Something extraordinary happened in the UK this week: the murder of three working-class girls was turned into a moral panic about working-class communities. Ruthlessly, with something approaching relish, the media elites dragged the public gaze from the frenzied stabbing of girls in a seaside town to the supposed frothing bigotries of the seaside town itself. In elite circles, angst over the evil visited on the children of Southport gave way to a foreboding over what lurks within Southport. In those terraced houses, with their white working-class inhabitants, so susceptible to online lies, so given to racial animus. These people want us to fear not the wicked individuals who terrorise our towns, but the towns themselves.

It has been a chilling spectacle. I am struggling to recall the last time the moral narrative around a horrific event was so mercilessly rewritten by those with cultural power. The week started with the grim news that a young man had invaded a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in north-west England and used a curved kitchen knife to assault its attendees, leaving three girls dead and others seriously injured. And it ends with the elites focussing their fury and energy almost exclusively on the civil unrest that followed that act of barbarism. On the ‘moral deviance’ less of the killer who laid waste to three precious lives, than of those small sections of working-class society that erupted in fury at his killing. The establishment is back in its comfort zone – fretting over the alien morality and unwieldy energy of the white working class.

As this awful week draws to a close, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are ruled by people who fear the anger of the masses following acts of inhumanity more than they do the acts of inhumanity themselves. You can deplore the riotous disorder that followed the Southport massacre, as I do, and still ask why that disorder elicited a more zealous reaction from the opinion-forming classes than did the slaughter that provoked it. To my mind, the street violence in Southport, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Manchester and central London was wholly destructive. Groups of men hurled projectiles at cops and, most despicabably, threw bricks at mosques. This was a betrayal of the quiet dignity the good people of Southport have shown following the horror that befell their community. And yet it is curious, concerning in fact, that this criminal behaviour seems to be occupying Britain’s moral guardians and policymakers more than the murderous nihilism inflicted on Southport’s girls.

Peruse the media and you will be left with the distinct impression that the true deviants of 21st-century Britain, the greatest threat to our way of life, are angry working-class men. The press is in the grip of an all-out hooligan panic, the likes of which we’ve not seen since the 1980s. The slain girls of Southport risk being forgotten in the media rush to denounce the ‘thugs’, the ‘far-right hooligans’ and the ‘fascists’ who they say swarmed the streets of Southport and other towns in the aftermath of the killings. Some even fear that the rioters were stooges of Russia – unwitting stooges, of course, given how dim they are. We’re told that those baseless claims spread by the far right, that the Southport suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker, came from a ‘fake news website’ with ‘links to Russia’, helping to give rise to those ‘violent riots throughout the UK’. This vision of Britain’s great unwashed being marshalled by Russia to spread mayhem across our isles is peak liberal hysteria.