Southport mourns. Then burns
Southport mourns. Then burns
Last night was supposed to be a moment to commemorate the victims of a tragedy. We were there as it descended into a violent and bloody riot
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By Jack Walton
Just before 8:30pm last night, as the Southport Mosque was being peppered with bricks and bottles, as bloody-faced police officers stood batting away flares with their riot shields and as a crowd of hundreds bayed and jeered, shouting “we want our country back” alongside assorted other chants about “disgusting nonces” and “paedophile protectors”, a blonde-haired woman jostled past me through the crowd. She was short, not much taller than five feet, and had just wrestled her banner back from a man who had attempted to snatch it from her. She shouted “fuck off” and held it aloft again.
“One Race — Human. Hope, not hate. Racism not welcome here”.
Her face was doing that thing faces do when they’re desperately trying to suppress emotion. A man swiped at her banner and called her a “cunt”. A woman with red hair told her she was part of the problem. It was as though, on a residential street in Southport on a Tuesday evening, an entire society was collapsing and the tragic murders of three children had descended into some kind of ugly proxy war. And then there was one woman, standing at the front alone, with a scrawled paper banner.
Via The Post’s video — which has now been viewed more than 3 million times on X — she has become an overnight symbol of resistance to the forces of bigotry and reaction. Major columnists have called her a “hero”. Activists against the far-right in Spain, France and Germany have taken inspiration (“Le courage, c'est ça”). The writer Bonnie Greer shared the video (“It takes a #woman”) as did someone who wrote: “She is the best of us. Seeing her standing there so bravely whilst visibly scared and upset gives me so much hope.”
The protestors had gathered after flyers circulated online throughout the day, shared by far-right channels and well-known agitators as well as ordinary folk. The flyers instructed people to meet on St Luke’s Road, just a short walk from Hart Street, where the previous day a violent assailant had launched a horrifying attack on a group of young children attending a Taylor Swift yoga and dance class.
Sure enough, by 8pm a crowd had gathered; mostly men, some who had come from elsewhere to cause trouble but many, it has to be said, from Merseyside — you can detect Scouse accents in the video clip and I heard them all around me. They stood gathered around the tributes of flowers and teddy bears that had been laid by shocked mourners throughout the day, including the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer. Some stood in the doorway of the Blue Anchor pub opposite, with pints.
And then things shifted. I heard a man shout “let’s go and smash up the mosque”. A few of the crowd surged away from the teddy bears and down the road to where an even larger crowd was already gathering. I followed them.
For the next hour and a half, bricks and bottles rained down on the mosque, the police positioned in front of it, without really ever stopping. The imam had been led away from the scene for his security. Early on I could see that a female police officer in front of me had a cut on her face. A male officer looked like he had broken his nose. Another was knocked unconscious. In total, at least 39 officers sustained injuries, according to the North West Ambulance Service, while 27 were taken to hospital. There will likely be questions as to whether the police on the scene — wearing caps — had the necessary protection for such an incident.
A helicopter circled overhead. A man stole a policeman’s hat, tried and failed to set it alight, then settled for an impromptu photoshoot wearing it. A boy in a balaclava, 14 or 15 years old, launched a flare at police officers and announced: “let’s get some bevvies in”. People tore down garden walls for bricks to launch.
Then, just after 8:30pm, a police van went up in flames. As news spread around town, almost every business in Southport closed its doors. Hotels started refusing walk-ins due to the threat to their guests.
One man from Liverpool who attended the riot told The Post: “My little girl lost her best mate in the Manchester [arena] attack and nothing has changed”. Others talked about the recent events in Leeds (where Roma people rioted after a child was taken away by social services), or the incident at Manchester Airport (a man was kicked in the head by police after assaulting a separate officer). Others talked about grooming gangs. All entirely distinct events melded together in the minds of last night’s attendees by wild assumptions and viral online conspiracies.
‘All of a sudden I was getting all these messages’
It’s late morning, around ten hours before the riot. At the platform of Meols Cop, the last train stop before Southport, a dozen teenagers stand around a buggy that is deputising as a makeshift trolly, filled to the brim with bouquets of flowers.
“They have friends who live in Southport, of course,” says Claire, who is looking after the group as part of a summer club, as she settles into a train seat adjacent to mine. It’s the morning of the day after the attack, an atrocity that Britain learned about from BBC News alerts and TV bulletins and people here experienced much more personally, via panicked messages and voice notes from friends.
