Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.

~Today marks the first anniversary of the slaughter at Southport - at one of those summer-resort activities you sign your kids up for, with nary a thought. In this case, it was a Taylor Swift dance-class, from which three little girls never came home: Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine years old; Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven; and Bebe King six. As Lucy Connolly could tell us if she weren't rotting in Starmer's Lubyanka, nothing is more traumatising than the death of a child. So we remember Alice, Elsie and Bebe even as Britain's "mainstream" media has chosen mostly to memory-hole them, their short lives being unhelpful to the official Ofcom-enforced narrative.

Yet, as Laura Perrins reminds us, in Southport there were many other victims, who will live with their wounds till the day they die:

One girl who a Police Officer thought was dead when he arrived at the scene, was stabbed 30 times.

At the time, I quoted this Tweeter's summation of the soi-disant United Kingdom:

Terrorism? Oh, don't be such a drama queen. As the Merseyside Constabulary and their BBC stenographers assured us within moments, there was as usual no terrorism to see here:

The attack was not terror-related, police said.

Oh, thank goodness for that. Three months later, Starmer's police state graciously permitted the public to learn very belatedly that at the alleged perpetrator's home they had found enough ricin to kill thousands of people, as well as a copy of something bearing the title The Al-Qaeda Training Manual.

No doubt, under Ofcom impartiality guidance, that isn't "terror-related", either. But, alas for the official narrative, at Merseyside Constabulary the duplicitous Chief Constable, Serena Kennedy, was forced to add a couple of charges under "Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000".

But don't worry: as I'm sure the BBC would tell us, the Terrorism Act 2000 isn't terrorism-related either.

Today is the first anniversary of the Southport carnage - July 29th 2024. When do you think the Merseyside plods found the ricin and the al-Qaeda manual? That afternoon? Late afternoon/early evening? The following morning? July 31st tops?

Yet they did not see fit to inform the public until October 31st. Notwithstanding Sir Robert Peel's founding principle that "the police are the public and the public are the police", for three months the police knew that the Southport killer was an industrial-scale ricin-manufacturing jihadist who attends mosque in prison, while the public was expected to stick to the official bollocks that he's a Welsh Christian choir-boy - or else Two-Tier Kier would fast-track you to gaol and drive you to suicide, as he did to Peter Lynch, whose blood is all over Starmer's thong, or whatever he wears when he's relaxing with his Ukrainian twinks.

Starmer lied. Serena Kennedy lied. To the court eunuchs of the media, Rudakubana is, laughably, "the Amazon killer". Nothing any Tweeter or Facebooker said about the motivations or origins of the mass murderer was as "misleading" as the official narrative. Unlike Sir Keir, his contemptible constabulary and his eunuch media, the killer is at least admirably honest:

It's a good thing those children are dead... I am so glad... I am so happy.

Lots of things have gotten worse in Britain this last year, not least for what remains of the nation's freedom of speech. The Online Safety Act came into force only on Friday, yet on its very first day it was being used to block video of English mums protesting sex-predators at migrant hotels. The British police are marking the first anniversary of Southport by seeking yet another investigation into Tommy Robinson. I sincerely hope the only reason Mr Robinson was at St Pancras was to board the next Eurostar and get the hell outta there.

And yet twelve months on, unlike the crackdowns after J6 and the Canadian truckers, the state did not succeed in cowing the masses. His Majesty and his evil prime minister may be willing to sacrifice your daughters to stabbers and sex-fiends, but signifcant numbers of the British people are not willing to go along with it. And resistance works: last week's protests in Epping have resulted in both the council and the Tory leader calling for the closure of the "migrant hotel"; last month's protests in Ballymena have resulted in two-thirds of the rapey community (in this case, the Roma) abandoning the town. Two-Tier can do his worst, but pushing back works.

As a conscious public-policy choice, there will be more child stabbings and gang-rapes in your future. So let us hope there will be more Ballymena/Epping pushbacks, too. After Southport, Starmer decided to make explicit what we have had to intuit for the last quarter-century: the state's principal concern is not all the stabbings, but the inconvenient people who persist in noticing the stabbings. Final thought from me a year ago:

If 'diversity is our strength', you'd think more polities would have given it a go over the millennia. Instead, the few that did, such as the Habsburg Empire, are no longer with us. 'Diversity', especially on the British, European and North American scale, leads to low-trust societies where you have no clue about your neighbours: That chap coming through the door, isn't he sweet, that nice Tory Lord Chancellor Ken Clarke was so right when he said how much more interesting all this diversity has made us ...oh, wait, he's getting out his machete.

This is not how functioning nation-states are meant to live. As someone said, over and over across the decades, diversity is where nations go to die. That it is our daughters who bear the brunt of this mad experiment, whether at dance class or on the streets of Rotherham, only makes it more shameful.

So why is officialdom's priority to 'manage' the narrative?

Because the children cut down yesterday are the direct result of public policy favoured in the UK by both governing parties. When public policy has consequences of which the state disapproves, they change it: restrictions on cigarettes, helmets for motorcyclists, twenty-mile speed-limits in urban areas, Covid isolation for granny... Yet nothing can be allowed to arrest the transformative consequences of this particular public policy. Instead, in the House of Commons, hours after yesterday's horror at Southport, Green Party leader Carla Denyer called for more 'safe routes' for 'refugees'.

The west dishonours its child sacrifices before the bodies are even cold. If you wanted to turn the present low-trust society into a no-trust society you would 'manage' this atrocity exactly as the dissembling and evasive authorities are doing.

~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.