Dan Reed’s film focuses less on the tragic killing of young girls by Axel Rudakubana and more on the riots that struck Southport in the aftermath
On 29 July 2024, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana hailed a taxi in Southport, Merseyside, to take him to Hart Space – the site where he brutally attacked 10 women and children, and murdered three young girls attending, of all things, a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
Channel 4’s new documentary One Day in Southport opens with a chilling blend of CCTV footage tracking Rudakubana’s movements before the attack and heart-wrenching testimonies from the victims and their families as they retell the horror of that day. Only their eyes are shown – primarily to hide their identities, but with the added effect of heightening the rawness of their grief.
But the documentary doesn’t linger on personal tragedy for long. It pivots quickly to something broader, perhaps even more disturbing: the nationwide reaction, and the social discontent the attack laid bare.
Using interview footage filmed by YouTuber Wesley Winter at the Southport riot, the documentary shines a light on the simmering unrest among members of the public that erupted after the incident. Winter speaks to bricklayer Dean Neil, a prominent voice at the Downing Street riots just two days after the attack, who represents the less extreme end of a far-right that quickly blamed the “unvetted” and “unwanted immigrants coming into the country” for the attack.
Winter, who boasts 165,000 subscribers on YouTube, presents himself as a journalist-documentarian, armed with little more than an iPhone and a Bluetooth mic as he roams the post-Southport riot scenes. His approach involves asking people provocative, loaded questions, creating content designed to provoke outrage, generate clicks, and subtly platform potentially harmful views.
This point is underscored by clips shown of Andrew Tate’s vitriolic online rants filmed from the comfort of his luxury car alongside audio from X chatrooms that spread false claims about Rudakubana’s ethnicity and immigration status.
These segments reveal how misinformation and hate speech led to attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers, highlighting a broader pattern of angry Britons – particularly the working class who have been at the sharp end of the country’s austerity policies and widening inequality – scapegoating migrants, while deeper structural grievances are ignored.
Producer and editor Dan Reed is right to highlight how that anger is often misdirected toward vulnerable communities rather than those in power, but he stops short of truly interrogating why that fury exists in the first place. He poses pertinent questions but offers up few answers.
Given the chance to confront some of the figures fuelling the unrest, the documentary opts to observe rather than dig deeper. It is a missed opportunity. Instead of peeling back the layers to understand what drives this hatred and disillusionment, the film risks once again amplifying harmful voices without offering meaningful context or critique.
For all its shortcomings, One Day in Southport does a good job of examining how Sir Keir Starmer, in the first month of his premiership, struggled to meet the needs of the public in the aftermath of the attack.
In one telling scene, he lays flowers for the victims, silent in the face of an angry crowd – a moment the documentary frames as a catalyst for the riots that followed. From there, it tracks his faltering leadership: speeches condemning hate speech, overseeing the arrest of nearly 2,000 people involved in the unrest, and his “island of strangers” speech – which played during the closing credits. It left me with a heavy heart and a lingering sense of despair.
Nearly a year has passed since the Southport attack and the ensuing riots, yet headlines of violent migrant protests in Epping now dominate the front pages – a stark reminder that little has changed. The anger that erupted back then still lingers, unaddressed and unresolved.
‘One Day in Southport’ is streaming on Channel 4
