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The Guardian
24-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
One Day in Southport review – a sombre portrait of how a tragedy was hijacked
Most of the six to 10-year-old girls gathered in the Hart Space dance studio in Southport, Merseyside, on 29 July last year for a Taylor Swift-themed workshop were making friendship bracelets ('It's a very Swiftie thing to do,' says the older sister of one, who was watching them), when 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana burst in with a knife. His attack left two children dead at the scene and another died the next day from her injuries. Six other children, including the sister who was watching, and two adults were injured and taken to hospital. One Day in Southport focuses largely on what happened afterwards interspersed with the memories of the injured older girl and her family, because what happened next was the result of so many social, cultural and political issues that you could spend a lifetime unpacking them. This documentary does the best it can in an hour. It interviews people from different sides of the various debates, and shows social media posts and footage from the riots that sprang up around the country and caught the police and the establishment unawares. The prime minister was left floundering and unable to address the mixture of feelings and motivations behind them quickly or directly enough. The attacker – his name then kept from the public – was quickly arrested. The police held a press conference and described him as a 17-year-old from Lancashire and originally from Cardiff. The latter detail was included to attempt to tamp down the speculation already rife online and in the local area (arising because the one thing witnesses to the attack did know about the stranger was that he was Black) that he was an immigrant, which quickly became an illegal immigrant, which quickly became a Muslim illegal immigrant and ignited all sorts of rage. The usual suspects from the manosphere and others with their own agendas to push then stoked the fires, including Nigel Farage ('It shows how unhappy people are with the state of law and order in this country … Your children don't matter to them, they don't care') and Tommy Robinson, the leader of the far-right anti-Islam English Defence League. The hour tracks the evolution of local grief and anger directed at a specific event into widespread violence and unrest. One of the many YouTubers and other people outside the mainstream media who recorded events is Wesley Winter. He began feeling at one with the righteous fury felt by others. By the time he was filming a few days later in Middlesbrough, he realised that the people walking along a residential street in a Muslim area of the town and smashing windows 'was a very different crowd' and he became frightened that they might turn on him next. A call from his wife trapped in her car as people smashed the windows of vehicles around her led them to leave the area as quickly as possible. His naivete is astonishing, but more admirable than the craven avoidance of those supposedly charged with leading the nation in times of strife to address the difficult, sensitive issues with which the tinderbox had been – and remains – stuffed. Because what have we here? We have a section of the population, that's suffering greatly under the cost of living crisis. This fact has receded from the headlines, but not from life – the housing crisis, the proliferating brutal effects of austerity that the current government seems to be doing nothing to alleviate, and much more. We have people who see the advent of more people to these isles as competition for increasingly scarce resources. Even the co-convener of Stand Up to Racism, Weyman Bennett, makes the point that 'people are protesting against something that is really happening to them … they are rightfully angry' before explaining how this is leveraged and exploited by far-rightwingers (and whatever Reform are pretending to be) so that 'they're blaming the wrong people'. The absence of anyone in authority addressing this, instead of lauding the arrests and sentencing of rioters, was and remains conspicuous. Why not publicly delineate the difference between legitimate concerns and far-right agitation – bring the worried into your fold and denounce those burning mosques and terrifying the asylum seekers in besieged hotels? Because there is a difference and it matters hugely. The documentary gives no facts or figures about immigration, costs or anything else apart from the number of arrests and the 1,000 years-plus total to which rioters were sentenced. It is essentially a mood piece, tracking the development of the hijacking of grief to violent ends and leaving us to draw our own conclusions about where, why and if we would have stepped back to say: 'This has gone too far.' One Day in Southport is on Channel 4 now.
