The betrayal of Southport

Southport was rocked by two tragedies last week. First was the senseless stabbing spree that claimed the lives of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar. Second was the racist rioting the following evening, when thugs hurled bricks and bottles at the local mosque. While the depraved killings of those three young girls remain front-and-centre in the minds of the people of Southport, tragically, it is those deplorable, ugly scenes on Tuesday night that have had greatest impact nationally, as rioting has since spread relentlessly across much of the rest of England.

To say that Southport, a sleepy seaside town in Merseyside in the north-west of England, is not a place you would expect to endure such a high-profile atrocity – let alone become a catalyst for a wave of racist violence – would be quite the understatement. A week on from the murders, the locals I speak to are in a state of shock and sheer bewilderment. ‘It doesn’t feel real’, is a common refrain from residents. It’s the kind of thing that happens ‘on the news’ or ‘in America’, they say.

The Taylor Swift dance and yoga workshop where the attack took place was advertised to children between six and 12. It was held at the Hart Space studios in Southport’s Meols Cop suburb. It sold out quickly. Just as it was drawing to a close near midday on Monday 29 July, a teenager stepped out of a taxi and entered the building. He is alleged to have stabbed girl after girl, repeatedly and ferociously, as well as the two dance teachers, who tried desperately to protect the young children. Three girls were killed. Two adults and eight children were hospitalised by the attack, but have – mercifully – since been discharged.

Beverley, who works at the Alder Hey hospital where the children were treated, can’t recall anything like this ever happening before. You have to go back to the 2018 murder of Cassie Hayes, whose throat was slit in a travel agency in the town centre, to recall a crime serious enough to have made the national news. ‘There aren’t even robberies here’, Beveley says. ‘This is why everyone is in shock.’ Southport is the safest major town in Merseyside.

It’s a journalistic cliché to describe a whole town or entire community as being in mourning. But in Southport, that sense is palpable. For the past week, much of the town centre, Beverley tells me, has felt like a ‘ghost town’. The first full week of the summer holidays would normally bring Southport to life. But there have been ‘no children out playing, nobody walking their dogs… There is a deathly silence.’

Emily, a care worker, says the bar where she works part-time was unusually quiet on Saturday night: ‘There were just two tables of customers at its busiest.’ That was until 8pm, when regulars flocked in to observe a minute’s silence for the three girls. The staff then put on a Taylor Swift song. After that, everyone left. ‘I didn’t need to stay for the rest of the shift. You could tell nobody wanted to be out’, says Emily. At the Blue Anchor pub on Hart Street, near the scene of the murders, a barmaid tells me it has been empty all week. Most of the customers have been journalists.

An ongoing sense of unease has kept a lot of people indoors. Beverley describes how even grown men she knows are, for the first time in their lives, unsettled by the sound of police sirens. Parents with young children are especially anxious. But there is also a genuine, shared feeling of grief. Few are in the mood to snap back to normal, almost as a sign of respect.

For a town of 90,000 inhabitants, Southport is surprisingly tight-knit. ‘Everyone knows everyone, in some way’, says Emily. Which means everyone is only a few degrees of separation away from last Monday’s tragedy. Nicky, who is retired, says that one of the girls who died was the niece of her son’s friend. You hear many stories of near-misses. A father who tried to buy tickets to the dance class for his daughter, but it was sold out. A girl who didn’t show up on the day, by sheer luck. Nicky’s grandson was at a different, nearby summer school in the same Meols Cop suburb on the day of the murders. Many feel like it could have been their children or family who were targeted that day.

The few places in town where people have been keen to gather are the many makeshift memorials to the three young girls. Each has been welcoming a steady stream of mourners and well-wishers, offering flowers, plants, cards and children’s toys. Although most are locals, some have travelled from far and wide to pay their respects – including a man who drove all the way from Cornwall just to lay some flowers. Volunteers keep the flowers watered and the displays looking orderly.

The evening after the murders, the quiet dignity of the people of Southport was utterly betrayed. The riots began just as a vigil for the three girls on Lord Street was drawing to a close. Nicky could see the unfolding chaos from her house. Cars started appearing on her road, until they were ‘bumper to bumper’, she says.

‘Then, suddenly, people started appearing, mostly young men, in groups, walking towards the mosque… Then another group, and another group, and another group.’

Soon Nicky could hear the sound of the police helicopter. ‘You could see people running back and forth’, she says, ‘black plumes were coming from the air’. ‘There must have been about six motorbikes, zooming down, circling the street. There were cars stopping and letting more young men out.’

‘As it got darker, it got scarier’, she says. ‘A young man ran up the road dragging two bins behind him so he could set them on fire.’

