafs seems to have offended their moral sensibilities more than the news of the slaughter of the girls on Monday. Or look at Counterfire, an online outlet of Britain’s radical left. On the Harehills riot, it said ‘a community ravaged by austerity fights back’. On Southport, it wailed over a ‘racist riot by a drunken far-right mob’, these ‘fascists’ who ‘rampaged through the community’. Rioting minorities are revolutionaries against austerity – the rioting white working classes are little Hitlers. Rarely has the boiling animus of the modern left for the oiks of Britain’s provincial towns been so starkly exposed.

As to Starmer – his press-conference pique over the post-Southport rioting might have been more convincing if he hadn’t taken the knee to Black Lives Matter in June 2020 when BLM riots were ravaging the United States. Both Starmer and Angela Rayner, then leaders of the opposition, genuflected in the fashion of BLM at the height of the fiery, riotous destruction that followed the killing of George Floyd. The idea that we should take lectures on social disorder from a politician who bowed to an ideology whose street violence caused 25 deaths and a billion dollars’ worth of damage is laughably absurd.

It seems that in the eyes of the new elite, some riots are okay, maybe even good, while others are vile acts of fascist lunacy. Angry African-Americans and their white ‘allies’ among the Ivy League left getting violent over the killing of a black man? Good. We bow down. Immigrant communities in Leeds setting fires in response to social workers coming for Roma kids? Fine. The language of the unheard. White working-class men kicking off in the aftermath of the murder of three girls? Evil. Unconscionable. Crush them.

It seems unarguable to me that it wasn’t the grievances behind these various riots that caused the elites to judge them so differently. After all, everyone agrees that the killing of George Floyd was awful, and that the removal of children from the family home can cause deep distress, and that the mass murder in Southport was an act of unspeakable evil. No, it is the identity of the rioters that determines whether they receive sympathy or hatred, pity or bile, Starmer’s slavish genuflection or Starmer’s promise of a savage law-and-order clampdown. The reason the post-Southport rioting so horrified the cultural establishment is not because of what was done but because of who did it. Them. The white lower orders. The people we never want to hear from. Ever.

The existence of a two-tier system of policing is undeniable now. Cops ran away from the Harehills riot, yet they stayed put in Southport and Hartlepool and cracked heads. They used kid gloves on ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters who waved brazenly anti-Semitic placards, yet they declared war on the anti-Islam agitators of Southport, Hartlepool and London. The police do not operate in a vacuum. They get their cues from the establishment. And the cue here is that white working-class men are the lowest of the low, the most morally corrupt of identity groups, and thus deserve everything they get.

All of this raises a pressing question about the authoritarian measures Starmer has promised to introduce in response to the post-Southport riots. Why these riots? What is it about this street violence that offended Starmer so much more than the Harehills street violence, to the extent that he now feels he must build a ‘national violent disorder unit’ to counter it? His proposed panoply of tyrannical measures is frightening. He says facial-recognition technology will be used to track the movement of certain activists. He says ‘surge teams’ of police officers will be sent to smash ‘far-right’ agitation. And he has ‘warned social media’ to keep a check on misinformation – like the misinformation that swirled around the identity of the Southport stabber – or else face consequences. In short, he’ll deploy AI, censorship and new armies of cops.

That it has suddenly become a priority to police misinformation on social media – despite these platforms having been awash for years with bullshit about everything from masks protecting us from Covid to Israel bombing the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza – suggests it isn’t lies per se Starmer wants to obliterate, but certain ideas, too. Certain opinions. Certain forms of anger. Anyone who thinks a new regime of online censorship would only be wielded against misinformation is, I’m afraid to say, a fool. Or at least unfamiliar with the history of social control. Views the Starmerites don’t like, especially on immigration, integration and multiculturalism, would very likely be swept up in any new crusade against words on the internet.

It strikes me that Starmer has made it his priority to protect society less from the kind of violence we saw last Monday than from people’s anger to such violence – an anger that is felt by many decent ordinary citizens who would never dream of rioting. His statements and policy proposals seem aimed far more at forcefielding the moral order from the masses’ feelings than from certain individuals’ brutality. Yes, he has made a few noises about tackling ‘knife crime’. But his fiercest commentary, his firmest policy promises, have been targeted less at addressing the nihilism that stalked Southport on Monday than at the riotous fallout from that foul event. I guess interrogating the rise of new forms of apocalyptic violence is hard, while knocking together a few ‘chav’ heads is easy.

