Southport never seems to be out of the news these days—and for all the wrong reasons. 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.
The two-tier configuration is interesting if only to expose the truism that in a mediated existence, there is a world that we see, inhabit, or experience and another one, carefully curated for appearances’ sake.
Away from the headlines, Southport is a place of some eccentric contradictions and paradoxes. Southport, notwithstanding its name, is neither in the south nor is it a port. It got its name from a hotel called the South Port built in 1797. The town’s founder was a William Sutton who regarded the town as his indulgent “folly” and the present-day Duke’s Folly Hotel is a stone’s throw away from the original situated on the town’s main Lord Street.
Southport occupies that liminal space between town and country, being surrounded by farmland and sandy beaches. Thus, if you are from Southport, you are known as a Sandgrounder. The town is equidistant from both Liverpool and Preston and is regarded by both as a rather quaint and old fashioned relative, somewhere to go for a ‘day out.’ Southport is the more modest and sedate version of Blackpool, and a place where Hasidic Jews arriving by train from Manchester can occasionally be seen visiting.
Paradoxes abound, Southport is a seaside town and yet the tide rarely comes in. Notwithstanding, there is a lifeboat station, provided not by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution rather from local fundraising. Incongruously, it is frequently used, not least to rescue those who fall prey to quick sands or get caught by the incoming tide when wandering too far across the sands towards the illusory nearness of Blackpool.
Sandgrounders tend to bristle at the Liverpudlian association of “Merseyside,” and much prefer to be identified as belonging to the historical county of Lancashire, which of course, traditionally (and paradoxically) includes Liverpool. The town is the product of Victorian endeavours, yet its northernmost village of Churchtown is referred to, somewhat obliquely, in the Domesday book, the historical record of England and Wales dating from the year 1086. There, adjacent to the village green, is a set of punishment stocks carefully preserved outside St Cuthbert’s, one of England’s oldest churches. In more contemporary times, the town’s eccentric tourist offerings include such things as a Lawnmower Museum, a model railway village, an annual flower show, as well as an air show. Small town or not, Southport has its own airport at RAF Woodvale. Additionally, the town is also renowned as the golfing capital of England hosting the Royal Birkdale Open tournament. Furthermore, Southport forms the northernmost aspect of the Sefton Coast with wildlife reserves, pinewoods—home to red squirrels—and Crosby beach’s renowned art installation, Another Place by Anthony Gormley.
The weather is invariably mild, and it is no coincidence that Southport is a place where people come to retire. And this aspect has also shaped its townspeople who are mild mannered and gently conservative (small ‘c’) and liberal. Voting patterns since 1885 show the town as broadly alternating between Conservative and Liberal. This was until the last election, where the town elected its first ever Labour member of parliament. However, the town is now showing signs of decline. Competition from Liverpool and Manchester, coupled with online e-commerce, have not helped this once rather elegant shopping centre. Many retail units along the renowned Lord Street are empty and the once immaculate verandas are unkempt and neglected.
The town is administered by Sefton Council, which is Labour-led and based in the nearby district of Bootle. Locals grumble that Southport is treated as a cash cow that can be milked ad infinitum. Yet these days, it is difficult to sense much in the way of prosperity with dilapidated buildings and a burgeoning plethora of tattoo parlours, Turkish barbers, nail bars, and take-aways. It would seem that the further politically leftward the town has travelled the poorer the town has become, and the poorer it becomes, the further leftwards it travels.
As will doubtless now be familiar, within weeks of the general election, the town was plunged into a sequence of horror, despair and infamy, and was shoved rapidly into the world’s spotlight. Come those terrible events of July, two tiers of reality (so to speak) could be discerned. There was the stage-managed portrayal with the now familiar routine of carefully curated public vigil and another more cloistered version proceeding in concert.
