The gold, the bad and the ugly

They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs
And too many right wing meetings

In the last week we have seen the best of people and the worst of people. It’s been an age of endeavour, resilience and triumph, and an age of horror, violence and bigotry.

The terrible events of Southport were bad enough, every parent’s worst nightmare writ large on every TV screen and news bulletin. I can’t even begin to get my head around that.

Since then though, the actions of a few have overtaken the headlines. How dare they? How dare those renta-thugs in their nylon Sports Direct football shirts, and their ill-fitting Primark jogger shorts use the deaths of those little girls as an excuse to go on the rampage? How dare they hijack a vigil that aimed to help people try to come to terms with what happened, to show solidarity and empathy with those who are dealing with the most unfathomable pain?

Few of the arrested come from Southport. None of the people who were rampaging through Liverpool, Middlesborough, Stoke-on-Trent, Hull – or any of the other places had anything to do with Southport or with the grieving, shell-shocked community.

Instead they attacked a place of worship, a library, and a Citizens Advice Bureau. They burned out a taxi – someone’s livelihood – looted shoe shops, and on Sunday night tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers. That, if I remember my General Principles of English Law O’Level properly, is attempted murder. They waggled their pallid, hairy, fat-bastard bellies in the face of police officers, shouting ‘I want my country back. And while I’m at it I’ll help myself to these Greggs sausage rolls, a tonne of Lush bathbombs and some JD Sports crocs.’

Yeah mate. I want mine back too. I want my diverse, community-minded country back. I want the country that opened its arms and its houses to those fleeing war-torn Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine.

I’m not so naïve as to think that this tension is new: from the pogrom in York in 1190, through Cable Street, the ‘rivers of blood’ and the Toxteth, Brixton and Croydon riots to Southport in 2024, there have always been those who use the sense of ‘other’ as an excuse for violence, thuggery, and thievery.

Equally, there have always been those who, in their quiet way, oppose it. Who do not recognise their country in the chants of the beer-swilling, pot-bellied bigot. That sentiment is there in the people of Southport who turned up at daybreak on Sunday, with tools and equipment, rebuilding the wall around the mosque, sweeping up the debris from the streets. Their streets. Their communities. The guy who set up a £500-target on Gofund me to replace some of the burned library books in the Liverpool Spellow Lane Library, who raised £50,000 in one day. The people of all faiths, all sizes, all colours who are out there sweeping up the streets of Middlesborough. That’s my country.

As is the one where a man with a metal hip, a cyst on his spine, and a sense of humour that’s drier than the Sahara, can hold the sporting world in the palm of his hand as he and his playing partner refuse to go quietly into the dark night of his career, but rage against the dying of the light, saving match point after match point to win not one, but two matches and get to the Olympic 2024 tennis doubles quarter finals. It wasn’t the fairy-tale ending many of us had hoped for, but my God, Andy Murray, what a career. You and Dan Evans had us believing for an all-too-brief period.

My country’s one where Tom Piddock, the cross country cyclist, can have a puncture mid-race and still get back into it, to win gold. Where the baby-faced Alex Yee can find just enough in him at the end to overtake his friend and rival Hayden Wilde. Where Imogen Grant and Emily Craig (a local lass, who learned to row at the lake down the road from me *proud face*) used their photo-finish from four years ago to spur them onto the gold medal. Where Adam Peaty’s silver means as much to him as a gold would, because, for him, it represents his conquering of his demons. Where Harry Charles can stand next to two of his heroes, on the podium, their golden medals reflecting in their faces, just as they did 12 years ago when they stood next to Charles’ father Peter.

I could go on for pages about this, but will spare you all that. Those you who follow this column are only too aware of my Olympic obsession, and those who know me well understand whence it comes.

Suffice to say, the Olympics shows us the best of us, and, luckily, so does the aftermath of the riots. Whatever your political persuasion, the rioters, the looters,  and those whose political rhetoric, safely delivered on Twitter or GB News, fuels their fire, do not represent me, they are not us. They are not my country.

This is more like it: