Random Acts of God? Understanding #EnoughIsEnough  ━ The European Conservative

Perhaps there are no more words left to be said about the Southport attack. Three beautiful girls are dead. In hospital, more lie injured, and the strain placed upon witnesses is untold. And yet, protests and riots have been breaking out on the streets of Britain. The online public square is aflame. The hashtag #EnoughIsEnough has been trending on X, formerly known as Twitter, for five days and the rage seems only to intensify with each passing day.

But the hashtag #FarRight has also been trending. Some members of Britain’s ‘luxury belief’ class—including the prime minister himself—profess to be baffled and appalled by the expressions of outrage. The cries of ‘How many more children?’ and ‘Is mine next?’ levelled at Keir Starmer by concerned parents as he sidled  up to lay flowers at the scene of the attack have been received online as ‘disrespectful’ and ‘self-indulgent.’ Yet others are familiar with this anger. For some time, this tension and frustration has been haunting their community. They gaze out the kitchen window and wonder to themselves when the headlines will cease to read, ‘Another person stabbed to death in broad daylight.’

In answer to that question, some have suggested the need for more youth groups whilst others demand an end to immigration. The rival sides gawk at one another in disgust: one accuses the other of being naïve and factitious whilst the other throws around accusations of bigotry and racism.

There is a schism emerging, and it lies between those who believe the Southport attack to be an isolated tragedy and those who see it within a broader tapestry of extreme violence, which is both increasing and being underplayed by sections of media and the UK government.

An Isolated Incident? 

When reports emerged that ‘a man’ had attacked with a knife a group of young girls, significant portions of the British public assumed the perpetrator would be male, an immigrant, and subscribe to Islam, for reasons that are blindingly apparent to some and a wholly ‘racist’ mystery to others. Rumour spread fast that the suspect was an African immigrant who had come to the UK illegally.

This later proved to be false; or, rather, only true by degrees. It was later revealed that the suspect, 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, was born in Cardiff to Rwandan immigrants who had themselves claimed asylum.

For some this was a matter of case closed. The Southport attack upon young girls at a dance class could be safely bracketed as an isolated incident, the attacker thought to be suffering some sort of mental illness. There is therefore no justifiable reason to probe any further, and certainly no connection or similarity to be seen between this attack and other extreme acts of violence on the streets of Britain.

Perhaps these people are right—perhaps Rudakubana was just an isolated and mentally ill young man. But as with the Clapham alkali attack committed earlier this year by Abdul Ezedi, an immigrant who came to the UK illegally from Afghanistan, people have begun to ask whether the Southport attack would have happened had Rudakubana’s parents been denied entry to the country. This is not an illegitimate line of inquiry. Butis it more profitable to ask in this instance how an individual born and raised in the United Kingdom could come to commit such an atrocity? Evidence from Denmark, where they gather statistics without fear or favour, suggests that second-generation immigrants from the Third World are in fact more prone to crime than their parents. Whilst correlation is not causation, members of the public and concerned parents are justified in posing questions of failed assimilation and radicalisation, and the assertion that they are xenophobic, racist, or ‘far-right’ for even having these concerns, let alone airing them, will not facilitate a peaceful resolution to the unrest. 

The pronouncement by Keir Starmer that this attack was just another instance of “knife crime” felt to some like a deflection and only fuelled accusation of ‘managed narratives’ by a government who—for the sake of maintaining some semblance of social order—is being disingenuous about the nature of the crime and denying the systematic issues that appear to be either contributing to or facilitating similar deadly attacks. Those that are enraged see no relation between this event and that of hooded youths stabbing each other in gang warfare or the unpremeditated stabbings arising from weapon-carrying culture. Such crimes are opportunistic whilst, from what information is available, the incident in Southport appears to witnesses to have been a deliberate and targeted attack.

