Today marks eight years exactly since I, along with eleven million British viewers, sat down to watch “One Love Manchester”, the televised benefit concert that was organised by pop superstar Ariana Grande after the devastating suicide bomb attack at Manchester Arena during one of her shows in 2017. Twenty-two people were killed and around a thousand injured, including those who obtained severe psychological trauma.
One Love Manchester was put together by Grande only a fortnight after the horror, when feelings were still as raw as it was possible to be. As a way of providing solace and morale, especially to Mancunians, it was deemed a roaring success. It raised over ten million pounds for the British Red Cross and each of the twenty-two deceased victims’ families received £250,000 each. Even Piers Morgan, who had expressed scepticism towards Grande, found it within himself to apologise to her for doubting her vision for healing and unity.
There’s a field of film theory known as reception studies which essentially argues that media texts are encoded with meanings (creative and political) by the creators, that audience reaction equally encodes the text with meaning, and that these meanings will change over time with new context. Rewatching the full three-hour concert on Youtube almost a decade later, the intent to lift spirits and pay tribute to the resilience of Mancunians and, by extension, British spirit, remains evident. What has faded, is the illusion of defiance or “fighting back”.
In fact, as cynical as it sounds, over the last eight years there’s a burgeoning feeling that the “love vs evil” message readily capitalised on by pro-multiculturalism politicians, was about control as much as catharsis. Control of the public’s justified anger, that is. At the end of the first hour, after acts like Take That, Miley Cyrus and Pharrell Williams had warmed up the crowd, producer and co-organiser Scooter Braun walked onto the stage. He spoke about his visit with Grande to the children’s hospital to visit victims of the attack. There, he said, he met a fifteen-year-old boy whose best friend had died at Manchester Arena. Braun claimed that the boy had asked him to relay a message to the whole audience: “Don’t go forward in anger, love spreads.”
The sentiment had a Christ-like quality, and from a bereaved and injured child was doubly powerful. What monster could question it? Perhaps a “professional hatemonger” like Katie Hopkins, who after tweeting in response to the bombing that Britain needed a ‘“final solution” was almost instantly fired from her LBC job. The moral indefensibility of her rhetoric helpfully made her the obscure antithesis to the spirit of the concert.
Love became the defining theme of the night. “Don’t you agree that love always wins?” Justin Bieber, visibly moved, declared to screaming, tearful cheers, adding that instead of fighting evil with evil, the concert was fighting evil with “good”. Katy Perry took these sentiments to, frankly, excruciating lengths, imploring the audience with Disneyish fervour to touch the person next to them, stranger or friend, and tell them that they loved them. Later, a highlight performance would be Ariana Grande and Coldplay duetting in a cover of Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back In Anger” — a perfect tribute to the wisdom of a fifteen-year-old.
It was okay to be angry at a senseless murder of innocent people and multiple attacks on our nation
Yet, on that day, it wasn’t just the bombing at Manchester Arena haunting the public. That same year on March 22nd, Islamist Khalid Masood had driven a car into pedestrians on London Bridge, killing six people and injuring a further fifty. The day before One Love Manchester was aired, another Islamist terrorist attack had been carried out in London, in which eight people were killed and a further forty-eight injured via vehicle-ramming and stabbings. As then-Prime Minister Theresa May put it, these were three acts “bound together by the single, evil ideology of Islamist extremism.” It’s very difficult not to look back at the theme of love, love, love — however sincerely intended by the artists — and not see a useful mantra for keeping a firm, virtue-coded lid on what was undeniably a cultural boiling point.
How might the atmosphere have been changed if one, just one, person had come out on stage and said that actually, it was okay to be angry at a senseless murder of innocent people and multiple attacks on our nation. Love could extend to the love of one’s country, its values, and the protection of its children. Anger was not defective in these circumstances, far from it — Aristotle himself taught that anger was a moral emotion as much as a vice, i.e. necessary for good.
Perhaps this was considered to be too complex and nuanced a sentiment — in the unlikely event it was considered at all. “Love vs evil” was clean, safe and comforting in the short term. Two weeks after the concert, another terrorist attack occurred — this one a revenge act where lone disturbed individual Darren Osborne attempted to drive a van into a mosque, resulting in one fatality and injuring eleven others. The senselessness and planned scale of damage in the crime (Osborne had explicitly aimed to murder as many Muslims as possible) seemingly proved the point: this is where looking forward in anger got you.
It’s eight years later. Anger — fury, even — now simmers palpably amongst a significant portion of the electorate, underpinned by betrayal and political apathy. In recent times, the full scale and horror of Pakistani grooming (rape) gangs have finally surfaced in the mainstream, along with the cynical failures of law enforcement, yet a national, judge-led inquiry has been refused. Conservative MP David Amess has been murdered by an Islamist and parliament he served too cowardly to even state this explicitly, choosing to patronise and gaslight the British public with an online safety bill. In 2023, the abject failures — negligence, according to some — of MI5 to potentially prevent what happened at the Manchester Arena surfaced.
Now, the mood seems to have shifted. The case of Lucy Connolly, imprisoned for 31 months for saying that migrant hotels could be burned down for all she cares, has generated support across the political spectrum among people who feel that the punishment didn’t fit the “crime”. Even more telling is the monumental backlash to Labour MP Lucy Powell’s jeering comments on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions around grooming gangs being a “dogwhistle”.
The smoke from the riots that exploded last summer following the Southport killings hangs in the air, and it’s gotten into a lot of lungs — including people much more left-wing than I am. Of course, killer Axel Rudabukana was neither an Islamist nor himself an illegal immigrant (his family’s circumstances are more dubious). But whether the misinformation that spread around his identity and motives was cynical or ignorant, there was an inescapable sense that the rioters had been waiting for a reason to attack the system.
It’s impossible to know for sure if the irreconcilable political division and social unrest in recent times would have been in any way curbed had righteous anger been accommodated, even encouraged, when it ought to have been. What is, and should have always been, certain is that love as some kind of all-powerful weapon against terror and the threat it poses to Britain and the West is and always was a celebrity soundbite — nothing more.