The outward-facing vigil attempted to combine sympathy for the families of the victims alongside some anti-racist sentiments written on placards. In hindsight, it is difficult to discern from which direction this supposed racism had emanated. From the earliest moments of the debacle when this small town was trying to process the greatness of the shock, speculation was rapid, emotional, angry, and fearful. Notwithstanding its population of around 90,000, Southport is nevertheless a small town, and everyone knows someone who knows someone connected to everyone. I am not sure if anyone perceived or articulated the violent attack as itself an act of racism. It could be that some merely allowed their inner thoughts to ponder upon the many incidents British people have encountered involving violent Islamism. A wary officialdom seemed keen to present a narrative that pointed away from the victims and their agony and towards what we might call the new world order’s cult of anti-racism and a Left-leaning, avowedly secular dogma.
On the evening following the murders, there was an initial public vigil that preceded a more colourful gathering that took place a week later amongst poignant and fulsome floral displays with toys and balloons, along with public bubbles blowing to commemorate the three lives lost. There were some genuinely moving moments as the bubbles filled the boulevard of Lord Street, rising high and travelling further than expected. I happened to be driving towards the gathering from Birkdale when a lone bubble came into view, inducing a spasm of recognition.
It was telling that the various memorial displays and events were situated outside the local arts centre, a decidedly secular venue. At the initial vigil taking place on the day after the murders, the lacuna opened up by the lack of any substantial Christian focus was unsettling. This hastily convened vigil confidently presented itself as the progressive and liberal way of doing things these days. I recall a time when the Reverend Rod Garner of Southport’s Holy Trinity Church, Southport’s erstwhile ‘go-to’ vicar, would have been on hand to guide the town with the wisdom borne of a religious framework. Alas, long since retired, in his place a local hospital chaplain offered some kind words and platitudes.
As I reflect more deeply upon the events of the summer and their still-unfolding aftermath, it occurs to me that we seem to be grieving for more than the loss of three young innocent lives. Enmeshed within the grotesqueness is the slow withering of a public-facing Christian world we are losing to a secular imitator with its performative gestures made for the sake of ‘appearances’ in various media outlets. It is as if we have forgotten how things ought to be done. In times of shock such as these it was to God via faith and religion to whom we would turn for comfort, strength and meaning. Without the guidance and poetry of scripture, there is no protocol, no structure, no words of substance that strengthen our spirit and nourish our souls.
As if to illustrate this, in the haste to avoid offending non-Christians, and this now (of course) includes secularists, the chaplain at the initial vigil eschewed all authentic Christian language for the sake of tepid phrases about not being alone, sticking together, and showing solidarity. He introduced an accompanying Catholic priest whose words were similarly constrained and limited to comment about the turnout—to which some forced applause ensued. At this, it felt as though some were effectively applauding their own presence at the vigil. Was it the case that the priest simply had no words upon which to draw at this time? Or was there a sense that his repertoire would now be misunderstood, misconstrued or simply deemed offensive? Under these circumstances, the secular utterances of Christian ministers diminished the symbolism of the dog collar to that of a mere fancy dress costume in a melancholy game of dressing up.
The gathering was encouraged to observe a minute’s respectful silence, to reflect and remember amid the cawing of the seagulls. But there was no prayer, no poetry of psalms, just faint traces of Christian rituals such as candle lighting, meditation and prayer. In what could have been an afterthought, the chaplain’s closing remarks “for those who pray” invited the assumed minority of the religious to offer prayers to “their God.” This surely represents the public-facing afterglow of a Christian culture.
Paradoxically, the new insurgent secular pseudo-religion can only take its emblems and signifiers from what went before and from that which has sustained us for centuries: that is to say, the Christian tradition. Yet as if to confound this new ideological progressivism, the responses to events in Southport bear witness to an actual Christian ethos that has left its indelible trace upon people here.
In the alternate version of events that Southport saw and lived through, rather than what the mediated ‘news’ chose to convey, there was the quiet, spontaneous blossoming of displays of pink bows and ribbons cascading all around the town from lampposts and gate posts. Many of these displays consisted of three simple bows, one for each of the murdered girls. This formed a peaceful yet powerfully feminine gesture of solidarity for their families. There appeared to be a dignified, steady determination on the part of many to participate in this simple gesture. And as the days went by, more and more of these ribbons were seen on gateways, doorposts and street furniture of all kinds until the town rippled in fluttering pink.
