Flaccid Media on Britain’s Riots

The X screen grab (below) is from Bolton, where Muslim men  turned out yesterday in hundreds, perhaps thousands, to defend their turf as rioting and street battles erupted across England.

In Northern Ireland, the unthinkable: Catholics and Protestants marching arm in arm to demand no more “asylum seekers”.

Entirely predictable, though, has  been the reaction of the establishment media and the policies it serves. At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill writes:

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….

O’Neill’s piece can be read in full here.