Am I going mad? It definitely feels like I’m going mad. Let me tell you two tales, one about an ugly football match, the other about the early release of a ‘political’ prisoner’. It feels as if society, not just the fans in the stands, are baying for blood. I’m mad about it. Here's why.
There’s been little love lost between my team Liverpool and their recent opponents Newcastle United.
Liverpool’s crime? Wanting to buy Newcastle’s striker, Alexander Isak. How dare they!
If reports are to be believed – and everything should be viewed with raised eyebrows when it comes to football transfers – Isak informed Newcastle of his desire leave at the end of last season and was given assurances he would be able to. Liverpool, with no recognised striker following Diogo Jota’s death placed a bid of around £110 million.
A British transfer record fee. As an opening bid. A fee subsequently described as “disrespectful.” I feel like I’m going mad. If anyone would like to ‘disrespect’ me with £110,000,000, please let me know and I’ll send you my bank details.
The game’s turning point is a tackle by Newcastle’s Anthony Gordon on Virgil Van Dijk, Liverpool’s captain, just before half-time.
Gordon comes flying in, studs up, raking the back of Van Dijk’s leg. It is a deeply unprofessional tackle from Gordon. A cynical attempt to hurt a colleague with no discernible attempt to win the ball. It’s a tackle that’s beneath him, frankly.
By the time Anthony Gordon lunges in, the tone of the match is clear: we’re here to cause harm to anyone in a red shirt. (And the Newcastle fans are still in the stands cheering them on).
At the end of the day, I’m just glad Liverpool won. But I am genuinely baffled and alarmed by the amount of normally level-headed people who became intent on causing harm because of a (potential) transfer. Bad blood is flowing, indeed rushing to the head of many of them.
Most of all, I’m glad Liverpool won because, when I say what I’m about to say, you know it’s not coming from a place of bitterness that my football team lost a match. Because another story this week has left me feeling like I’m going mad: the release of Lucy Connolly from prison.
In July 2024, three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in Southport. In the aftermath, amid (false) reports that the killer was an asylum seeker, riots broke out across the country as people targeted mosques, asylum seeker accommodation, and even libraries.
In the midst of this, Lucy Connolly – whose husband was, at the time, a Conservative county councillor – tweeted:
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the [f***ing] hotels full of the [b***ards] for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
Having left prison, Connolly told The Telegraph that she was a “political prisoner” and that Keir Starmer “needs to look at what people's human rights are, what freedom of speech means and what the laws are in this country.”
The irony of her saying this in an interview with a national newspaper was apparently lost on her.
Am I going mad? It definitely feels like I’m going mad.
Lucy Connolly encouraged people to burn down hotels with people inside. To spill blood. She pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing ‘threatening or abusive’ written material on X. She literally admitted to doing this in a court of law.
But she is now being hailed in some quarters as a political martyr and champion of free speech. Let’s have it right: you are free to say what you want, but you are not free from the consequences of your speech. Whether you like it or not, migrants and asylum seekers are made in the image of God, as we all are, and are beloved by the creator of the universe. None of us has the right to end their lives. Incitement of violence towards them is rightly a crime.
She deserves to be in prison.
The people who rioted last year are ultimately responsible for their actions. But Lucy Connolly – and everyone else who incited violence in the aftermath of the Southport attacks – is also partly to blame for cultivating a society in which thugs feel as though that is an acceptable course of action. Now she is released from prison, every media outlet, every interviewer, every politician who repeats her reality-defying nonsense without challenge is as culpable as she is for fostering this climate of violence. This is before we even begin to talk about the record numbers of asylum seekers who have already died in our care.
It was ultimately Anthony Gordon’s stupid decision to go in studs-up on Van Dijk. But referee Simon Hooper and the Newcastle fans should reflect on their part in fostering a climate of violence in which Gordon’s felt his decision was reasonable, too.
We are all Simon Hooper. We are all the referee. When we allow rhetoric to become calls for violence, this has real-world consequences. People get hurt and killed. Blood is spilled. We are all responsible for the society in which we live, and the rhetoric of the debate that occurs therein.
It’s not just febrile Newcastle fans that are losing their grip on reality: there seems to be a society-wide willingness simply to bypass the concrete facts of reality to further personal ideologies. The more people like Lucy Connolly are rehabilitated by media whitewashing, the more statements like “set fire to all the [f***ing] hotels full of the [b***ards] … if that makes me racist, so be it” become acceptable, the less safe the most vulnerable in society become and the more likely they are to be killed.
That’s the nub of it. Lucy Connolly should be in prison because what she said leads to people being killed. No-one should have been surprised when Anthony Gordon went in on Van Dijk that night. No-one should feign surprise when migrants and asylum seekers are eventually killed on the basis of rumour and misinformation. Because they will be. And because we will all have been cheering on from the stands.
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