Public outrage was only compounded when the UK press released an image of the suspect as a young boy. It was an offence against civility to depict the attacker as the same age as those who were killed. The public feeling is that Rudakubana is being construed as a figure of pity—a young man let down by a wider community, such that his actions become understandable and warrant compassion. Attempts have been made to understand what could motivate an adolescent on the cusp of manhood to commit such an atrocious crime. In other words, ‘what went wrong?’

“He has autism.” “He went to a Christian church.” “He contributed to Children in Need.” “He enjoyed musicals.” Strange puff pieces of this kind are received by the public as an attempt to excuse the suspect, to diminish his culpability, and to put the burden of responsibility upon an amorphous ‘society’ that failed him. The media do an injury to those wounded, traumatised, and bereaved when they semi-suggest that the perpetrator belongs among the ranks of his victims.

The final result is frustration and contempt for a myopic establishment class that appears insulated from the consequences of its own luxury beliefs and fatally out of touch with the concerns of the people.

Thoughts and Prayers

The litany of “thoughts and prayers” trickling down from those in authority is beginning to feel tired. Thoughts and prayers hold little sway when they emanate from a godless society, and the phrase has become miserably insufficient in the face of our problems. For some, the laying of flowers by the prime minister and his fellow government mandarins was a tasteless photo opportunity. And whilst I would not be as cynical towards a man who is also father to a daughter, the sour atmosphere at that wreath-laying was indicative of a country that is sick of platitudes like ‘don’t look back in anger’ and ‘stronger together’ being wheeled out to kick the can further down the road.

The attack has been labelled a tragedy, a word with which some have taken umbrage, myself included. Whilst the death of any young person is a revolting tragedy, I bristle at any suggestion that the attack itself was one. The word ‘tragedy’ is invoked towards those events which are gut-wrenching—hideous and unfair—but are, at their heart, unpredictable in nature and beyond reasonable control.

Suicides are a tragedy. Children dying of cancer is a tragedy. People lost in floods, or tornadoes, or earthquakes are sucked into a tragedy. This is to say that a tragedy is understood in terms of perceived ill-fate, in terms of things that could have been prevented—if preventable at all—only with the benefit of hindsight. 

The public feeling is that the barbaric attack in Southport was preventable. 

To construe the Southport attack—or, indeed, any of the other violent attacks seen on Britain’s streets in recent weeks and months—as something akin to a natural disaster is to write them off as unpredictable and to place the population at their arbitrary mercy. Apprehending the perpetrators would be to capture lighting in a bottle. A parent would be no more able to protect their child from being tangled up in the next attack, whenever it strikes, than prevent the weather that falls upon their head. In such conditions, everyone can only sit tight, and pray that the next tragedy spares them.

This is an unbearable state of affairs for most people. And for some, it feels like a deliberate underplaying of the role of human agency in these circumstances.

When an atrocity is called a tragedy, the greater weight of the pointed finger is levelled at providence, not the perpetrator. If nature is to blame, then the perpetrator is little more than a celestial puppet, an empty vehicle subordinate to the tyrannical will of an unnamed god. But these are not random acts of God. The person who committed this attack has a community and a history, and to label the event a ‘tragedy’ understates both the agency of the attacker and the responsibility of the government and law enforcement authorities to prevent further attacks—or at the very least to minimise their likelihood.

The general feeling of those who are angry is that Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, should have remained silent if she could offer nothing better than weak platitudes about being ‘deeply concerned at the very serious incident.’ As for the prime minister, he should have stayed away until he had convened parliament to announce the steps they intend to take to stop such brutal assaults upon the nation’s children from ever happening again. The roar of one father captures the mood: “Go away! You’re not wanted!”

Some have asked, “But why is there such contempt for them when they are only expressing their sympathies?” It is because sympathies can only be proffered by those who bear no responsibility for events, and the angry and inflamed regard the UK government—not just of the last three weeks but the last 25 years—as bearing some responsibility for the fatal attack. 

But how could the government play a hand in such a barbaric crime? Again, the answer from the public is forthcoming: mass immigration. 

