It’s July 29th, 2025, exactly a year since the horrific events in Southport that left three children dead and nine injured, and sparked rioting in the town and across the country. It was a time of almost unimaginable hatred and violence – both from the perpetrator and the rioters – and even a year later I still find it hard to believe what happened in the small quiet town where I now live.
I haven’t been in Southport today – I’m away working overseas, training journalists in conflict reporting in Armenia. Many of those I’ve been working with are from Nagorno-Karabakh, or Artsakh as Armenians call it. In 2023 when I was last here, they had just been expelled from their homes, after Azerbaijan seized control of the area. Many of them have lost relatives in the decades of fighting between the two countries. They’ve all had to start their lives again. They have suffered.
But I wanted to tell them about what happened in Southport, and how online hatred and misinformation about the attack went around the world in hours. I stood up in front of them and started my powerpoint, and there were the happy faces of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar, and I started crying.
It was unprofessional, it was unexpected, but it was, I suppose, entirely human. And it’s made me think about what everyone in Southport has been through this year.
Tonight, from a hotel room in Armenia’s capital Yerevan, a very different place to Southport, I’m talking to Times Radio about our sad, horrible anniversary. It will be a strange experience – but one that lets me connect with everyone at home who’s remembering that awful day