Murder, machetes and mobs in Britain
by Melanie Phillips:
The deeper issue is a corrosive breakdown of trust, social order and cohesion.
[…] As has now been demonstrated once again, social media has a pernicious impact in spreading falsehoods and inciting disorder and violence. It enables tragedies which inflame public anger and horror to be exploited by agitators, thugs, conspiracy theorists, political opportunists and others with assorted agendas.
There are deeper reasons, however, why such falsehoods gain traction among the general public. Many are prepared to believe them while refusing to believe factual statements made by police and other authorities. And that’s because there’s been a widespread and catastrophic loss of trust in such public bodies.
For an increasing number of people, there’s now an automatic presumption that the authorities aren’t telling them the truth. That’s because there’s such a dislocation between what people can see with their own eyes is happening and what they are told or not told about it and what they can see is or is not being done about it.
The rioting in Southport has received considerable and disapproving publicity. That’s because those rioters could be described as “right-wing” — that is to say, white, male, working-class and therefore axiomatically bad.
Yet people can see that violent disorder by people who aren’t obviously white, male and therefore “right-wing” is often downplayed, excused or ignored.
On the same day as the Southport massacre and subsequent rioting, gangs of youths slashing at each other with machetes ran amok on the seafront at Southend. They were apparently part of a large influx of young people from outside the town. There was also violence in the town centre. Several people were seriously injured.
The machete is not a signature weapon of the white working class.
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