How Southport Made Me Fall Off My Woke High Horse

For me it was Southport. A town I barely knew existed until 2024. The terror attack left me absolutely horror-struck. I am not going to repeat the murderer’s name. I cynically suspect more people can spell it right than remember the names of the girls who died – Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe. They are the ones who deserve to be remembered. Alice, Bebe and Elsie. With a reminder that many others were hurt at the same time.

It was of course not just the event itself, horrific as it was. It was the Government and media response that followed. Even I, not primed to see these things very clearly through my wokerati goggles, clocked that the Government was not really responding to there being a horrendous child murderer, but to the presence of knives and of largely fictitious violent far-Right mobs who were somehow more of a threat than a man actually wielding a knife against children. And the arrests that followed swiftly, of people using words, while I vividly remember seeing the video doing the rounds on social media of a police officer asking actually armed men to just go and drop their weapons off at their local mosque: no arrest for actually carrying a weapon in public, but don’t you dare use Twitter (X) or Facebook!

Some, like Lucy Connolly, survived and are now fighting for the situation not to repeat itself; others, like Peter Lynch, were not so lucky and should be added to the remembrance list.

Let’s get back to my penny dropping. There is context that I believe had a lot to do with Southport being the time of realisation for me. I used to be, as I said, a wokerati. I can see now how my university studies primed me to be very aware of equality, equity, diversity and various issues of inclusion. I was enforcing a lot of these through my work at university health service, some in ways that I retrospectively cringe at and pray I am able to somehow remedy going forward.

I wasn’t as far gone as to claim myself to be on any health spectrum – I was always a straight white female and, apart from an incident when I was a teen, my hair never had an unnatural colour, so I didn’t have much going for me in terms of Identity Top Trumps. But I did believe a lot of the nonsense and, for a long time, I actually felt like ‘less’ for not having enough ‘lived experience’ of ‘lack of privilege’. What a load of rubbish that was!

There were times when I experienced some doubts. Not during Covid lockdowns, as happened for many others. I was one of those on whom that fear campaign worked and I was too terrified to question it – luckily only until my pregnancy, when I opted out of the boosters for good.

BLM, on the other hand, left me with some unanswered questions, such as why people were protesting police carrying firearms in a country where this is not the case or, if ‘black lives matter’ is a statement of truth universally acknowledged, then surely ‘all lives matter’ must be, too? Without any links to any specific movements or groups or events or politics, both those statements stand together, surely. But I was willing to give the kindness brigade the benefit of the doubt overall – after all, I was raised on believing in never-ending kindness and DEI.

It wasn’t until my situation changed significantly that I changed my views. I left my work to become a stay-at-home mum for a while. In the summer of 2024, I was long enough after the birth of my girl for my brain not to be a complete mess anymore, but she was still young enough to nap during the day. I felt acutely the death of three little girls as I had my own. I had time enough during the day to read the news and follow the information out there, and even notice information that wasn’t there.

I was out of my work long enough that my brain was not completely immersed in the DEI soup and saw connections it would have ignored otherwise. I was in a supportive relationship where I was always safe to question anything and bounce thoughts around on any subject. And I was biologically primed to look out for any potential threat that could come my daughter’s way.

In other words, I was in an ideal situation to finally see more clearly. Indeed, if I didn’t learn my lesson at this time, I think there would be no hope for me. And it was a hard lesson.

I tend to describe it not as a shift from Left to Right, but as a fall from a very high horse onto the ground. It was not a choice of a side-step – it was me being knocked down by a tree branch and landing on my arse, getting deep cuts in the process. The ground is hard, thorny and looks a lot less welcoming than it did from up there. But there is no getting back up on this particular horse, nor should there be, as I can now see the damage left behind it.

I have no idea whether I would ever get off this horse were it not for these circumstances. I take no pride in saying that about myself, nor joy in thinking how many others don’t get anywhere near an ideal set-up to change their minds in, but it needs to be acknowledged – my personal circumstances played a major role in the change in my beliefs.

I have since learnt the term ‘disconfirmed expectancy’, also known as ‘failed prophecy’, talking about situations where reality opposes our belief-based expectations. I believe it was through the Daily Sceptic but sadly do not remember who wrote the article mentioning it.

My understanding is that, when confronted with reality that goes against our expectations, people broadly either adjust their beliefs and expectations or they double down, trying to ignore, disprove or demonise all that goes against their views.

For me, as for many, Southport was finally the time of adjusting my beliefs. But for many people it wasn’t and, lately, with the rise of politically motivated violence – please add Ann Widdecombe to the list of people to be remembered – I have been wondering how many times people can double down before they break.

It made me think of folding paper. When I was young, there was a trend trying to fold a piece of paper as many times as you can (step aside, TikTok!) and it was believed no one could fold it more than eight times. I looked it up and a lady called Britney Gallivan beat that record in 2002 – 12 folds in a very long tissue paper.

How many more folds, or doubling downs, are we going to discover are possible? And quite how thin will a person need to wear their minds, beliefs and humanity in order to do so?

And so, here I am. Would I ever get back on that high Leftie wokerati horse and ride it in blissful ignorance, were it possible? No. My daughter’s future and safety are best served from the ground and I will take every thorn along the way for her.

For me, family and politics are now intertwined and I imagine always will be. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss being up there, blissfully oblivious to the reality of the ground and voting without knowing a single policy or manifesto item of any party.

I am still in recovery from wokeism and, while I mostly found my feet, finding my path forward is not straightforward down here – Farage Candy Land, Lowe Fields, Badenoch Brooks, they all seem to be mirages now that I know taking any of them at face value is as foolish as it was to take the Greens or Labour at face value.

But here I am, trudging forward nonetheless, best I can, wondering when the penny dropped for other people, what horror will make the next group join me on the ground and how many will keep doubling down until they snap.

Marianne Bennet is a pseudonym.