Additionally, below the media radar, the wider public most likely did not see the clean-up operation and rebuilding of the mosque wall, begun by locals first thing the next morning after being damaged in the ensuing riot. They were also unaware of the mosque’s Imam giving out flowers to random passers-by on the days of the girls’ funerals. Nor were they aware of the customary good relations between the mosque and the community.
Nor was there much in the way of publicity for the emphatically heartfelt and positive notice by the shopkeepers whose shop had been looted and damaged. The public notice displayed in their window thanked the many Southport people who had donated funds and helped to restore them to normality. Additionally, there were also prompt offers of help from various tradesmen on the online “Next Door” Neighbours app and some Facebook groups. And it can go without saying that the wider world knows little of the overall shock on the part of the locals, horrified at events so untypical and never before witnessed by Southport.
There has been intuitive speculation on the part of the Sandgrounders that the now infamous frenzy of damage was inflicted from without, not within the town. Strangely, the much-publicised rioting, shown live on social media, seemed to invite the very responses that have since landed some people in prison. And the two-tier focus continues to be deflected away from the violence of the murders only to land firmly upon the conjured spectre of the ‘far Right.’
As the weeks and months have gone on, there have been further revelations concerning the status of the perpetrator and his two-tier identity, comprising, on one hand, a Doctor Who child actor and Welsh choirboy and, on the other, an alleged radicalised Muslim whose face we must not see. Moreover, there is continued speculation about the part Prime Minister Keir Starmer has played in the unfolding of events. His expressions of sanctimony over the riots betrayed a deep lack of concern for the fears of people deeply affected by the murderous attack upon innocents. Furthermore, there is no shared vision for dealing with vast numbers of incomers from places in the world with radically different outlooks and values than those of the mild-mannered inhabitants of this northern seaside town. There is still such a lot to assimilate and work through, and the only remedy on offer is crass name-calling and ridicule. One thing strikes me as pertinent. This town is as far from any notion of the ‘far Right’ as it is possible to be.
In Western Culture: Today and Tomorrow (2007), the late Pope Benedict XVI as Joseph Ratzinger wrote that it is the obvious thing for politicians of all parties to do is to offer change, “and change for the better.” In his election campaign, Starmer had repeatedly stood upon such a platform. Yet as Ratzinger alludes, there is a deep sense of dissatisfaction that predominates notwithstanding this continual drive to revolutionise in all but name. The Marxian revolutionary project is arguably one that is set upon changing human nature and the overthrow of religion. Yet in the modern world, we seem to know that there is something missing, something that is incrementally being removed for the sake of good appearances and, as Ratzsinger puts it, “the liberal dogma of progress.”
Making the case for the spiritual foundations of Europe and the West in its widest sense, Ratzinger reminds us of our heritage as fostered from the three pillars of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. 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.
The unrest that has now come to represent Southport to the world forms a painful betrayal of the many decent local people whose unfaltering kindness and care has been shuffled out of view. There is a sour taste that lingers due to the harsh sentencing of some, whose crimes consisted largely of being in the vicinity of the mosque in St Luke’s Road or commenting online in an immediate emotional response. This adds additional heartache and sadness to this sorry affair. It is difficult to see when closure can come. There are rumours of efforts to put back the perpetrator’s trial for political reasons, meaning the lingering of painful associations for some time to come.
The onward trudge of secular progressivism continues with its efforts to supplant the Christian underpinnings of our society. Southport’s local council recently issued a request for both public and private displays of pink ribbons to be removed suggesting that it is time to “move on.” Despite the request, many remain in place. We are not all quite so anxious to “move on.” Certainly not just yet. It is perhaps worth giving some thought to the ongoing effects that the July attacks provoked. Many children are fearful and anxious, and as one head-teacher has reported, the children’s emotions are reignited at each fresh news item associated with that fateful day.
