Southport Still Haunts Britain

One year ago today, a 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana walked into the Hart Street dance studio through the open front door. Here, 26 children were attending a dance and yoga workshop themed around the music of Taylor Swift. Armed with a kitchen knife, Rudakubana launched into a 12-minute long stabbing spree that would take the lives of three young girls—six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar. Bebe and Elsie died at the scene, while Alice would die in hospital from her injuries the following day. Ten more people—six children and two adults—were injured, most of them critically. 

Almost as quickly as news of the attack broke, speculation swirled online. Police were unable to name Rudakubana due to his age, and so rumours filled the information vacuum. Eddie Murray, a local parent, wrote on LinkedIn that the attacker was a migrant. On X, a prominent right-wing account, run by a woman named Bernadette Spofforth, claimed the perpetrator was an illegal migrant called Ali Al-Shakati, who had arrived in the UK on a small boat. These rumours proliferated and evolved into claims that “Al-Shakati” was a Islamist extremist who was known to the authorities. The story, though untrue, spoke of a pattern that many Brits were familiar with. 

In Southport itself, tensions reached a head the day after the attack, when residents learnt that nine-year-old Alice had died overnight. That evening, at a vigil for the victims, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was heckled by angry locals as he laid flowers. “How many more children will die on our streets, Prime Minister?” one man asked. “Are you going to do something?” By nightfall, hundreds were gathered outside Southport Mosque. They threw bricks, rocks, and bottles, and set fire to a police van. Common chants included “Who the f**k is Allah?” and “We want our country back!”

Merseyside Police attempted to counter the online misinformation and quell unrest by announcing that the suspect was a 17-year-old male who was born in Cardiff and lived in the area. It was also revealed that his parents were from Rwanda, and that he had no known religious affiliation. By this point, however, the damage was already done. Over the next ten days, protests and rioting spread to 30 towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland. Belfast, Bristol, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent all saw their own unrest. The riots that summer would become the most destructive since 2011, with a total of 1,804 arrests being made in connection to them. 

The anger over the senseless murder of three young girls was raw enough. But the Southport attack also came at a time when social tensions were already taut. Just days before Rudakubana’s killing spree, footage had spread online of a shocking altercation in Manchester airport, showing a police officer kicking the head of a British Asian man. Protestors then gathered outside nearby Rochdale police station, where men chanted “Allahu Akbar!”. A few days before that, the Harehills area of Leeds had been rocked by more rioting, triggered by a dispute between the Roma community and social services. The country watched in horror as the images of burnt-out double decker buses, police with riot shields, and crowds of angry Muslim men filtered through the news and their social-media feeds. It felt to many at the time like Britain was near breaking point. 

So when Southport happened, it was practically inevitable that it would spark unimaginable fury. It almost didn’t matter that Rudakubana was born in the UK and, as far as we know, not an Islamist of any kind. The tragedy acted as a springboard for communities across the country to express their anger, fear, and helplessness at a Britain they no longer recognised. 

In Manvers, Rotherham, the obvious target for this rage was the local asylum centre—a Holiday Inn Express hotel that had been housing migrants since 2021. Residents were reportedly warm and welcoming at the start, but as time wore on, stories spread of male asylum seekers harassing teenage girls and generally causing disturbances. Relations between locals and migrants started to sour. In an area where the grooming gang scandal still casts a long shadow, the Southport attack was the final straw. On August 4th, six days after Rudakubana’s rampage, hundreds protested outside the Holiday Inn Express, in a demonstration that soon turned violent. People threw objects at the building’s windows and even tried to set the hotel on fire with 200 residents still inside. Although no one was critically injured at the time, the incident’s only fatality came much later. Peter Lynch, a 61-year-old grandfather, was arrested and convicted of violent disorder due to his involvement in the rioting. He had shouted “racist and provocative remarks” outside the Holiday Inn, including calling police “scum.” For this, he was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison. But in October, he was found hanged in his cell, having taken his own life. 