The Sun
08-07-2025
- The Sun
Southport killer's actions were ‘mercilessly calculated' and among the worst in UK's history, inquiry says
A PUBLIC inquiry into whether Southport triple killer Axel Rudakubana could have been stopped began today. The 18-year-old stabbed Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, to death on July 29 last year. 5 5 5 A public inquiry will now look at whether the attack could or should have been prevented given what was known about the killer. Retired senior judge Sir Adrian Fulford, who is leading the review, has made the decision not to name the killer and instead refer to him as AR. In his opening statement, the chairman said Rudakubana's actions were 'almost unimaginable but nonetheless mercilessly calculated'. Following the horror, it emerged the killer had a "sickening interest in death" and had made chilling searches for school massacres before carrying out the rampage. His morbid fascination saw him flagged three times to anti-terror programme Prevent but no further action was taken. As a result, the killer was free to storm the Hart Space community centre and begin senselessly knifing terrified children and adults. A rapid review into his contact with Prevent found his case should have been kept open. It also concluded Rudakubana should have been referred to Channel, another anti-terror scheme. He was jailed for life with a minimum of 52 years following the horrific triple murder but will likely never be released. The killer pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and ten of attempted murder. He also admitted two terror offences after police found ricin and an Al-Qaeda manual at his home. Despite this, cops are still not treating the attack as terror-related. The Southport Inquiry will hold its first live hearings at Liverpool Town Hall this week. Sir Adrian will lead the probe, which has been split into two phases. The first will focus on the circumstances leading to the attack and AR's contact with Prevent. He will then examine how young people are "drawn into extreme violence" during the second phase. Families of the three victims will begin giving evidence tomorrow morning. Opening the inquiry, Sir Adrian said today: "As the Government at the highest levels has recognised, the perpetrator is responsible for one of the most egregious crimes in our country's history. "However hard we try, ordinary language simply fails to reflect the enormity of what he did on 29 July last year. "None of the most powerful adjectives even begin to suffice: there are no words that adequately describe what occurred and I am not going to try (and then fail) to find them. "Instead, I simply observe that his crimes impose the heaviest of burdens on our society to investigate speedily but comprehensively how it was possible for AR to have caused such devastation. "To analyse the decisions that were or were not taken by multiple individuals and organisations given his deteriorating and deeply troubling behaviour; to identify without fear or favour all of the relevant failings; and to make comprehensive, sensible and achievable recommendations to ensure we have the best chance of intervening with and preventing others who may be drawn to treating their fellow human beings in such a cruel and inhuman way." AR's first referral to Prevent came in 2019 when he was aged 13 after he used computers at his own school to search for material on a school massacre. What happened in Southport? THE horror unfolded last summer as 26 excited children gathered for the dance class to kick off the summer holidays. The two-hour event had been organised by instructors Leanne Lucas and Heidi Liddle at The Hart Space. Just three miles away, Rudakubana had armed himself with a 20cm knife. Chilling footage showed the killer pacing outside his home before being picked up in a taxi. Just 30 minutes later, he arrived at the community centre as the children sang Taylor Swift songs and made friendship bracelets. Leanne opened a window due to the summer heat and saw the masked teen outside but thought nothing of it. But seconds later, the door opened and Rudakubana stormed into the class and began attacking children and adults at random. Screams rang out as the killer teen systematically made his way through the room stabbing his victims with the black-handled Cerbera kitchen knife. Hero dance teacher Leanne was stabbed in the arms, neck and back as she used her body to shield young girls from the knifeman. She screamed at the children to "run away" Her colleague Heidi Liddle escaped uninjured after bravely locking some of the children inside a toilet. Businessman Jonathan Hayes, who was working in the office next door, was attacked after he ran inside and tried to stop the carnage. At 11.57am - 12 minutes after the rampage began - police stormed the scene. Officers found Rudakubana holding the large, bloodied kitchen knife and he was arrested. After the horror attack, the teen said "I'm glad they're dead" as he was held in a custody suite. Two years later, he was flagged again after viewing material on previous terror attacks - including those in London in 2017. Although there were no concerns over a particular ideology or religious hatred, his obsession with violence had caused fears. But he was not found to have posed a terrorism risk and therefore did not reach the threshold for intervention by Prevent. Rachael Wong, director at law firm Bond Turner, representing the families, said: "We know that nothing the inquiry reveals or subsequently recommends will change the unimaginable loss felt by the families of Elsie, Alice and Bebe, but we all now have a responsibility to ensure that something like this never happens again. "We will be doing all we can to assist the chair through the inquiry and uncover the truth. "It is only through intense public scrutiny that real change can be effected."