The Bigger Picture

Significant constituencies of the public, media and government do not understand that, for many of the British people, the attack on those fantastic Southport girls is a culmination—the final assault—in an endless, lethal campaign against the British people and their way of life. They see flashing before their eyes the beheaded body of Fusilier Lee Rigby, a beloved father and son. They see buses and train cars ripped open by homemade bombs. They see the queues of ambulances outside Manchester Arena in 2017. They see the dead and wounded strewn like rag dolls upon London and Westminster Bridge. They see a pattern: Islam and immigration.

False assumptions, it must be said, were indeed made about the identity of the Southport attacker. But it has been asserted by the press and establishment politicians that these false assumptions were the result of racist imaginings festering among ‘far-right’ conspiracy theorists rather than an extrapolation upon similar prior events. Furthermore, its propagation is said to belie a fundamental wrongheadedness and xenophobia in the native British population. “No such pattern exists,” we are told. “It is simply not the case that great swathes of ordinary British citizens have truly seen evidence of this pattern with their own eyes, both as reported in the newspapers and in their own communities.”

The hashtag #FarRightThugsUnite that later trended on X demonstrated that those who are concerned about the regularity and severity of these vicious attacks against peaceful citizens and innocent children come from all walks of life. They are mothers and fathers, grandparents and godparents. They are doctors and nurses and teachers and nursery school assistants. They are retired police officers and ex-servicemen. They are local politicians. They are members of the press. Some are natives to the United Kingdom and some are immigrants who integrated and adopted Britain as their home. Some are religious, some are atheists—Sikhs, Christians, Hindus, defectors from Islam, they spoke of their love of the country and their fear that something fundamental is going wrong.

The public perception is that, in the last two decades, the most egregious and shocking crimes committed against the UK have been committed by illegal or unintegrated immigrants, often originating from Islamic countries. Suppression of evidence surrounding the ethnicity of perpetrators in the rape gangs in the likes of Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford have contributed to this public perception. And of course, there are the murder of Sir David Amess, the 7/7 attacks, and the Reading stabbings. Public feeling is that enough is enough—it is time to insist upon assimilation, it is time to freeze immigration, it is time to address the ghettoisation of our towns and cities.

It is not the case that for each barbaric crime carried out the perpetrator is of these demographics. Nor is it the case that all individuals belonging to this demographic commit such crimes. This is not the argument being made, either by myself or by peaceful protesters and critics. Attacks by the IRA coloured much of the early 2000s and the man who murdered Jo Cox was a violent white neo-Nazi. Any criminal is in a minority in their community, and certainly in society as a whole. The point is that, just as a disproportionate number of the most violent crimes are committed by men, a disproportionate number of terror attacks, grooming gangs, and extreme knife attacks in the UK  appear to bystanders to be being committed by people of Muslim background or with immigrant status; and further investigation and action into this is, rightfully, being demanded.

This does not justify the attacks on mosques or immigrant hotels by rioters, and does not disqualify the fact that the riots we have seen contain people motivated by racism. It does, however, perhaps make the motivations of the rioters more understandable to those who, up until this point, have been baffled as to why attacks have been set in that direction.

It remains to be seen what galvanised Rudakubana in his murderous actions. Until the Merseyside Police present their evidence to the court, there is little benefit to be had in speculating how the suspect’s motives fit into a national picture. Homegrown issues will require homegrown solutions; but that does not preclude the need to address our imported problems nor does not negate the existence of the broader concerns communities have about immigration or the cultural compatibility of some of those permitted entry into the UK. Whilst pundits and politicians may brand the concerns of these people ‘racist’ and ‘far-right,’ this does not then excuse them from having the urgent and necessary discussion to determine who is right. 

If the prime minister believes he can put off that debate by denying the existence of the concerns or that he can eradicate those concerns by delegitimising them and restricting their ability to be voiced, he risks breeding more of that which he claims to wish to avoid: anarchy on the streets of Britain.