They started coming almost as the new day dawned, bringing brooms and buckets, trays of drinks or just goodwill. The rubble was swept from Southport’s once-quiet streets and the windows shattered by rioters were fixed. Local builders volunteered to shore up a wall outside the mosque, smashed in the previous night’s orgy of self-righteous thuggery, while neighbours helped council workers clear up. A traumatised town was doing its best to show that the riots were not in their name; that they just want to support those who are suffering the unbearable loss of three little girls at a summer holiday dance class.
And that’s what civic pride, looking after your own, and all the other old-fashioned values the far right falsely claims to stand for, actually look like in action. If you really care about the victims of an unspeakable tragedy, you don’t use their suffering as an excuse to loot corner shops. If you really care about murdered children, you don’t terrify living ones by brawling beneath their bedroom windows on a night when they must have needed, above all, to feel safe. And if you really fear Britain descending into lawlessness then the last thing you do is throw bricks at the police, whether in Southport or Hartlepool, outside migrant hotels in Aldershot and Manchester, or outside Downing Street itself.
