Watching the 2024 Southport riots from across the Irish Sea, there was an obvious and awful sense of history repeating. Just as the stabbing of a child in Dublin in November 2023 triggered racist violence, so the fatal attack on a dance class near Liverpool was seized upon as an excuse for carnage in the UK. Children had died, cities were burning – and British politicians appeared dazed by the scale of what had happened.
Twelve months later, Finding Neverland director Dan Reed has painstakingly chronicled these terrible events with One Day in Southport (Channel 4, 9pm). If only a film-maker of equal stature would turn their attention to the anarchy that gripped Dublin seven months previously. Alas, we wait in vain.
He begins with a close-up on one of the survivors of the attack – a now 13-year-old who cannot be named for legal reasons.
“My vision was going blurry and I ran across to this guy and I said to him: ‘I’ve been stabbed, I think I’m dying,” she recalls of the brutal assault by Axel Rudakubana on the Hart Space, a community hub in Southport, a quiet seaside town 27km north of Merseyside.
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“I was struggling to breathe, and I saw my sister there and she was saying, ‘Please don’t die, please don’t die’.”
Her voice is heavy with trauma, and the viewer’s heart will break for her and for the families of the three children who died: six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar, aged nine.
What happened next was, of course, shocking but not surprising. Racists, thugs and “citizen journalists” descended on Southport and whipped up hysteria against a local mosque. With police on the ground seemingly in the dark about Rudakubana, rumours that he was a Muslim immigrant began to spread. He was, in fact, born in Cardiff to a family from Rwanda, which is overwhelmingly Christian. Yet that was of little comfort to the terrified people inside the mosque in Southport.
Reed isn’t interested in blaming people and wisely avoids portraying Rudakubana as some sort of interesting or complicated villain (he is now serving a 52-year murder sentence). He wants to give a voice to the victims of the attack and to understand the anger that turned town centres across Britain into war zones.
Those on the hard right tell Reed that their protests are not about race but about working-class people. “The issue we are now fighting has changed. It ain’t about race no more, it is about class,” claims Wendell Daniel, the black videographer who works with Tommy Robinson, one of Britain’s most prominent far-right activists.
However, chilling footage from around Britain suggests that the 2024 protests quickly descended into mob rule, as we see when another panicking videographer rushes back to his car after thugs surround his Asian wife.
No Irish person needs to be reminded about racism in British society. Nonetheless, something has shifted since the pandemic, says Weyman Bennett, co-convener of Stand Up to Racism. Right-wing marches used to attract a certain type, he says – “Billy No-Mates”, middle-aged men, without friends or a purpose in life.
Now, they are increasingly joined by women and young people, says Bennett – an entire swathe of society that feels abandoned, and believes people such as Robinson may have the answer.
It’s a terrifying thought. But then, as anyone who saw Dublin burn in November 2023 will know, it isn’t really a thought at all, it’s the new reality with which we are all going to have to come to terms and, sooner or later, perhaps, take a stand against.