“All of a sudden I was getting all these messages flashing through on my phone, on WhatsApp and things,” says Claire as the train moves off. “No one really knew what was happening or where it was — at first we were worried it might be some of their friends”. It turned out that the teenagers in her care didn’t know any of the children involved in the attack, who were a bit younger, but the group still decided to come and pay its respects. “We felt it was the right thing to do,” she says.
Throughout the day, dozens of journalists gather around the police cordon on Hart Street. Local, national, even international. One is on the phone with her editor, who seems to want to know what the chances are of an interview with the parents of either of the two, soon-to-be three, dead girls. She tells the editor “they’re broken”, but she’ll do her best.
The names of the three girls are Bebe King, aged six; Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, aged nine. Every detail seems more distressing than the last. I’m told secondhand from someone who knew the family that one of the girls killed, as yet unnamed, was due to be a bridesmaid the day after she was murdered.
A woman at the scene tells me her sister was working at Alder Hey as the aftermath of the attack unfolded. “She text me in the afternoon just saying: ‘it’s as bad as I’ve ever seen’”. Staff on days off were frantically summoned to work. “They were really desperate. Just calling everyone who wasn’t working. She said was it was horrifying”. Very quickly Alder Hey declared a major incident.
The precise events of Monday — the day of the attack — are still being patched together. The first The Post heard was in the form of a WhatsApp voice message roughly midday, which featured a woman speaking from near the scene: “I feel sick, I don’t know if you guys can hear the sirens and stuff…I don’t know if it was at that Hart Space, you know, where we did the pole dancing…apparently, there was like a holiday club…someone’s just gone in and stabbed all the kids”.
It turned out to be a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance class set up for children during the holidays. Sometime before midday, a man arrived in the area by taxi, refused to pay his taxi fare (according to witnesses), then entered the premises and began a frenzied knife attack, killing three girls and leaving five more children and two adults in critical condition. In the words of one witness, it was “like a horror movie”. A local journalist called Tim Johnson, who arrived on the scene shortly after police, described a girl covered in blood being carried away on a stretcher to the BBC.
Later in the afternoon, The Post was sent pictures taken from a nearby window showing two of the children with t-shirts soaked in blood receiving urgent medical attention on the pavement. The images are too distressing to publish.
Samuel, who owns a shop a couple of miles away from the scene but who lives nearby, says he also found out through WhatsApp groups. “It was just buzzing up, all this stuff, I couldn’t even believe. Then my wife rang, she kept saying that it was little girls and they’d been stabbed”.
The wrong man
Samuel tells me he’s seen the speculation online. One name has been popping up all over the place: Ali Al-Shakati, said by excitable social media users to be an asylum seeker who "arrived in the UK by boat last year". According to the police, Al-Shakati does not exist.
The real suspect is a 17-year-old born in Cardiff who moved to the Southport area around 2013. The Telegraph has reported that his parents were Rwandan. Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy’s choice to refer to the suspect’s origin (from Cardiff) in her press conference immediately after the attacks has been interpreted in different ways.
Was she right to do so — an attempt to quell the immediate assumption from right-wing influencers that the suspect would be a recently arrived migrant? Or was it a mistake — given the subsequent reporting about his Rwandan parents — and in danger of playing into the notion that she was trying to hide something, a narrative given credence by Nigel Farage yesterday when he hinted darkly that information may be being withheld.
Few would envy the situation the police find themselves in after an incident as horrifying and politically sensitive as this, especially in a world where the names of bogus perpetrators and other forms of misinformation can travel around the world before a police press team has had time to pull their boots on.
As we chat, a man standing nearby asks about the name Al-Shakati, which he has also heard. Samuel tells him the name is made up. “Right, right,” he says. “I see. It’s hard to know what to believe sometimes”.
It’s now just gone midday and the numbers of mourners are increasing — presumably people on lunch breaks. As a steady procession of flowing-carrying mourners makes its way up Kensington Road from the town centre and onto Hart Street, claims are spreading faster and faster online — that the attacker was a Muslim extremist; that the police are protecting his identity; that it’s time to stand up — for your community, for your nation, for your children.