The deeply embedded legacy of Christianity shone forth in one particularly splendid example of the Holy Spirit at work. In the immediate aftermath of the murders, Richard Vernon, pastor of Southport’s Lakeside Church, had what he described as a “what if?” moment. He dared to ask the question: what if we could bless every child in Southport and let them know we (as churches) are here for them and that God loves them? What resulted was audacious: a “blessing in a backpack” project.
The idea was to create a backpack, filled with goodies, gifts and toys, to be given as a blessing for every primary school age child in Southport. Seeking donations from the congregation and other churches, pastor Richard received offers of help and support from Scripture Union, a local businessman, the Liverpool One church, the Elim churches nationwide and many others.
With local volunteers joining in from around Southport, the church managed to organise 6,400 backpacks for the children, a considerable feat of logistics in itself. The children were thrilled at receiving their surprises and one can only hope the impact that this gift has had upon them has gone some way to assuage some of that residual anxiety.
For younger children, the love of God has to be translated into something tangible. In the case of this particular gift and blessing, the intended message was the gift of a backpack for life’s journey. In yet a further paradoxical turn, it took a pastor (“shepherd”) who does not even own a dog collar to exemplify the meaning of the “Lord is my shepherd who leads me in right paths for his name’s sake” for that life’s journey.
Southport, now my adopted home for three decades, will remain a place of paradoxes. It is a duke’s folly, a seaside with no sea, and a place of mild weather and even milder-mannered, decent folk. The two-tier religious response, one public yet hesitant and the other private yet dynamic, teaches us all that what the secular media conveys is rarely the whole story. In this two-tier framework, the Southport that is mediated, with its selective versions of events and a cynical funnelling of a narrative, leads only to falsehood. Only the Southport that exists, the one that is, can lead to truth.
The frequent spontaneous and authentic Christian responses to the episodes of hatred were not those diluted words performed in costume for the camera. Along with those who rolled up their sleeves or donated money, the blessing in a backpack project, borne of a “what if” moment, shines forth as emanating from the One that is. Here is the hidden power of the Holy Spirit, however paradoxical, that shows us clearly that the answer to hatred has to be love.
Southport: A Public and Private Affair
Another Place by Anthony Gormley
Southport never seems to be out of the news these days—and for all the wrong reasons. 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.
The two-tier configuration is interesting if only to expose the truism that in a mediated existence, there is a world that we see, inhabit, or experience and another one, carefully curated for appearances’ sake.
Away from the headlines, Southport is a place of some eccentric contradictions and paradoxes. Southport, notwithstanding its name, is neither in the south nor is it a port. It got its name from a hotel called the South Port built in 1797. The town’s founder was a William Sutton who regarded the town as his indulgent “folly” and the present-day Duke’s Folly Hotel is a stone’s throw away from the original situated on the town’s main Lord Street.
Southport occupies that liminal space between town and country, being surrounded by farmland and sandy beaches. Thus, if you are from Southport, you are known as a Sandgrounder. The town is equidistant from both Liverpool and Preston and is regarded by both as a rather quaint and old fashioned relative, somewhere to go for a ‘day out.’ Southport is the more modest and sedate version of Blackpool, and a place where Hasidic Jews arriving by train from Manchester can occasionally be seen visiting.
Paradoxes abound, Southport is a seaside town and yet the tide rarely comes in. Notwithstanding, there is a lifeboat station, provided not by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution rather from local fundraising. Incongruously, it is frequently used, not least to rescue those who fall prey to quick sands or get caught by the incoming tide when wandering too far across the sands towards the illusory nearness of Blackpool.
Sandgrounders tend to bristle at the Liverpudlian association of “Merseyside,” and much prefer to be identified as belonging to the historical county of Lancashire, which of course, traditionally (and paradoxically) includes Liverpool. The town is the product of Victorian endeavours, yet its northernmost village of Churchtown is referred to, somewhat obliquely, in the Domesday book, the historical record of England and Wales dating from the year 1086. There, adjacent to the village green, is a set of punishment stocks carefully preserved outside St Cuthbert’s, one of England’s oldest churches. In more contemporary times, the town’s eccentric tourist offerings include such things as a Lawnmower Museum, a model railway village, an annual flower show, as well as an air show. Small town or not, Southport has its own airport at RAF Woodvale. Additionally, the town is also renowned as the golfing capital of England hosting the Royal Birkdale Open tournament. Furthermore, Southport forms the northernmost aspect of the Sefton Coast with wildlife reserves, pinewoods—home to red squirrels—and Crosby beach’s renowned art installation, Another Place by Anthony Gormley.
