We need to talk about Southport The state wants to protect us from reality

The new information was quite a contrast to what we were told in the aftermath of the attack. Then, the police had said that the incident was “not believed to be terror-related”. Even during Monday’s press conference, Kennedy maintained that Counter Terrorism police were not classifying the Southport murders as a terror incident due to the lack of an established motive — even though they are now prosecuting their suspect under the Terrorism Act.

Then there’s the religious connection. Many immediately assumed that the attacker was inspired by radical Islam. However this notion was stamped on hard after the killings, especially as far-Right riots spread around Britain in response, and Keir Starmer launched a blitz of prosecutions on those accused of “lies” and “disinformation” and for stirring up hatred against Muslims.

Something distinctly odd and unsatisfactory appears to be going on here. Certainly the timing of the police announcement gave off a bad smell, coming a day before the Budget. It was also notably delayed until a few days after a Tommy Robinson march in London, which would have been given fuel by the news.

The day the authorities released the news could hardly have been bettered from a media-management point of view, suggesting at least informal coordination between police, the Crime Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Labour government. But I think this is unlikely to take the form of any deliberate “cover-up” or conspiracy. Rather I suspect that any coordination will be wrapped in technical, legalistic language and of shared priorities like maintaining “community relations”: in the collective assumption that they were simply doing the right thing.

For, despite 14 years of Conservative rule, the British state shares broadly the same aims as the new Labour government. They speak the same language and have the same approach, especially to things such as diversity and equality. In the last and most domestically significant act of its previous time in government, Labour embedded identity politics in the state through the Equality Act of 2010. And this has now percolated fully through the system. The government and state, now largely aligned as shown in their common response to the Southport riots, give off the appearance of being a regime, one with a common sociology. Its mantra is “Diversity is Our Strength”: an unabashed assertion that diversity causes good things to happen, which also means not bad things.

We all now know what this messaging demands. We’ve seen it before, following outrages from 7/7 in London to Manchester Arena, Liverpool Remembrance Day, London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Reading, Parsons Green and Lee Rigby in Woolwich; as well as other largely unknown attacks happening at the fringes, such as in Hartlepool in 2023 and Burnley in 2020. Right-wing activists are familiar with the logic. Liberal-Left opinion managers know it like the back of their hands. So do the authorities, and they crank into gear whenever an attack occurs bearing the obvious hallmarks.

We all know instinctively that the system must defend diversity. It must be revealed as a strength, otherwise the meaning of our society is revealed to be fake: at best naive and mistaken; at worst mendacious lies, open for exploitation by those who mean us deep harm. The bold statements we used to hear about how such attacks have “nothing to do with Islam” are no longer convincing. Other tactics must be employed. Some things must be revealed and others concealed. And so the regime and its supporters go to war over “reporting”, “commentary” and “sharing information”. They say that this is a matter of responsibility versus irresponsibility, that it is legally necessary in order to not prejudice a trial.

But we get the wider message. We shouldn’t talk about it. We shouldn’t be concerned about the same pattern repeating itself. And we shouldn’t get angry about this information being withheld from us for nearly three months while people were convicted for overreaching in their anger.

This is not to say that the police and the Criminal Prosecution Service; the commentators and opinion managers on Twitter; the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and the Prime Minister Keir Starmer are all bad people, mendacious, cynical liars, determined to prevent people from knowing the truth. Rather, as Dominic Cummings keeps on telling us in between his relentless denunciations of these people: “The system is working as intended.”

This is the regime we live in. It is a regime of the Equality Act and associated Public Sector Equality Duty, of community leaders for some and not for others, of DEI commissars telling us to who must be favoured and disfavoured, of the Human Rights Act and European Convention of Human Rights protecting dangerous foreign criminals from being deported. It is the system of diversity: and it demands that certain things be promoted and others be suppressed. The regime has committed itself. Its functionaries are merely following the rules, following the logic of the system. Communities that qualify as “communities” must be protected from harm: and this means that we must all be protected from reality.

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Ben Cobley is author of The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity and The Progress Trap (forthcoming). He is a journalist by trade and a former Labour Party activist.

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