I’ll by saying I hate that term; Culture War. Its often bandied about in the context of online arguments about LGBTQ+ rights, evolution vs. creationism, gender roles. Its disingenuous to describe petty online arguments as a war. They’re not wars, they are bickering entitled by keyboard warriors. That’s not war.
Maybe this isn’t quite war (yet), but the scenes in Southport yesterday are indicative of an insipid and underlying tension simmering beneath the surface. Fueled by years of divisive rhetoric from idiots like Farage and Tommy Robinson, its starting to leave social media echo chambers and manifest as violence on the streets of the UK.
On Monday lunch time a 17-year-old ‘boy’ walked into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport with a knife and stabbed children. Three are now reported to have been killed; a 6-year-old, a girl aged 7 and another aged 9. As a parent who has children who attend cricket clubs, swimming lessons, rugby and tennis classes, this hits hard. You take your children to somewhere you think they will be safe and never see them again. Its any parent’s worst nightmare.
As terrible as it was, I don’t want to talk about that yet. Let’s instead talk about what happened in Southport on Tuesday night.
The EDL descended on Southport and congregated outside the town’s mosque. Why? The mistaken – or at least unconfirmed – information that the perpetrator of this act was a muslin. This was fuelled by information which was leaked to the right wing press that the name of the person responsible for this atrocity was “Ali Al-Shakati”. Naturally, the right-wing groups such as the EDL seized on this. Here you have an Arabic and therefore Muslim killing white children. They smelled blood in the air.
The mob descended and what occurred next is a night of violence in which thugs attacked the police, injuring over fifty officers, set fire to police vehicles, and damaged parts of the mosque (source). Why? Because they could. There’s no other explanation for the actions of these thugs. On the night when the people of Southport held a peaceful vigil for the victims of the attack, Neanderthals from the EDL used the tragedy as an excuse to terrorise innocent people and damage a place of worship. It disgusts me. The mother of one of the slain girls said, “This is the only thing that I will write, but please stop the violence in Southport tonight. The police have been nothing but heroic these last 24 hours and we don’t need this.”
We don’t need this:
I think this is indicative of a wider societal problem. We are not a ‘United’ Kingdom. We are a disunited collection of groups and cultures who are starting to view each other with suspicion. There is absolutely no respect for the police any more. You just have to look at what happened at Manchester airport last week to see that when police officers were brutally attacked. You only need to look at what happened in Leeds a couple of weeks ago when riots saw officers injured. Those officers were acting to safeguard children and were attacked by a mob.
The police have not helped themselves. Wayne ‘The Rapist’ Couzens. Cliff Mitchell. David Carrick. Names synonymous with corruption. All criminals who were trusted to protect the vulnerable. No, the police have done little to assuage public opinion that they are all crooks. If we look back to May 2017 when a homemade bomb was detonated at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester by an Islamist terrorist. At that time public opinion couldn’t have been higher. Just seven years later is couldn’t be any worse. And, I don’t see a way back for the police.
Fuelled by Brexit, by the Reform Party, by the Tories, and by bigots like Farage and thugs like Tommy Robinson, the country is descending towards dark times. The press, controlled by the elite, has convinced poor people on either side that other poor people are the reason why they are struggling. The lack of funding of the education system has removed the ability of the public to form their own opinion or to look in depth at the reasons why they’re using food banks in record numbers. We are naturally a tribal species and we’re not far enough along the evolutionary path to not treat those different from us with suspicion. The white working class is suspicious of Muslims. Muslims are suspicious of whites. Whites and blacks are mistrustful of each other. This is not a battle between the haves and the have-nots, its an impending war between cultures, and the police – who we trust to keep us safe – are impotent and no longer up to the task requested of them. When the police have lost control of the streets, disparate groups will look to their own for protection. We are at that point now. Its a tipping point and we’re slowly, inexorably, moving towards a very, very dark time.
