The Raoul Moat affair has uncovered a seething pit of northern madness

17 July 2010

Some of the public are so stupid and desperate to emote that they will mourn anything, says Rod Liddle. They even build shrines to crazed killers and chicken carcasses

What on earth is the government going to do about all these deranged northerners running amok shooting people? The more callous among you might well argue that it doesn’t really matter, as these madmen are only shooting other northerners, and so it is therefore none of our business. Perhaps. But there is no guarantee that the next deranged northerner will not get on a train, if he can afford it, and start shooting at us, instead. This is the thing; you simply cannot tell with nutters, there is no logic to their mayhem. There is a case to be made for employing the consensual, democratic approach adopted by the Cumbria and Northumberland police, which is to let each respective deranged northerner shoot several people — to get it out of his system — before the law is brought in to constrain him. Some people have criticised the police for this, but it seems to me as good an approach as any other.

One thing, though, is for sure — until a week ago, Cumbria’s Derrick Bird thought he was odds on to win the much coveted Mentally Ill Northerner of the Year Award, to be presented by Yorkshire’s Karen Matthews — who, if you remember, hid her young daughter, Shannon, in a drawer beneath a friend’s bed for a month or so and claimed she’d been abducted — at a glittering ceremony at Batley and Spen Working Men’s Club in December. And then suddenly Northumberland’s Raoul Moat has snuck in, snatching the commemorative pig-iron beer tankard from Derrick’s hand. Derrick must be gutted, as well as dead.

You think this is all in bad taste? Believe me, this is nothing. This is nothing. The Raoul Moat affair has uncovered a sort of seething pit of madness which well exceeds anything achievable by even the lowest form of satire. I do not mean Mr Moat himself — who, hereafter, will be referred to as ‘Moaty’, which is the name given to him by his thousand upon thousand of supporters in the north-east of England, including the former England football international and drunkard Paul Gascoigne, of which more later — but the others, the people online, the people in the streets, the people. And the queuing up to put flowers upon his ‘shrine’, which is situated next to a storm drain where he once lived. These lumpen-shrines are a comparatively new thing, a Diana thing, or post-Diana thing, I suppose; the garage flowers tied to the railings in what is known as a ‘Catford Bouquet’, after the south London suburb where people get stabbed to death. It is said that these sorts of bouquets and wreaths, together with attendant illiterate textspeak notes (RIP Monger luv u xxx lol) were left in a Liverpool backstreet on the site where a ‘body’ had been found, even though later it was discovered to be the carcass of a chicken. Maybe that story is apocryphal, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Shrines: once to Mary or Jesus, then just to people who had died suddenly and unfortunately, then to domestic fowl, now for murderers.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (5)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

pete johnson

July 15th, 2010 2:06pm Report this comment

I thought we were well past the dribbling North South prejudice which characterised the seventies.

Eff whay aye...

Moat wasn't from Northumberland. He was from Newcastle.

Facebook is, and always has been, driven by idiocy. Presumably that's why you read it.

You seem to claim that 18,000 people have signed up to the Facebook campaign? I just looked and it has 731 members. The moderator just posted an apology because he's too busy to delete all of the unsympathetic posts. However, there's a similarly named satirical site with 8,000 members. Perhaps that's the one you meant but you just didn't read any of the content?

I live in Newcastle and I've yet to meet one of the "thousands and thousands of supporters" you speak of. Everyone I've spoken to refers to him in terms which would just as adequately describe you.

Last years Home Office Crime stats set the rates for violent crime incidents in London at around 40,000 higher than the combined regions of North East and North West England. This area includes the cities of Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester and has a population of 9.25 million as compared to London at 7.2 million. The rates for both the North East and North West are falling. London reported no change. Last time I checked London was fairly and squarely within what is commonly perceived as South.

Tw*t

Oedipus Rex

July 16th, 2010 11:50am Report this comment

Dead right about the surreal Di blubfest - it has launched an era of mass hysteria about just about anything, as if the nation was suffering from some kind of collective psychological illness.

The fact that, in this case, it is in reality a small minority doesn't change a thing - north or south.

Yam Yam

July 23rd, 2010 2:42pm Report this comment

To paraphrase that immortal British gangster movie, 'Get Carter', "Some hard nuts operate up north, Rod. They won't take kindly to someone from London poking his bugle in."

Kevan

July 26th, 2010 7:30pm Report this comment

Though I agree that the north-south divide thing is a little beyond the pale, I couldn't agree more that our society contains a significant number of people who readily answer the description "...fabulously — almost inconceivably — stupid, illiterate, ill-educated but incredibly sure of their rights..." and that number, I fear is far greater than either we might imagine, need or should tolerate. Those illiterate half wits who do answer to this description need to have it impressed upon them that you have no rights what so ever, certainly not a right to respect unless you earn them/it. The only scum in this society are those under educated persons who believe they are the centre of the universe and act accordingly badly, without decorum, without manners and without intelligence.

Herbert Thornton

July 26th, 2010 9:13pm Report this comment

Of course Moat was nuts, but why point a finger at the North when the entire country is as mad as Rod's box of frogs, with the madness being especially concentrated in London? Mass hysteria and a desire to construct shrines are indeed endemic to the Establishment - evidenced by the degree to which it worships at the shrine of Political Correctness and by way it has encouraged so many millions of immigrants to settle in Britain, bringing with them their own special kinds of mass hysteria and building shrines all over the place.

There is a saying, centuries old, that "Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."

From all the evidence, it seems that this time, the Gods are more determined than ever.

Post comment