Southport lays bare what a broken, poisoned society we’ve become

A far-right mob - drunk on cheap beer and disinformation - then descends on the town as it mourns, attacking a mosque and police. They poured their filth and hate over what should have been a sacrosanct moment, and for that they will be damned forever. Patriots? They disgrace the word.

How did we reach this place? A place where humanity seems crushed. There were moments of goodness to cleave to: the ordinary citizens who ran to help the children; the ordinary citizens who faced down far-right thugs; the bravery of the emergency services throughout.

But light seems finite; darkness sprawls.

These terrible events feel the culmination of some dreadful sickness that’s fevered us for years. Repeated acts of random pointless street violence; an epidemic of mental illness among the young; an ocean of lies and hatred online that’s spread into us all, rotted everyone from the inside out.

A pervasive sense of dehumanisation seems the poisoned root. So many of us are prepared to see fellow human beings as ‘not us’, as something ‘other'. Is this drive towards dehumanisation political? Does it come from sickness of the mind?

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Where did we begin to unravel? Was it austerity? Was it the acceptance of poverty’s evils? Poverty doesn’t create mass killers or hoodlums, but it does take a wrecking ball to the foundations of society, it obliterates cohesion. If we’re prepared to have children fed by charity, we cannot say we’re a group which cares for one another. We’re not.

We’re an atomised society of dog eat dog. That festers in a culture. It creates a breeding ground of fear and hate and anger. Some feast on those three dreadful emotions; others are perverted by them; a few use them to step toward power.

Happy people don’t obliterate the innocent; happy societies don’t spawn armies of political extremists. Broken societies are places where people break one another in all manner of ways.

We’re extinguishing hope, and when hope starts dying some of us can become monsters. When public services and emergency services are so crushed that there’s little or no safety net for the mentally ill, then society is at clear risk.

Police today are forced to act like mental health nurses as there aren't enough social workers, no space in mental health units, and too few psychologists to deal with the broken amongst us.

Each failure creates another failure until the snowball gathers such weight it starts to smother society.

Our politics is foul. We’ve lived for years with the politics of division. Politicians chose to divide us, not bring us together; they told us why we differed from each other, not what made us the same. In an already atomised society, politicians deliberately pulled us further apart. You could hear them shredding the fabric of unity.

Governments smashed society’s pillars: the NHS, police, and schools. They crushed community. Then they offered blame - blame someone else, never themselves. Blame the other, whoever the convenient other may be. Politicians normalised blame.

They also normalised lies. Since the disinformation and race-baiting of Brexit, politicians of every party now think they owe truth nothing. They scream propaganda, not policy. When those at the top behave hysterically, hurl insults, issue threats, demonise, repeat and amplify lies, this all trickles down. Soon an entire society is infected with a kind of madness.

This isn’t just happening here. It’s happening all over the western world. The senseless violence, the political hate, the chaos and division. America is the epicentre of this sickness, but we across the British Isles and Europe are infected too.

Something is sick in our souls and it’s now manifesting itself in violence, rage and paranoia. Sometimes that violence is political, sometimes it’s just violence for the sheer hellish sake of violence.

Social media mainlined the infection - shot the poison right into our marrow. Social media is the greatest disaster to happen to humanity since gunpowder. It’s our undoing, because it undoes us from each other. We mediate each other through screens, not flesh and blood. This is the source of the great dehumanisation we’re living through.

The mainstream media is little better. Where once the media sought to explain and inform, it now seeks mere attention. Hate is the great attention-grabber. Who stops to look at an act of love?

So we’ve a media discourse debased for clicks. That has consequences. Here in Scotland, a disagreement over something as meaningless as short-term lets is labelled a "pogrom". When violent words are used in this way, we’ve surrendered our intellect, placed another brick in the edifice of division.

Politicians, social media, the traditional media, all have eaten away at our intelligence, our scope to reason together as a group. Education itself has been gutted.

A scene from Tuesday night's riot in Southport (Image: PA)

At a time when children, more than ever before, need to know how to think logically for themselves, our schools are shattered. Education is the frontline for every decent society. We’ve failed our schools and our children.

Evidently, Covid played its part in this unravelling. It sent some mad, we’ve all seen that. But pandemic alone isn’t enough to create this landscape of despair. A strong society wouldn’t buckle under Covid - and yet societies across the world simply broke, and we came apart.

Nor have we been brave enough to talk honestly about immigration. Politicians either feared to mention immigration, or used it as a weapon. We need to speak wisely and calmly about what we as a nation need, and of our humanitarian duties on the international stage. We need to understand both our history - our role in immigration - and how to navigate the future in ways that foster unity.

Will the events in Southport be some catalysing event, like Dunblane, forcing society to recognise its flaws and change? The chances seem terrifyingly slim. In this atomised, dehumanised, age we no longer stop to think, to question, to search for answers, we just want to shout, scream, and for some, they just want to hate, to hurt.