THE LEFT'S PREFERRED DEAD

In the ceaseless carnival of British public life, where outrage is rationed like wartime sugar and compassion is distributed according to an invisible points system known only to the higher editors, we have lately been treated to a particularly refined example of what might be called two-tier sympathy. It is a system so exquisitely calibrated that one almost admires the craftsmanship, even as one contemplates the moral wreckage it leaves behind.

Consider, if you will, the case of Jason Arday. Here was a man whose ascent to the rank of youngest Black professor at Cambridge had been greeted with the sort of institutional rapture normally reserved for the rediscovery of a lost Vermeer. His personal narrative—autism, late speech, triumph over adversity—was polished until it shone with the soft glow of approved inspiration. Then, with the inevitability of a Victorian novel reaching its third-act revelation, questions began to accumulate about the precise dimensions of that narrative and the scholarly foundations beneath it. Resignation followed. Death followed soon after. And with it came the expected cascade of media and progressive solicitude: the careful phrasing, the lingering profiles, the gentle insistence that any scrutiny of the man’s claims must somehow be entangled with darker forces. One could almost hear the collective intake of breath as the narrative was hastily rearranged to ensure that sympathy remained undiluted.

Now place beside this the quieter procession of the others. Ann Widdecombe, a figure whose robust opinions had long made her a convenient target for metropolitan disdain, was murdered in her own home with a thoroughness that left little room for ambiguity. The investigation acquired the sombre machinery of counter-terrorism, yet the public mourning remained curiously restrained, as if the nation had decided that a certain quantity of political incorrectness in life somehow diluted the horror of the death. 

Henry Nowak, an eighteen-year-old student, was stabbed on a Southampton street; the subsequent handling of the scene, complete with the victim being restrained while dying, produced a brief spasm of national unease before the story was filed under the heading of regrettable procedural complexity. Wayne Broadhurst, walking his dog in west London, encountered a frenzy of violence from a man whose immigration history and mental state formed a combination the authorities appear to have found administratively inconvenient. Rhiannon Whyte, a hotel worker, was pursued and killed after her shift at a premises housing asylum seekers—an arrangement that, in the abstract, sounds almost like a social experiment designed by someone with a dark sense of humour and no personal stake in the outcome.

These cases share a certain grim clarity: ordinary people going about ordinary lives, interrupted by sudden and irreversible violence. They also share a relative scarcity of the prolonged, atmospheric sympathy that settled so readily around Arday. The difference is not merely one of celebrity. It is one of narrative utility. Arday’s story, even in its contested form, could still be made to serve larger purposes—representation, systemic barriers, the redemptive power of institutions. The others offered no such convenient scaffolding. Their deaths pointed, inconveniently, toward questions of street safety, immigration control, and the uneven application of official concern. Better, then, to treat them as discrete tragedies rather than symptoms of anything larger.

The resulting imbalance has a peculiarly modern flavour. It is not that the media refuse to report the deaths; they do, with professional efficiency. It is that the emotional temperature is carefully modulated. One set of victims receives the full orchestral treatment—soft lighting, lingering close-ups, the implication that society itself stands indicted. The other set is handled more like a series of unfortunate local incidents, best acknowledged and then allowed to recede before they disturb the preferred map of grievance. The effect is rather like a theatre critic who reserves his most extravagant praise for the production that flatters his own prior theories, while treating the rest of the season as regrettable but inevitable.

Robert Frost, the American poet, once observed that the mark of a civilised society is its capacity to recognise absurdity without immediately converting it into a programme. We appear to have inverted the formula. The absurdity is recognised well enough—the disparity in attention is obvious to anyone not professionally required to deny it—but it is then pressed into service as further evidence of the very hierarchies it exposes. Those who notice the two tiers are invited to examine their own motives; those who enforce them are presumed to be acting from higher moral necessity. It is a closed system of impressive elegance, and about as useful as a chocolate teapot when it comes to the unglamorous business of protecting the next dog-walker or hotel worker or student walking home after a night out.

One is left with the melancholy suspicion that sympathy, in its current institutional form, has become less a human response than a form of cultural bookkeeping. Credits are awarded according to the perceived historical ledger of the victim; debits are applied with equal precision. The ledger itself is rarely audited. In such a climate, the dead are sorted not primarily by the manner of their dying, but by the stories they can still be made to tell. Some stories, it seems, are simply more sympathetic than others. The rest are left to make their own arrangements with posterity, which, unlike the contemporary media, has never been particularly good at taking notes.