The weather is invariably mild, and it is no coincidence that Southport is a place where people come to retire. And this aspect has also shaped its townspeople who are mild mannered and gently conservative (small ‘c’) and liberal. Voting patterns since 1885 show the town as broadly alternating between Conservative and Liberal. This was until the last election, where the town elected its first ever Labour member of parliament. However, the town is now showing signs of decline. Competition from Liverpool and Manchester, coupled with online e-commerce, have not helped this once rather elegant shopping centre. Many retail units along the renowned Lord Street are empty and the once immaculate verandas are unkempt and neglected.
The town is administered by Sefton Council, which is Labour-led and based in the nearby district of Bootle. Locals grumble that Southport is treated as a cash cow that can be milked ad infinitum. Yet these days, it is difficult to sense much in the way of prosperity with dilapidated buildings and a burgeoning plethora of tattoo parlours, Turkish barbers, nail bars, and take-aways. It would seem that the further politically leftward the town has travelled the poorer the town has become, and the poorer it becomes, the further leftwards it travels.
As will doubtless now be familiar, within weeks of the general election, the town was plunged into a sequence of horror, despair and infamy, and was shoved rapidly into the world’s spotlight. Come those terrible events of July, two tiers of reality (so to speak) could be discerned. There was the stage-managed portrayal with the now familiar routine of carefully curated public vigil and another more cloistered version proceeding in concert.
The outward-facing vigil attempted to combine sympathy for the families of the victims alongside some anti-racist sentiments written on placards. In hindsight, it is difficult to discern from which direction this supposed racism had emanated. From the earliest moments of the debacle when this small town was trying to process the greatness of the shock, speculation was rapid, emotional, angry, and fearful. Notwithstanding its population of around 90,000, Southport is nevertheless a small town, and everyone knows someone who knows someone connected to everyone. I am not sure if anyone perceived or articulated the violent attack as itself an act of racism. It could be that some merely allowed their inner thoughts to ponder upon the many incidents British people have encountered involving violent Islamism. A wary officialdom seemed keen to present a narrative that pointed away from the victims and their agony and towards what we might call the new world order’s cult of anti-racism and a Left-leaning, avowedly secular dogma.
On the evening following the murders, there was an initial public vigil that preceded a more colourful gathering that took place a week later amongst poignant and fulsome floral displays with toys and balloons, along with public bubbles blowing to commemorate the three lives lost. There were some genuinely moving moments as the bubbles filled the boulevard of Lord Street, rising high and travelling further than expected. I happened to be driving towards the gathering from Birkdale when a lone bubble came into view, inducing a spasm of recognition.
It was telling that the various memorial displays and events were situated outside the local arts centre, a decidedly secular venue. At the initial vigil taking place on the day after the murders, the lacuna opened up by the lack of any substantial Christian focus was unsettling. This hastily convened vigil confidently presented itself as the progressive and liberal way of doing things these days. I recall a time when the Reverend Rod Garner of Southport’s Holy Trinity Church, Southport’s erstwhile ‘go-to’ vicar, would have been on hand to guide the town with the wisdom borne of a religious framework. Alas, long since retired, in his place a local hospital chaplain offered some kind words and platitudes.
As I reflect more deeply upon the events of the summer and their still-unfolding aftermath, it occurs to me that we seem to be grieving for more than the loss of three young innocent lives. Enmeshed within the grotesqueness is the slow withering of a public-facing Christian world we are losing to a secular imitator with its performative gestures made for the sake of ‘appearances’ in various media outlets. It is as if we have forgotten how things ought to be done. In times of shock such as these it was to God via faith and religion to whom we would turn for comfort, strength and meaning. Without the guidance and poetry of scripture, there is no protocol, no structure, no words of substance that strengthen our spirit and nourish our souls.