The earliest mention The Post has found of any protest being advertised was from 6pm on the night before the riot (though we cannot confirm this was the first mention anywhere). It comes from a newly created Telegram Channel called Southport Wake Up. The owner of the account — which has less than 50 followers — posted a flyer advertising a protest on St Luke’s Road. “RISE UP ENGLISH LADS,” he wrote separately, while also sharing the name of the fictional Ali Al-Shakati. The protest was organised for two hours after the vigil in the town centre, where hundreds of people spilled over the road from the Atkinson and businesses shut their doors to encourage people to attend a minute’s silence.
One member of the channel wrote that the suspect is “Confirmed to be a Negroid. Born in Cardiff. This is a racial issue, not a passport issue. We need to deport them all.” Others shared Nazi imagery. Others were flagging the proximity of Hart Street to a nearby mosque, a site without any relevance — but which, in less than 24 hours, would have the attention of the nation’s media. Another circulating poster urged protestors to “protect your identity” if they take to the streets. “NO FACE, NO CASE” read the large capital letters.
Word broke Merseyside Police were monitoring a potential threat during the day, while we were sent unconfirmed reports of people being sent home from work as hundreds or even thousands of protestors were expected to descend on the town.
One post on X (formerly Twitter) telling people to head to St Luke’s Road was viewed 400,000 times. The organised far-right busied themselves getting the word out. One man who did a lot of the pushing, Jeffrey Marsh, is a Welsh Nationalist involved with the far-right Patriotic Alternative and a previous member of the Welsh Defence League.
It wasn’t just the organised far-right though, far from it. Many of the people spreading the word in local WhatsApp channels and Facebook groups have no outward affiliation with any known group. Much like the riots at the Suites Hotel in Knowsley in February 2023, the organised far-right certainly played a role, but they likely didn’t make up the bulk of the crowds.
The analysis of what happened in Southport last night will last months. Much like the Suites, there will no doubt be arrests, commentary saying “these people aren’t representative of our region”, and an increasingly strained political battle between those who will want control of the narrative. Some will argue it was ordinary folk rising up against a country that has been stolen from them. Many more will say thugs hijacked a horrendous tragedy.
Starmer, who was met with heckles from the crowd when he came to pay his respects earlier in the day yesterday (“How many more children, prime minister?”), said last night that “those who have hijacked the vigil for the victims with violence and thuggery have insulted the community as it grieves.” He added: “They will feel the full force of the law.”
Southport’s MP Patrick Hurley referred to “out of town thugs”, while Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner, Emily Spurrell, said they had been “stirred up online by the likes of the EDL [English Defence League], just looking for a fight." Merseyside Police’s Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss commended his officers and condemned the violence. “This is no way to treat a community, least of all a community that is still reeling from the events of Monday,” he said.
Evidently, what was meant to be a day of mourning became something else altogether. As smoke rose above the police van, I spoke to a man whose face was almost fully concealed. He told me he was “sick of them protecting these nonces” (“them” being the police). “It’s time to stand up against this — we’ve all had enough of it. It’s sick”. A woman nearby shouted: “what have the police done? They went and tried to save those girls [the day before]. What have they done?” The man turned away and started filming the burning van. Quite what “nonces” had to do with a knife attack was never addressed.
The next morning, a very different crowd had gathered outside the mosque. They’d come with their own brooms to sweep up the mass of rubble. As for the woman holding the banner, the video we shared online of her has now been seen around the world, eliciting thousands of replies commending her bravery, and some calling her a “traitor”. The banner was eventually snatched from her hands and she left the riot holding back tears. I followed her down the road away from the carnage outside the mosque. I asked if she wanted to talk but she said she didn’t. She had played her part — now the internet would take over.
I, like the vast majority of Southport residents, was horrified by the events here on Monday lunchtime. Little girls being just that, were viciously attacked and sadly, some fatally. I was one od many hundreds who attended the vigil outside the Atkinson, yesterday evening. It was heartbreaking, peaceful and very dignified, as was befitting the occasion. To think, that less than two hours later, people were attacking a mosque, setting fire to vehicles, destroying garden walls to use the bricks as missiles. Just who did they think they were representing. I am English born and bred, and I for one would prefer to live peacefully among people of all nationalities, rather than the thugs who hijacked a tragic occurrence for their own ends.
“out of town thugs” - Reform came 2nd or 3rd place in a majority of constituencies across Merseyside. They came 3rd place in Southport. I fear the government, councils and police are refusing to see or manage the rise of the far right amongst our own local population.