FARAGE'S TWO FINGERS, BURNHAM'S SOFT TOUCH

The spectacle of Andy Burnham, that perpetual understudy of British politics now elevated to the highest and oldest office of statedom, earnestly proposing that the better-heeled villages of England must now shoulder a larger share of the migrant housing burden, arrives with exquisite timing. Only days after Nigel Farage reclaimed his Clacton seat in a by-election so thoroughly boycotted by the major parties that his principal rival was a man wearing a dustbin on his head, Burnham’s remarks retain the full, undiluted flavour of a politician who has mastered the art of rearranging the symptoms while the underlying condition thrives. While the voters of Clacton were busy delivering a rough, unsubtle verdict on the political class, Burnham was busy redistributing the consequences of that class’s failures with the brisk efficiency of a man who has just discovered that fairness can be measured in hotel rooms allocated per postcode.

Farage’s victory - 22,239 votes against Count Binface’s 9,455 in a contest the establishment preferred to treat as a farce - does not, of course, transform British politics overnight. Yet it possesses a certain clarifying power. It suggests that a substantial portion of the public has grown weary of being told that uncontrolled arrivals across the Channel constitute a shared national endeavour, akin to a flood or a distant war, in which every community must simply dig deeper and smile more bravely. Burnham’s response to local revolts over the placement of 1,250 asylum seekers is to insist that the leafy bits of the map must now absorb more of the overflow. It is the policy equivalent of noticing that the roof is leaking and solemnly instructing the residents of the drier rooms to stand under the drip for the sake of equity.

This is not statesmanship. It is the managerial reflex of a man who has spent years perfecting the appearance of concern while the boats keep coming. Housing those who have entered the country illegally is not an act of collective solidarity; it is the visible residue of successive governments’ inability or unwillingness to enforce the border. The solution remains, as ever, within the government’s power - those without authority to stay should be returned forthwith to their countries of origin. The process need not be theatrical, but it must be steady and unapologetic. Treaties that have mutated from instruments of cooperation into instruments of paralysis can be left. Laws that prioritise process over outcome can be rewritten. The alternative - endlessly lecturing the residents of places like Piddington about their moral obligations - merely confirms that the political imagination has shrunk to the size of a spreadsheet.

Burnham’s particular contribution is to render this failure almost touching in its feebleness. He speaks of fairness between rich and poor while remaining curiously silent on the more elementary fairness of distinguishing between those invited to enter the country and those who simply arrive. One senses in him the mild, professional anxiety of a man who understands optics better than borders. The Clacton result, for all its absurdity and the absence of serious opposition, still carries the unmistakable scent of public impatience with precisely this style of politics. When the establishment declines even to field candidates and a man in a bin finishes second, the message is not subtle: large numbers of voters have concluded that the current approach is not working and that those who continue to manage decline rather than reverse it have exhausted their credit.

The Channel crossings themselves must be stopped. If the organisers of those crossings understand only the language of interdiction, then force, applied with the measured determination of a state that still claims sovereignty over its own waters, is not an excess; it is the minimum requirement of seriousness. Softness has not produced compassion. It has produced hotels, local anger, eroded trust, and the melancholy sight of politicians like Burnham urging the redistribution of a problem they show little interest in ending. Continuing to pretend that the answer lies in spreading the discomfort more evenly is the rhetorical equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs while insisting the iceberg is a valuable opportunity for community cohesion.

George Orwell once noted that political language often substitutes the expression of feeling for the possession of thought. Burnham’s latest intervention belongs firmly in that tradition. It offers the warm glow of moral exertion without the inconvenience of decisive action. Britain is under no obligation to house every person who succeeds in reaching its shores by irregular means. It is under an obligation to maintain a border that means something. The voters of Clacton, in their rough and imperfect way, appear to have grasped the distinction. One waits, with diminishing patience, for the former Mayor of Greater Manchester to do the same.

THE ALERT THAT CRIED WOLF

There is a particular quality to the modern British emergency that no other nation quite manages to achieve. It arrives not with the dignity of an air-raid siren or the honest panic of a flood warning, but with the tinny, self-important beep of a government app that has finally found something useful to do after years of sitting around looking important. On Friday evening the phones of England and Wales began to scream in unison. Not because missiles were inbound, not because the Thames had risen to swallow Westminster, not even because a particularly large asteroid had taken a shine to Norwich. No. The nation was being urgently informed that it should refrain from lighting a disposable barbecue.

One could almost admire the efficiency. The same system designed to save lives in the event of genuine catastrophe had been pressed into service to lecture the populace about outdoor cooking. The message itself possessed that special bureaucratic poetry we have come to expect: a “very high risk of wildfires nationally,” followed by a solemn prohibition on barbecues, firepits, garden incinerators and fireworks. Even a small flame, it warned, might rapidly develop into something that would inconvenience emergency responders. Somewhere in Whitehall a civil servant was no doubt congratulating himself on having discovered the perfect fusion of public safety and public nannying.

It was always going to end this way. Those of us who watched the emergency alert system being introduced with a mixture of cautious approval and deep suspicion were assured, in the usual tones of official sincerity, that it would be reserved for life-threatening events. Floods. Terror attacks. Extreme weather that actually threatened to kill people rather than merely spoil their weekend. We nodded along, the way one nods when a politician promises that a new power will never be abused. We even allowed ourselves a flicker of relief that, for once, technology might be harnessed for something other than delivering targeted advertisements for cut-price socks. And then the first serious heatwave arrived, the grass turned the colour of old newspaper, a few fires broke out, and the system revealed its true vocation.

