The Daily Mail’s take on the alleged crowd attacker in Liverpool is utterly fascinating. We learn that he is a white middle class man who runs his own business. He “lives in a smart £300,000 four-bedroomed detached property on a neat estate”. His neighbours say he is a “family man” with ‘well-behaved children” who, they add, must have “panicked in the moment”. “It’s particularly out of character”, they supposedly added. Hands up who thinks this style of reporting is just a bit weird?
It’s the classic: “It was a moment of madness” defence. The alleged attacker is a regular middle class Joe, whose wife for all we know is a classic Daily Mail reader, and people like him just don’t do things like this. He isn’t a desperate refugee, he isn’t even black and he is a local lad. Can’t we just let him off this once? We all make mistakes.
The Mail hasn’t used those actual words, but they might as well have done because that is literally what they mean. No less than four Mail “journalists” have put together a version of the story that would look very different if the alleged attacker was an unemployed black man from a “sink estate” and wasn’t white. I can’t help thinking they’d have found some very different friends of the accused. “He was always a bit weird. Kept himself to himself, like he had something to hide. Everyone around here thought he was weird.”
I’ve heard this report as being, quite literally, “whitewashing”. It’s a certain kind of person who deliberately drives a car into a crowd of people. I can can almost visualise a seething editor, furious that the alleged attacker looks like him.
I find the whole thing grotesque and offensive. We had this last year in Southport when a black man murdered young children, which led to thuggish rioting all over the country. Because this alleged attacker doesn’t fit last year’s model – who by the way was neither a migrant nor a Muslim – the impression I get from the Mail is that our sympathy should be with the poor white man who allegedly carried out the attacks.
Whether the alleged attacker is a “company director” or an asylum seeker, it’s the same story. Ordinary people were victims of an attack and that’s it. That is not the impression one is supposed to take from Britain’s most repulsive newspaper. This particular incident was a one-off. “Our” people don’t normally do this kind of thing. Give this attacker a break, will you? No thanks. A crime is a crime, company director, well-behaved children, family man, out-of-character or not.