As if to illustrate this, in the haste to avoid offending non-Christians, and this now (of course) includes secularists, the chaplain at the initial vigil eschewed all authentic Christian language for the sake of tepid phrases about not being alone, sticking together, and showing solidarity. He introduced an accompanying Catholic priest whose words were similarly constrained and limited to comment about the turnout—to which some forced applause ensued. At this, it felt as though some were effectively applauding their own presence at the vigil. Was it the case that the priest simply had no words upon which to draw at this time? Or was there a sense that his repertoire would now be misunderstood, misconstrued or simply deemed offensive? Under these circumstances, the secular utterances of Christian ministers diminished the symbolism of the dog collar to that of a mere fancy dress costume in a melancholy game of dressing up.
The gathering was encouraged to observe a minute’s respectful silence, to reflect and remember amid the cawing of the seagulls. But there was no prayer, no poetry of psalms, just faint traces of Christian rituals such as candle lighting, meditation and prayer. In what could have been an afterthought, the chaplain’s closing remarks “for those who pray” invited the assumed minority of the religious to offer prayers to “their God.” This surely represents the public-facing afterglow of a Christian culture.
Paradoxically, the new insurgent secular pseudo-religion can only take its emblems and signifiers from what went before and from that which has sustained us for centuries: that is to say, the Christian tradition. Yet as if to confound this new ideological progressivism, the responses to events in Southport bear witness to an actual Christian ethos that has left its indelible trace upon people here.
In the alternate version of events that Southport saw and lived through, rather than what the mediated ‘news’ chose to convey, there was the quiet, spontaneous blossoming of displays of pink bows and ribbons cascading all around the town from lampposts and gate posts. Many of these displays consisted of three simple bows, one for each of the murdered girls. This formed a peaceful yet powerfully feminine gesture of solidarity for their families. There appeared to be a dignified, steady determination on the part of many to participate in this simple gesture. And as the days went by, more and more of these ribbons were seen on gateways, doorposts and street furniture of all kinds until the town rippled in fluttering pink.
Additionally, below the media radar, the wider public most likely did not see the clean-up operation and rebuilding of the mosque wall, begun by locals first thing the next morning after being damaged in the ensuing riot. They were also unaware of the mosque’s Imam giving out flowers to random passers-by on the days of the girls’ funerals. Nor were they aware of the customary good relations between the mosque and the community.
Nor was there much in the way of publicity for the emphatically heartfelt and positive notice by the shopkeepers whose shop had been looted and damaged. The public notice displayed in their window thanked the many Southport people who had donated funds and helped to restore them to normality. Additionally, there were also prompt offers of help from various tradesmen on the online “Next Door” Neighbours app and some Facebook groups. And it can go without saying that the wider world knows little of the overall shock on the part of the locals, horrified at events so untypical and never before witnessed by Southport.
There has been intuitive speculation on the part of the Sandgrounders that the now infamous frenzy of damage was inflicted from without, not within the town. Strangely, the much-publicised rioting, shown live on social media, seemed to invite the very responses that have since landed some people in prison. And the two-tier focus continues to be deflected away from the violence of the murders only to land firmly upon the conjured spectre of the ‘far Right.’
As the weeks and months have gone on, there have been further revelations concerning the status of the perpetrator and his two-tier identity, comprising, on one hand, a Doctor Who child actor and Welsh choirboy and, on the other, an alleged radicalised Muslim whose face we must not see. Moreover, there is continued speculation about the part Prime Minister Keir Starmer has played in the unfolding of events. His expressions of sanctimony over the riots betrayed a deep lack of concern for the fears of people deeply affected by the murderous attack upon innocents. Furthermore, there is no shared vision for dealing with vast numbers of incomers from places in the world with radically different outlooks and values than those of the mild-mannered inhabitants of this northern seaside town. There is still such a lot to assimilate and work through, and the only remedy on offer is crass name-calling and ridicule. One thing strikes me as pertinent. This town is as far from any notion of the ‘far Right’ as it is possible to be.