The government, it turns out, had been planning this all along. Not the wildfires, of course – those remain the responsibility of the weather, the dry undergrowth and the occasional idiot with a match – but the moment when the alert system could be deployed for something agreeably trivial yet darkly moralising. Propaganda does not always arrive in jackboots. Sometimes it arrives as a stern note about disposable barbecues, delivered with the full theatrical apparatus of a national emergency. The same people who once fretted about 'misinformation' now treat every dry spell as an opportunity to broadcast the gospel of official caution to every mobile phone in the land.

And into this carefully prepared moment stepped Andy Burnham, that perpetual almost-man of British politics, the former Mayor of Greater Manchester who has spent years positioning himself as the Prime Minister he so clearly believes the country deserves. Burnham has the look of a man who has rehearsed his concerned expression in front of a mirror until it has taken on a permanent, slightly moist quality. He appears at the scene of a fire the way other men appear at the opening of a supermarket: slightly too eager, slightly too ready with a statement, slightly too convinced that the cameras have been waiting specifically for him.

One imagines him receiving the news of the wildfires with something approaching professional satisfaction. Here, at last, was a crisis that required neither complicated economic thinking nor the messy business of actual leadership, but simply the deployment of his signature mixture of furrowed brow and regional authenticity. He could stand in front of the smoke, urge caution, support the ban on disposable barbecues, and generally radiate the air of a man who had been warning about this sort of thing for years, even if no one can quite remember him doing so. The temporary ban on the sale of single-use grills was announced with the solemnity usually reserved for declarations of war. Retailers were instructed. Guidance was issued. Burnham spoke to the BBC in the tones of a man who has finally been given a proper job.

There is something almost touching about the way certain politicians seize upon any opportunity to tell the public what not to do. The barbecue, that humble instrument of British summer, has long been viewed with suspicion by the more refined end of the political class. It is noisy, it is smoky, it is associated with people who drink lager in plastic chairs and discuss football rather than the finer points of net-zero strategy. To ban the disposable variety under cover of an emergency is to achieve, in one neat stroke, both a public-safety gesture and a small cultural victory. The alert system, once sold as a shield against disaster, has become a loudspeaker for the latest official preference.

Of course the fires are real. Of course dry conditions and high temperatures create genuine risk. No one of sound mind wants to see homes destroyed or firefighters exhausted by preventable blazes. The difficulty lies in the scale of the response. A national emergency alert is not a press release. It is not a gentle reminder on the evening news. It is a siren that interrupts dinner, startles drivers, and announces itself with the authority of something that might, in other circumstances, mean the difference between life and death. When that authority is spent on advising against a Saturday afternoon sausage, the currency is devalued. People begin to treat the next alert the way they treat the third or fourth email from their bank warning them about 'suspicious activity.' They glance, they shrug, and eventually they switch the whole thing off.

This was the fear from the beginning. The system’s defenders insisted that only the most serious threats would trigger it. The sceptics replied that governments, once given a tool for reaching every citizen at once, would find it irresistible for lesser purposes. The sceptics have been vindicated with almost indecent speed. The first major use of the alert for an 'active incident' turns out to be a lecture about outdoor cooking, delivered while the Prime Minister speaks of Britain as a 'tinderbox' and ministers scramble to look decisive. Andy Burnham, never one to miss a chance to appear statesmanlike, adds his voice to the chorus. One half expects him to announce that Greater Manchester has taken the lead in developing a more responsible form of charcoal.

The satire writes itself, yet the consequences are not particularly funny. A tool that might one day be needed for a genuine national emergency has been introduced to the public in the most deflating manner possible. The next time the phones scream, a significant number of people will assume it is another sermon about garden incinerators or the correct disposal of cigarette butts. Many will have disabled the alerts entirely. The government will then express surprise and disappointment that the public is not taking the system seriously. It will not occur to them that seriousness is a two-way street. A heatwave becomes a national emergency. A barbecue becomes a threat to civilisation. A mayor with a gift for the concerned soundbite becomes the face of official wisdom. And a system that was meant to protect the public becomes, in its first major outing, a vehicle for the sort of nagging that once required a leaflet through the door.

The clowns, as the original complainant put it with admirable economy, are in charge. They have taken a serious instrument and turned it into a national public-address system for their preferred version of common sense. They will, of course, insist that this was never the plan. They always do. The rest of us, staring at our phones as the siren dies away and the instruction not to light a fire settles over the evening like ash, are left to draw our own conclusions. The emergency alert has spoken. The barbecue is cancelled. The republic of caution is safe for another day. And somewhere, one suspects, Andy Burnham is already preparing his next statement.