Thugs also set a police car on fire. They pelted the mosque with bricks and bottles. Several worshippers were trapped inside. Rioters also menaced the local corner shop, run by a Sri Lankan man. They smashed the shop’s windows, but failed to get inside. ‘People were just running wild’, Nicky says. ‘They were fools.’

Calm did not return until around half past midnight. Even then, Nicky could still hear the odd person screaming – including a few girls. ‘They were laughing and giggling’, she tells me, ‘thinking it was funny’. Many of the rioters had been drinking heavily that night.

Even closer to the carnage was her neighbour, who recently moved into the area with two young children. When Nicky’s husband saw her the next day, she was still shaking. She had never been so scared in her life.

Nicky thinks these were people ‘who came from outside, looking for trouble’. Initial police reports corroborate this. Of the hundreds of people causing carnage that night, 13 have been arrested and one charged. Three were local to Southport, but many others have been identified as coming from out of town, including from Formby, St Helens and Newton-le-Willows. The latter two are at least a 40-minute drive away.

Why did they attack the Southport mosque? As we now know, in the immediate aftermath of last Monday’s murders, speculation about the suspect and his motives were rife. Numerous hard-right influencers made baseless claims that the stabbings were an act of Islamist terror, carried out by an asylum seeker fresh from a small boat. These rumours spread around the town almost as quickly as news of the attack itself. ‘As soon as someone used the word terror’, Beverley says, ‘it was hard to come back from that’. The police, initially unable to release the suspect’s identity due to his age, struggled to rebut the falsehoods.

You will struggle to find any support or sympathy for the rioters here in Southport. I meet Mike, a street pastor, outside one of the memorials on Hart Street. ‘People just don’t understand it’, he says of the rioting. ‘They feel that it’s really got in the way of being able to process their grief.’ Lynne, his colleague, agrees: ‘Three little girls have lost their lives in tragic circumstances. There’s a feeling that people are utilising that for their own agendas.’ ‘Even though they’re saying they’re doing it because of what’s happened in Southport’, Mike adds, ‘the people here don’t want that to happen’.

Nicky is even more forthright: ‘These mindless thugs have no respect for what happened to those beautiful little children.’ ‘After such a horrific thing on Monday, they made things 10 times worse on Tuesday’, says Emily.

Beverley recalls driving past the mosque the day after the riots, feeling anxious. First at the sight of a police van. Then at the sight of several white men with tattoos in the car park. Rumours had swirled that there would be repeats of Tuesday’s night’s carnage. But these men were not there to cause trouble. They were shaking hands and hugging worshippers.

Faruq Ahmed, the muezzin of the Southport Islamic Society Mosque, who delivers the call-to-prayer, tells me that many of Southport’s Muslims – a tiny community of just 1,000 – are still shaken and scared by Tuesday night’s rioting. But the support from neighbours and other well wishers, as well as the now constant police presence, has offered some comfort and reassurance. I ask him if Tuesday night’s violence and racism was in any way representative of Southport. ‘Definitely not’, is his emphatic response.

The day after the riot, local residents turned up to clean up the mess. ‘I was really impressed with the volunteers’, Nicky says. ‘They were out from early in the morning… in droves.’ Others volunteered to rebuild the small wall separating the mosque’s car park from the road – the bricks had been used to throw at the police and at the mosque’s windows. A local glazer repaired the broken glass for free. ‘Slowly, slowly, things are going back to normal’, says Faruq.

The mosque clean-up is just one of many acts of solidarity that have defined Southport’s response to the horrors of last week. People are eager to tell me how much they’ve been touched by the generosity of spirit on display. Local shops have given flowers out for free for those who want to pay their respects but can’t afford to. Security guards have offered to protect the town’s summer schools for free. Local Facebook and WhatsApp groups are filled with offers to do shopping or other errands for people who still feel shaken by the attack or the riots. In the short amount of time I spent at the Hart Street memorial, a woman turned up to offer some coffee to the police officers.

During the attack itself, several people tried to confront the attacker and protect the girls from harm. The people I speak to are immensely proud of Leanne Lucas, the organiser of the dance class, who shielded several girls from the suspect’s blade, sustaining serious injuries in the process. John Hayes, a local businessman, was similarly injured after trying to disarm the knifeman. Joel Verite, a window cleaner, helped the police to tackle him to the ground. Hayes and Verite ran towards the danger, into the carnage and risking their lives, to try to bring an end to the killing spree.

This is what Southport ought to be remembered for after this week. For the heroism of those who intervened in the attack, and for the unassuming solidarity of the townsfolk, who have banded together in the face of extreme adversity. It will not – must not – become a byword for the despicable, racist riots raging across England. As every single person I meet is desperate to make clear, none of this is happening in their name.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.