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At 11.45 a.m. on 29 July, 2024, a 17-year-old boy called Axel Rudakubana walked into a community studio on Hart Street in Southport and attacked a class of children who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed bracelet-making workshop. Armed with a kitchen knife, Rudakubana killed two children, six-year-old Bebe King and seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and wounded ten others, one of whom, Alice da Silva Aguiar, aged nine, died the following day.
The unimaginable horror of this crime sent shock waves across the country. A group of little girls, enjoying a summer holiday activity, had been attacked by a stranger with a knife, and three of them were now dead.
Rudakubana had a long history of troubling behaviour. From the age of 13, he had become increasingly obsessed with violent online videos and had repeatedly made worrying comments about mass shootings to classmates. Teachers had reported him to Prevent, but his case was turned down on account of him not displaying any extremist tendencies.
However, Rudakubana had become ever more unpredictable, and he had caused considerable alarm among his school community. He seems to have been worried too, because in October 2019, he rang the NSPCC’s ChildLine and admitted to having murderous thoughts and confessed that he had often taken a knife into school.
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Matters came to a head when he was first accused of carrying a knife and then, having been excluded, returned to the premises and broke a fellow student’s wrist with a hockey stick. Permanently expelled from his school, he failed to settle anywhere else and became ever more the outsider, slipping through the system and falling largely out of sight before going on to commit that terrible crime.
However, none of this was public knowledge in July 2024 and so a scapegoat was needed.
As news of the attack broke, a 41-year-old, Northampton-based child minder called Lucy Connolly was following events, and she and others in her online world knew who to blame. Connolly was an avid X (formerly Twitter) user with a growing following among right-wing users, and as she drank in the barrage of disinformation circulating on the platform, she came to believe that the attacker was, (according to the CPS) ‘a Muslim asylum seeker who had come to the UK on a boat.’
It was untrue. Radakubana was born in Cardiff in 2006, four years after his parents, evangelical Christians, had emigrated from Rwanda.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Connolly was not the sort of X user who waits for facts to emerge and so, having returned home from work, at 8.30 pm that evening she sent out the following tweet to her 9,000 followers:
“Mass deportations now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government & politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
The post rapidly blew up. Amplified by far-right users, it was shared some 940 times, making about 310,000 impressions, until fearing repercussions – she deleted it four hours later. But by then, the damage had been done, and her words helped kindle the inferno of hate that followed.
The very next day, riots erupted. A mosque in Southport was besieged by a drunken mob yelling “No Surrender” and chanting Tommy Robinson’s name. The following day, supporters of Patriotic Alternative gathered in Whitehall, and more than 100 arrests for offences including possession of knives followed.
That same evening, another mob descended on a Holiday Inn at Newton Heath, Manchester, which was said to be housing migrants and four people were arrested. In Aldershot, another gang of thugs attacked a hotel and threw projectiles at its windows – and the police who were trying to protect the people inside.
Across the next few days, further gangs of ‘concerned citizens’ terrorised England; a rally in Sunderland on 2 August attracted hundreds who yelled ‘save our kids’ and ‘we want our country back’ before looting local shops and setting fire to a cab.
Connolly, meanwhile, was now firmly on the right-wing social media influencer map and was clearly enjoying her notoriety. On 3 August, she responded to an anti-racist protest in Manchester, tweeting: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry refugee. Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”
The following day, the violence reached its crescendo. In Rotherham, about 400 people gathered in Manvers, where some tried to burn down a Holiday Inn that was housing migrants. Residential areas in Middlesbrough were attacked, and cars and bins were set on fire, and by the end of the week, not only had millions of pounds of damage been done and dozens of police officers been hospitalised, but communities up and down the country had been left reeling in fear and destruction.
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By 5 August the worst of the violence was over. That same day, Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a COBRA meeting and promised that justice would follow, that it would be hard and swift and that those responsible for the violence would be held to account for their actions.
The following day, Lucy Connolly, who had been identified as one of the online agitators, was interviewed by police, and three days later, on 9 August, she was charged. Connolly pleaded guilty to ‘inciting racial hatred’ and on 17 October 2024 was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison at Birmingham Crown Court.
In his sentencing remarks, His Honour Judge Melbourne told the disgraced childminder: “You intended to incite serious violence. What you did encouraged activity which threatened or endangered life.”
In a further statement, Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS’s Special Crime a