Lynch was by no means the only person to feel the full, and seemingly disproportionate, force of the law in the aftermath of last summer’s riots. Among those who had undoubtedly caused actual violence and vandalism were a string of arrests of people who were never even present at the riots. Notably, a Romanian man was convicted of spreading “false communications” and attempting to “stir up racial hatred,” because he posted a TikTok video in which he pretended to be chased by imaginary rioters. He was jailed for three months. In another case, a woman was sentenced to 15 months in prison for writing on Facebook: “Don’t protect the mosque. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” Another man was sentenced to 20 months for writing on Facebook that “every man and his dog should smash [the] f**k out of Britannia hotel,” an asylum hotel in Leeds. Bernadette Spofforth, who initially spread the rumours about Rudakubana being a Muslim migrant, was also arrested, but later released without charge. 

The most high-profile of these cases must be Lucy Connolly. Connolly, a wife of Conservative councillor and mother from Northampton, was sentenced to almost three years in prison for a post she made on X. Immediately after the Southport attack, she called for “mass deportations now” and said that people could “set fire to all the hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” Despite the fact that her post was deleted in a matter of hours and it was never proven to have actually resulted in real-world violence, Connolly was put behind bars. The appeal for her sentence to be reduced were thrown out this year, with the Court of Appeal declaring it to be not “manifestly excessive.” 

The state’s eagerness to lock people up for nasty comments made online came in stark contrast to its usual indifference to policing other sorts of crime. People began to complain of a ‘two-tier’ justice system, whereby those classified as ‘far Right’ were treated more harshly than they might otherwise have been. Starmer’s government naturally dismissed these accusations as “baseless,” “unsubstantiated,” and “disgraceful” and claimed they were part of a “right-wing extremist narrative.” When asked about the two-tier policing phenomenon by a Sky News reporter, Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley grabbed the man’s microphone and threw it to the ground in a strop. 

It was difficult to ignore the feeling that the government was more interested in coming down hard on anti-migrant riots and less in preventing the kind of attacks that had sparked them. For starters, the authorities had essentially allowed Rudakubana to slip through the cracks. It later came out that his teachers had warned Prevent, the UK’s counterterrorism programme, three times about his obsession with violence. Each time, Rudakubana was ignored, because he did not have a ‘terrorist’ motive. At one point, a 13-year-old Rudakubana had turned up to school with a knife, for which he was expelled. Just two months later, he returned to school carrying a hockey stick, with which he intended to attack a pupil. He told authorities that he had carried a blade on him more than ten times. Police turned up at his home no less than five times, responding to calls about his behaviour. Social services were apparently very aware of his aggressive disposition and obsessive interest in historical genocides and school shootings. For whatever reason, they decided not to take action that could have saved the lives of three young girls. 

The Labour government was more concerned with placing the blame on online retailers like Amazon for selling kitchen knives, with Starmer himself absurdly branding Rudakubana the “two-click killer.” What we really needed, apparently, was not a close, uncomfortable examination about the decaying fabric of modern British society. Southport and the subsequent unrest could all be made to go away if we were to pass a law to blunt all kitchen knives, and more closely police what people say online. “Think before you post,” the official UK government X account darkly warned the country in Southport’s aftermath. To this end, Labour announced just this week that the police are setting up a new elite unit, the National Internet Intelligence Investigations team, to monitor anti-immigration posts on social media. This was proposed as a response to Southport, to offer “enhanced capacity to monitor and respond to social media at the national level.” It will no doubt be kept busy by the protests currently springing up outside asylum hotels across the country—from Epping, to Canary Wharf, to Norwich. 

A year on from Southport, it doesn’t feel like much has changed at all. We seem to be having the same conversations about free speech, crime, terror, migration, and those ever nebulous ‘British values.’ People in ‘left-behind’ communities, hollowed out by unemployment and atomised through rapid demographic changes, don’t feel any more listened to. One year into government, Starmer’s Labour has done precisely nothing to address these concerns. It remains to be seen whether the UK can make it through the rest of this summer without tensions once again boiling over into full-blown riots.