Liverpool mayor warns public against ‘weaponising’ Southport stabbings

We spoke to Steve Rotheram, Mayor of the Liverpool City Region,  and we began by asking him for his thoughts on the news that three children have now died.

Steve Rotheram: My first thought, as a father, as a parent, you drop your kids off when they’re young to these things and you place your children in the hands of others and you expect that they will come home safely. Not just safely, but they’ll have enjoyed the experience. And that’s what everybody did yesterday, dropping their kids off, and it ended with this tragedy. Which now, as you said, has taken a third life.

Jackie Long: Obviously in an incident like this, which is incredibly rare, obviously people are devastated, but they are frightened too.

Steve Rotheram: The community definitely needs some reassurance. As you said, the likelihood of something like this happening, a million to one. There’s so many things that go on with kids every single day, and they go on without incident. And to have something like this, and the magnitude of what’s happened, I think that’s what has shocked most people. And that’s why you’ve seen the outpouring of despair and grief.

Jackie Long: And anger as well. The prime minister came, he could only stay, it felt like a matter of seconds, before he had to turn away. Lots of anger from some people saying to him, ‘how many more children must die?’

Steve Rotheram: I don’t understand that people want to weaponise the deaths of three children before the investigations have concluded. I think there’s plenty of time to do that. Look, Keir Starmer came here as the prime minister of this country, to pay respects to the first responders. He thanked them all individually, shook every single person’s hand, and he came here to lay flowers. Not just on behalf of Keir Starmer, he’s the prime minister of the country. And that’s what he did. And I don’t think that it’s appropriate for people to have used this occasion and then to put forward some of their nefarious theories about what happened.

Jackie Long: And he paid tribute to responders directly today?

Steve Rotheram: Yeah, very movingly and no script. Just explained to those people who took part in the operation yesterday that whilst they’ll think that they’ve done their duty, they were just doing their job. It’s far more than that. And it’s very much something that the country thanks them for.

Jackie Long: You’ve said and you’ve repeated what the police have been saying, that people need not to speculate. They need not to allow anger to be fuelled by misinformation. How important is that in your view?

Steve Rotheram: Massively so. Because there are things in which certain sections, politically, will jump on the bandwagon and try to cause some nefarious intent, and I hope that doesn’t happen here. You’re talking about an area where it’s a very close knit community and they don’t need this. At some stage, those people will go away. The legacy has to be that we rebuild the resilience and the trust here, and get this community back on its feet as soon as possible.

Jackie Long: That is about, to a degree, getting information out to the public, though, isn’t it? And people feel that that information about who may be responsible for this, has been slow in coming.

Steve Rotheram: It has to be verifiable, doesn’t it? You can’t just speculate. And some of the conjecture that was online was totally misleading, and we now know some of those details. But the chief constable was there and very much explained that as things become known, they will tell people. But also you have to take into consideration that there are many families who should be told first and they will be, in the right way, informed of progress in regards to the investigations first and foremost, and then all of us at a later date will be able to find that information.

Jackie Long: So your message to people who are feeling grief and many people feeling anger and fear, what is that message?

Steve Rotheram: It’s understandable, isn’t it, that people will feel all of those emotions, but we will rebuild. Unfortunately, this is not the first time something of this nature has happened in the Liverpool City region. We’ve seen a number of tragedies, and in those communities, people do come back together. And it’s about that community resilience and cohesion. And that’s what will happen here. There are still people now who are poorly in hospital. We need to be thinking of those people and not trying to make political capital out of something as tragic as this.