As Merseyside reeled from the horrific murders of those beautiful girls, tanked-up neo-fascists crawled out of their sewers, says our columnist Brian Reade in his frank and fearless column
We used to chase motley crews of coked-up Nazi fanboys out of Merseyside by humiliating them.
In 2015, a White Man March by National Action ended with them wetting their trousers behind police in Lime Street Station’s left luggage depot as onlookers sang: “Master race, you’re having a laugh.” Two years later the English Defence League scuttled out of town after hundreds of locals serenaded them with a mass rendition of the Benny Hill theme tune.
But in Southport on Tuesday the rats caught us unaware. As Merseyside reeled from the horrific murders of those beautiful little girls, the tanked-up neo-fascists crawled out of their sewers to hijack a vigil, attack a mosque, brick the police and pour poison on the open wounds of a devastated community.
Much has been made of Russian bots naming the murderer as an illegal muslim asylum-seeker, which inflamed the mob. But the reason that far-right thugs now feel emboldened to take to our streets lies much closer to home. Low-life British grifters with big social media followings stir hate to boost their profiles and bank balances, regardless of the consequences.
This week Andrew Tate, Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson and lesser-known attention-seeking parasites, directly or indirectly, implied that Southport had suffered an Islamist terror attack even though the police had ruled that out.
Some of them, who laughably describe themselves as journalists, claimed the suspect wasn’t being named due to a left-wing conspiracy, when they should have known the 17 year old could not be named until a judge allowed it. But it’s the new breed of far-right politician, given respectability by election to parliament, we should truly be worried about.
‘For beautiful, read white. For going horribly wrong, read letting in foreigners.’
The phrase echoing around Southport on Tuesday was the Reform Party’s mantra and Lee Anderson’s catchphrase “we want our country back”. On social media the party’s deputy chair, Richard Tice, banged on about “two-tier policing” and one of its MPs, Rupert Lowe, asked “is there more to this than we’re being told?” while conflating the murders with the need to stop the boats. Despite knowing the suspect was a Cardiff-born British citizen.
And then there was that shameless ball of gurning deceit, Nigel Farage, delivering in Prime Ministerial mode, an address that asked, “Police say it was a non–terror incident… I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us?” In doing so, the self-styled Man of the People (despite, like Tice and Lowe, being a public school-educated millionaire) knowingly inflamed the racists and the conspiracy theorists.
Instead of condemning the Southport violence and distancing himself from the right-wing thugs who feed off his bigotry, he played to the disillusioned gallery by stating “something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country”.
For beautiful, read white. For going horribly wrong, read letting in foreigners. Which this country always has, much further back than the early 1900s when my Irish nan and Italian grandad emigrated to Britain.
The idea that you get rid of the millions of people with coloured skin who have come here, many from British commonwealth countries, and everything will be fine, is a lie of Nazi proportions. And they know it. But they don’t care.
