Growing up in Southport, the feeling that you might have been forgotten by the rest of the world was palpable. As soon as you told someone where you were from, the questions began.
“Southport.”
“Stockport?”
“No, Southport! By the sea.”
“Oh, Southend.”
Now, Southport is the name on everyone’s lips, as a result of the most disturbing killing of children this country has endured since the Dunblane shootings. And, like Dunblane, the Merseyside coastal resort is due to become a metonym used by people who need Google Maps to find it. But a metonym for what? Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox and those driving the riots across the nation want Southport to become a stand-in for “the failure of multiculturalism”. This isn’t the kind of place Pleasureland was built to be.
Even though it felt like a living time capsule to us as teenagers, we knew that Southport still carried the old razzle-dazzle, like an ageing star from golden age cinema. Glass-domed arcades and scenic, botanic gardens remind you that in its Victorian heyday, Southport offered families a temporary escape from a life of toil. A pocket of clear sky amid the smoke and smog of the Industrial Revolution, it was the envy of the world. Every local person knows that the grandeur of Southport’s Lord Street inspired Napoleon III’s redesign of the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Have I dug through the archives to verify this tale? No. It is obviously true. And if it isn’t, it should be.
But by the time I started at King George V sixth-form college on Scarisbrick New Road, students from the cooler corners of Merseyside – Bootle, Toxteth, Aintree – told stories of the footballers, pop stars, artists or models who made their areas famous. That was until a friend stumbled across an old interview with 80s pop sensation Soft Cell, in which frontman Marc Almond talked about how he was born and raised in Southport. Soft Cell’s cover of Gloria Jones’s 60s Black American classic Tainted Love was pure Southport. “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to (dum dum) run away / I’ve got to (dum dum) get away.”
Once college was over, I did run away. Off to a new life at university, like so many others I grew up with. Southport didn’t seem like a place for the young. But no one ever really leaves their home town. My family stayed in the area and once I had a daughter, the trips back increased in frequency.
So last Saturday, my five-year-old girl and I boarded the train from London Euston, and changed over at Liverpool to head up Merseyrail’s Northern line to Southport. All the action was on the trains going the opposite way. We were heading towards some much-needed peace and quiet.
After spending the weekend with family, I woke up at 6.30am on Monday 29 July, and left my daughter to enjoy a further week with my family and began the journey back to the many work obligations that awaited me in London.
But around noon, I looked at my phone and saw a bunch of messages about how little girls had been stabbed to death five minutes away from where I had left her that morning. I don’t mean that as a turn of phrase: the walking time between the yoga studio where the attacks happened and my family home is exactly five minutes, or a one-minute drive. Panicked phone calls confirmed my daughter and her cousins were safe. The relief that swept over my body was palpable. But that was soon followed by sorrow at the scale of the tragedy that had occurred and the knowledge that this act would leave scars for the victims and the community that would never heal.
The next day brought even more worrying news. Friends and family were messaging about disturbances by far-right activists who had invaded the town. Plans to go out to fairs and play centres were cancelled and they stayed in the house all week. Videos of frothing crowds throwing bricks and glass bottles at a local mosque while screaming “who the fuck is Allah” and proclaiming that “we want our country back”. Figures like Andrew Tate had boosted conspiracy theories about the killings. Stories spread that the killer was an asylum seeker called Ali al-Shakati, that he had been on the radar of MI6 and Liverpool’s counter-terrorism police unit. All just figments of the desperate, far-right imagination. The truth was the person charged was Axel Rudakubana. He was born and raised in Britain. He wasn’t a foreigner, at least no more than anyone else with parents born outside the UK. But all many people will see is black skin.
Southport was far from some post-racist utopia when I was growing up, but it wasn’t the caricature of northern racism that southern rightwing provocateurs like to invoke. The people in Merseyside pride themselves in being different from southerners, not as easily susceptible to the xenophobia peddled by the Murdoch press and others. It is a cliche, of course, but one that carries a grain of truth. However, the goal of the new, social media-driven far-right movement is to spread misinformation in a way that appears as if it’s coming from within communities. They cluster around moments that can be framed as a “clash of cultures” and exploit the anonymity of the internet to spread stories that will heighten ethnic conflict. For them, the death of three innocent little girls is nothing more than a recruitment tool. They want it to tell us something about racial or cultural incompatibility that it simply does not.
The year my family moved to Merseyside was the same year another horrific child killing took place in the area and broke hearts across the nation. In 1993 in Bootle, a pair of boys kidnapped James Bulger, aged just two, and beat him to death with bricks and an iron bar, before discarding his body on train tracks. The name of the person responsible belongs alongside names like Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, or Aaron Campbell or Kim Edwards and Lucas Markham, not alongside anybody who just “sounds foreign”. These are names that ask a question about the human capacity to enact sickening, violence for which no one has found an answer. Except Tommy Robinson and his fans. “Stop the boats,” they scream. “Close the border.” Such simple, catchy answers.
And largely forgotten among all this shouting about a “clash of cultures” are the three little girls whose lives were cut short in the cruellest way imaginable. Six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar had a whole lifetime of growing up among faded seaside romance ahead of them. Years of eating ice-cream on the beach wearing a duffle jacket, gloves and a scarf. Years of climbing onboard a carousel so rusty that the thrill comes not from the ride but the risk that the machine was maybe last serviced in the 20th century.
Three little girls have been cheated of their lives. Encouraging racism, hatred and mutual suspicion across the country will not honour them. Destroying newsagents and places of worship in their local neighbourhood will not honour them. Instead, we should be focused on rebuilding the town that they called home, not tearing it apart further. Walking through Southport town centre again last weekend, it was impossible not to notice the devastating impact that austerity has had on the town. Shopfront after shopfront lies empty or has its shutters down. The famous old pier is closed, with reports that the decking is rotting away from the inside.
Rather than tearing Southport apart, wouldn’t a more fitting tribute be a wave of investment into the previously forgotten town? A rebirth of Southport would honour Bebe, Elsie and Alice more than making it the new staging post for a far-right invasion of Merseyside, an area of the country it has long struggled to get a foothold in. They look at the cold deprivation of post-industrial Britain and imagine it to be fertile terrain to sow seeds of discontent and hatred. But this assessment overlooks the heart, passion and idealism that powered this region throughout the decades. I always thought Tainted Love fitted the home town of its singer because in its sound, it combined both elements – the alienation and the imagination, the loneliness and the love. Over the coming months, Southport will need all our love to make it through this most ghastly chapter in its history.
Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire
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• This article was amended on 5 August 2024 for legal reasons.