Starmer with his counter-riot proposals and the media with their one-eyed handwringing over the post-Southport unrest are sending a message, consciously or otherwise. They’re saying that the worst thing of the past week, the thing that most clearly demands moral condemnation and authoritarian reply, is the aftermath of the massacre. They are devoting themselves to the control and curtailment of mass anger rather than to the far tougher task of doing something about acts of mass violence. And the dark irony is that it was precisely this warped obsession with policing the public’s angst about social decay, this elite fixation on the destabilising consequences of working-class feeling, that has given so much space to the agitators responsible for the street outbursts we’ve seen over the past week.

That the cultural elites’ greatest fear post-Southport has been the reaction of the throng is not actually surprising. We live under officials who seem maniacally obsessed with observing, checking and deflating the views and emotions of working-class society. Bereft of solutions to knife crime, too cowardly to confront the rise of radical Islam, clueless in the face of a new culture of nihilism, our rulers focus instead on controlling the public response to such horrors. They erect a vast edifice of political correctness to police what can and cannot be said on these matters, in the hope that if peace cannot be maintained through tackling violent behaviours, it might at least be propped up through shooting down any passionate public reaction to such behaviours. Their obsession is with maintaining a phoney social calm by silencing people’s concerns rather than addressing the things that concern us.

You see it on so many issues. On Islamist terrorism, the familiar call is ‘Don’t look back in anger’. Don’t get too het up. Don’t ask awkward questions. After every terror attack of recent years, the cry has gone out: if you get too angry about this horror, you might stir up ‘Islamophobia’. You might embolden those who wish to ‘[seize] this atrocity to advance their hatred’. Even using the word ‘Islamist’ has become a risky business. Counter-terror police once considered changing the language around terrorism, by replacing ‘Islamist terrorism’ with ‘faith-claimed terrorism’, and ‘jihadis’ with ‘terrorists abusing religious motivations’. Why? To bring about ‘a change in culture’, they said; to break the ‘link’ in some people’s minds between Islam and terrorism. Can’t stop terrorism? Stop the discussion about it instead. Curb people’s thoughts, defuse their feelings.

Political correctness strangles the discussion of knife crime, too. Your knife chatter is nurturing racist visions of ‘violently nihilist, feral, often black or ethnic-minority teen gangs’, warns the Institute of Race Relations. So watch yourself. Perhaps say nothing at all, to be safe. And we are well used to public concern about mass immigration being written off by the educated classes as simmering xenophobia, a disease of the Little Englander mind.

Perhaps the worst case of public discussion being ruthlessly sidelined by an elite that outright distrusts us was in relation to grooming gangs. For years, local councils and police forces around England failed to be open about these largely Pakistani-Muslim gangs that were targeting white-working class girls for sexual exploitation and abuse. In some cases they even failed to investigate them properly. All because they feared our response. They presumed, with spectacular prejudice, that ordinary people would rise up in an orgy of ‘Islamophobic’ violence if they discovered the truth about grooming gangs. So they hid it. Their dread of pleb feeling, of working-class concern, had become so great, so overpowering, that they ended up more content to let girls be raped than to let the public know the rapes were happening.

When you force people into a straitjacket of political correctness, they will soon try to struggle out of it. When you treat people’s anger over terrorism, crime and general social decay as an equally destabilising force, possibly as a more destabilising force, they will start to take offence. Grave offence. People are sick of being shut up. Of being called racist for questioning immigration policy, fascist for voting for Brexit, Islamophobic for opposing radical Islam, fearful for discussing knife crime.

The post-Southport rioters should feel the full force of the law. Some were far-right grifters milking people’s concerns for their own cynical, hateful ends. Others will have been opportunists seeking the cheap thrill of street violence. And some, perhaps, were genuinely concerned people who foolishly let themselves be swept up in these grim scenes of anti-working-class, anti-democratic violence. Beyond these riotous fools, however, there are many people out there, good, law-abiding people, who have tired of being told to pipe down, of being told that their beliefs are as threatening to the social order as violence itself. They won’t keep quiet for long. After Southport, the rage of the dispossessed is likely to grow.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy