Southport as Talked About: Seen and Unseen.
Southport never seems to be out of the news these days—and for all the wrong reasons. In this post, some images and a link to my recently published essay on Southport.
Until recently, Southport was a lesser-known northern English seaside town. Sadly, since last July when three little girls were murdered and others were injured at a holiday club, the name now elicits wary expressions of knowing recognition. The heightened exposure is further compounded after a spate of rioting that occurred in the wake of that event.
In addition to the savagery of the event and its continuing aftermath, the name Southport has now become synonymous with the so-called ‘two-tier-Keir’ phenomenon of sentencing harshly otherwise law-abiding citizens for online tweets or likes and the release of violent offenders from prison to make room for them. Normal protocols have been upended so that people were branded as criminals before any due process was observed. Additionally, there is now a ubiquitous labelling of moderately conservative and liberal people as ‘far-right’ for daring to ask questions or to speculate about the perpetrator of the attacks. Southport is now firmly in the world’s purview. Even Elon Musk has expressed opinions relating to Southport.
Continue reading at the European Conservative.
(Below are some images to accompany the text, only available here).
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Hi, ST ... Excellent article. It's beyond incomprehensible how things have so completely reversed to the point where law-abiding citizens are harassed and prosecuted for "crimes" that heretofore were not crimes, and hardened criminals (and even "soft ones") are released.
It's eerily reminiscent of the product of one of Lewis Carroll's drug binges, "Alice in Wonderland." The Red Queen would feel right at home in Britain today...
Of course, the US is pulling an oar in the same boat...
Hi Caroline,
This article at the European Conservative is a much-needed tonic to the hysteria. I have a friend who lives in Southport, and his account of there has never matched the one in the British media (unsurprisingly).
You express some scepticism about 'Two-Tier Kier' as a label. Politically, it's very clever marketing, but I think it does miss an important aspect of how it comes about. To some extent, I think it does emerge out of the fact that the hatred against religion that gained public force in the 1970s (and had academic force from the turn of the century). This was fundamentally a hatred of Christianity.
This anti-Christian hate, foreshadowed by Nietzsche, has led to the bizarre situation whereby Muslim criminals are to be spared punishment because of their ethnicity (or rather, fear that ethnic hatred would be stirred up by their crimes) while Christians are to be condemned for their religion, or perhaps indeed for their whiteness. Christianity is now seen as a white religion - a huge irony, given the number of black Christians on our planet.
Starmer's thus very nearly holds a principled position, although it is a deranged principle, one wholly adjacent to Identity Politics. We are to be judged, contrary to Martin Luther King Jr's dream, by the colour of our skin and not by the content of our character.
In this regard, I truly appreciate your remark:
"This is especially pertinent given that there will be some who will want to blame religion as a blanket cause for the violent Southport murders in addition to a cynically crafted construction of the ‘far Right.’ In case anyone needed reminding, religious Christians, no matter their actual politics, are now construed as ‘far-right’ in the secular progressive worldview."
I'll be including this in Friday's Bazaar at Stranger Worlds. Thank you for writing it!
Stay wonderful,
Chris.