Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar. Those names we remember today, three young girls – aged six, seven, and nine – stabbed to death at a dance workshop in Southport one year ago.
We honour Leanne Lucas and Heidi Liddle, the organisers of the event, who put themselves in harm’s way to protect the children during the attack: Lucas was stabbed five times in the back. And we think of the other young children who were injured that day, but who thankfully survived.
It was a day of unimaginable horror. It spoke to some of our deepest and most atavistic fears, of the harming of children, of unexpected danger, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, of violence done by knives – intimate, deadly, terrifying. And it also spoke, and would continue to speak, to both the best and the worst of ourselves, and to our fear of the other.
We recall, because we must, the name of Axel Rudakubana, the 17-year-old who carried out the dreadful deeds and who is now serving a life sentence in prison, with a minimum tariff of 52 years. It is inconceivable that he will ever be released. He was born in Cardiff before moving to Southport in 2013; he was also known to the authorities, having been excluded from school and referred to the police, then expelled for taking a knife to school.
Rudakubana was referred to the Home Office’s anti-extremism Prevent programme three times because of his interest in violence, but officials had found no evidence of terrorist ideology. Although an emergency review found that procedures had been followed correctly, the failure to take effective action suggests that Sir William Shawcross’s independent review of Prevent was right in saying the strategy needed considerable improvement. By failing to anticipate Rudakubana’s malevolent potential for violence, it failed the people of Southport.
The police handled information about the attack clumsily in the immediate aftermath. They disclosed as little as possible, and too emphatically stated that the atrocity was not “terror-related”. A pervasive attitude of “nothing to see here” would not make public concern and fear go away; in fact, it served only to amplify it.
Today we also remember, with grim condemnation, those who used every doubt, every hint, every scrap of information to fuel suspicion and hatred. Rudakubana was a British citizen, but his parents were ethnic Tutsi from Rwanda who had moved to the UK a few years before he was born.
In the absence of evidence, rumours were spread that he was an asylum-seeker or a Muslim immigrant, that this horror had come from abroad and been admitted to our shores.
We should never forgive or forget those whose feet were slipping in the blood of young children as they scrambled to construct a poisonous political narrative against any and all immigrants, who put some kind of responsibility on the shoulders of every man and woman who had come to Britain, no matter what the circumstances.
We cannot forget because of the effect it had. The day after the attack, a “protest” outside Southport Mosque turned to violence, with bricks and bottles thrown, a shop looted, and a police car set on fire.
So began a series of riots which spread across the country to more than 20 towns and cities over the following days: Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds, Birmingham, Sunderland, Blackpool, Belfast. More than 130 police officers were injured over the course of a week, 1,840 people arrested, and 1,103 charged.
It began outside a mosque. Remember that Rudakubana is not a Muslim, nor from a Muslim family. Rwanda, where his parents were born, has a tiny Muslim population, barely two per cent. Undoubtedly, police and prosecutors said too little, and often what they did say was the wrong thing. It allowed malign actors to channel public fear and hatred towards other groups, principally Muslims and asylum-seekers.
Of course, people were scared and bewildered. A terrible event had occurred, a bloody slaying of innocents. The public wanted to know more; the public wanted reassurance. But the right to reassurance ends abruptly when a brick is thrown or a window is smashed. And the stain of sly culpability should never be allowed to wash off those who posed as the people’s protectors and champions, those who were “just asking questions”.
The Southport stabbings were the act of a violence-addled loner who had been allowed to fester outside societal norms. Law enforcement has huge lessons to learn from what happened. The rest of us, still somehow numbed by his violence, have a choice: do we look for ways to create a more cohesive society with stronger moral and behavioural norms, or do we simply allow ourselves to indulge in violent purges, no matter whom we target? Which choice would we rather explain to the girls who lost their lives that day?
