So, who’s made the news this week? Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Nigel Farage, Axel Rudakubana, Huw Edwards, Levi Bellfield, Brian Spencer, Anjem Choudary (above) for starters. I make no comment about Rudakubana who, at the time of writing, is an innocent man at least until after a murder trial takes place. The rest? Fucking hell. A fascist who stirred up the pot which led to the riots following the murder of the innocents in Southport, basically the same bloke but in a suit, a disgraced TV presenter who had admitted to downloading the worst kind of child pornography, the killer of Milly Dowler, the heroic painter and decorator who took a brick in the bollocks to protect the police and an islamist hate preacher. If there was a hell in some kind of afterlife, these goons would be in it.
I’ve found it overwhelming. The way it’s presented in the media can make you question what kind of world you live in. Are these people representative of our country today? Is this country on a handcart to hell? The answer to both questions is an emphatic no. Here’s why.
Yaxley-Lennon and Farage, and their cohorts on the far right fringes of politics, are the ones who are fearful. After 14 years of a hateful right-wing Conservative government, with ugly right wing polemic at its heart, the pot has been well and truly stirred. The anti-foreigner populism, the politics of fear, stoked not just by hate merchants like Yaxley-Lennon and Farage, but by sections of media, like the Mail, Sun, Express, Telegraph, GB News and Talk TV has gained at least in terms of noise. And why? Because we now have a Labour government. The endless dogwhistle racism of Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and a large proportion of the Conservative benches in the House of Commons has been rolled back. The times they are a-changing and for the pedlars of hate and fear, this is a threat, to Yaxley-Lennon and Farage in particular to their grift.
For the next five years, and hopefully longer, the talk in government will no longer be about cheap rhetoric like “stop the boats”. That will be confined to the reduced parliamentary Tory party, a few Reform goons when they can be bothered to turn up in parliament and the rabble-rousers on the streets. While this will not represent their final hurrah, unfortunately, the dynamic is now very different.
In fact, among the names I quoted, there’s actually some good news. Bellfield has failed in his bid to enter a civil partnership and Choudary will now be banged up in prison for at least the next 28 years, hopefully unable to further direct and encourage terrorism. Very bad people but the law caught up with both of them and now they spend the rest of their lives within four grey walls, hoping that they are not beaten to death by their fellow inmates. We can only but hope that their lives behind bars are filled with regret, but also fear. They deserve no less than that.
It is true that there are not always consequences to people’s actions. Some people get away with it over and over again. Yaxley-Lennon keeps coming back in between jail sentences and Farage cleverly walks a fine line, traitors to their country, both. But when people’s luck does run out, there is a price to pay. As I always say, if you are a bad person, sooner or later you will come across someone who is even worse.
Often, it’s bad people who make the news. That’s why it’s called news because it’s what’s new. But then again, we have Andy Murray, our many Olympic stars, the people who cleared up Southport after mob rule broke out, a government committed to service and not self-aggrandisement, the heroes who tried to protect the young girls in Southport, Swifties for Southport who have raised over £350,000, the woman who yesterday came to our food bank and gave us three tins of food and said, apologetically, it was all she could afford. You know. Good people. Every single one on a different level to the purveyors of fear and loathing.
I end the week with more hope than I felt at the start of it. That could be because I was able to peer through the gloom to find that actually there are a lot of good people out there.
The hatemongers know that change has come and their messages of hate are no longer in the mainstream. That’s why they have stepped up the hate. We will have more hate in the coming days and weeks because these things have a momentum about them. When the weather closes in, and the booze and cocaine stocks run low, they’ll creep back under their rocks again, but this time they know they are losing.
Bad people made the news, they often do. But there are more of us than there are of them. It’s a long road and there are still massive obstacles along the way and, unusually for me, I am more optimistic today than I was yesterday. And day to day is all I can do these days.