In Western Culture: Today and Tomorrow (2007), the late Pope Benedict XVI as Joseph Ratzinger wrote that it is the obvious thing for politicians of all parties to do is to offer change, “and change for the better.” In his election campaign, Starmer had repeatedly stood upon such a platform. Yet as Ratzinger alludes, there is a deep sense of dissatisfaction that predominates notwithstanding this continual drive to revolutionise in all but name. The Marxian revolutionary project is arguably one that is set upon changing human nature and the overthrow of religion. Yet in the modern world, we seem to know that there is something missing, something that is incrementally being removed for the sake of good appearances and, as Ratzsinger puts it, “the liberal dogma of progress.”
Making the case for the spiritual foundations of Europe and the West in its widest sense, Ratzinger reminds us of our heritage as fostered from the three pillars of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. 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.
The unrest that has now come to represent Southport to the world forms a painful betrayal of the many decent local people whose unfaltering kindness and care has been shuffled out of view. There is a sour taste that lingers due to the harsh sentencing of some, whose crimes consisted largely of being in the vicinity of the mosque in St Luke’s Road or commenting online in an immediate emotional response. This adds additional heartache and sadness to this sorry affair. It is difficult to see when closure can come. There are rumours of efforts to put back the perpetrator’s trial for political reasons, meaning the lingering of painful associations for some time to come.
The onward trudge of secular progressivism continues with its efforts to supplant the Christian underpinnings of our society. Southport’s local council recently issued a request for both public and private displays of pink ribbons to be removed suggesting that it is time to “move on.” Despite the request, many remain in place. We are not all quite so anxious to “move on.” Certainly not just yet. It is perhaps worth giving some thought to the ongoing effects that the July attacks provoked. Many children are fearful and anxious, and as one head-teacher has reported, the children’s emotions are reignited at each fresh news item associated with that fateful day.
The deeply embedded legacy of Christianity shone forth in one particularly splendid example of the Holy Spirit at work. In the immediate aftermath of the murders, Richard Vernon, pastor of Southport’s Lakeside Church, had what he described as a “what if?” moment. He dared to ask the question: what if we could bless every child in Southport and let them know we (as churches) are here for them and that God loves them? What resulted was audacious: a “blessing in a backpack” project.
The idea was to create a backpack, filled with goodies, gifts and toys, to be given as a blessing for every primary school age child in Southport. Seeking donations from the congregation and other churches, pastor Richard received offers of help and support from Scripture Union, a local businessman, the Liverpool One church, the Elim churches nationwide and many others.
With local volunteers joining in from around Southport, the church managed to organise 6,400 backpacks for the children, a considerable feat of logistics in itself. The children were thrilled at receiving their surprises and one can only hope the impact that this gift has had upon them has gone some way to assuage some of that residual anxiety.
For younger children, the love of God has to be translated into something tangible. In the case of this particular gift and blessing, the intended message was the gift of a backpack for life’s journey. In yet a further paradoxical turn, it took a pastor (“shepherd”) who does not even own a dog collar to exemplify the meaning of the “Lord is my shepherd who leads me in right paths for his name’s sake” for that life’s journey.
Southport, now my adopted home for three decades, will remain a place of paradoxes. It is a duke’s folly, a seaside with no sea, and a place of mild weather and even milder-mannered, decent folk. The two-tier religious response, one public yet hesitant and the other private yet dynamic, teaches us all that what the secular media conveys is rarely the whole story. In this two-tier framework, the Southport that is mediated, with its selective versions of events and a cynical funnelling of a narrative, leads only to falsehood. Only the Southport that exists, the one that is, can lead to truth.
The frequent spontaneous and authentic Christian responses to the episodes of hatred were not those diluted words performed in costume for the camera. Along with those who rolled up their sleeves or donated money, the blessing in a backpack project, borne of a “what if” moment, shines forth as emanating from the One that is. Here is the hidden power of the Holy Spirit, however paradoxical, that shows us clearly that the answer to hatred has to be love.
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