Southport victims’ families have shown that even in the...

EVEN in the face of the greatest wickedness, virtue shines through. It is there in the heroism of those who faced murderous knife maniac Axel Rudakubana — especially yoga teacher Leanne Lucas, who has to live with the physical and mental scars of that terrible day in Southport, and her colleague Heidi Liddle, who tried to save the children he was determined to kill. It is there in the selflessness of the police officers who tackled the monster, and in personal trainer Joel Verite who confronted the teenage fiend but who deflects praise to others.

Image Credit: The Sun [Photos of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Bebe King.]

It is there in the courage of the families whose children died that day but who now raise money to help others, to keep alive memories of their precious little ones. And it is there in the fortitude of the Southport community which pulled so admirably together when there were siren voices willing to hijack their grief and use it to inflame tensions. Leanne has bravely told how she wants to “find goodness in the world” and the parents of Bebe, Elsie and Alice desperately seek “the light in the dark”.

They have already found it. It is in them. FINALLY a crackdown has begun on the shady tax-dodging nail bar, takeaway and car wash businesses and others employing migrants with no right to work here. Great. But what of those drawn here by the lure of free benefits and cash-in-hand employment in the black economy, and left to live in squalor?. Arrest figures from the Home Office don’t reveal how many, if any, migrants involved have been returned to where they came from and how many are still being accommodated at ruinous cost to the taxpayer.

Some 800 deportations have taken place, but that is a fraction of the number who came here just in small boats last year and not even as many as have arrived that way in January alone. As a deterrent, the crackdown is nothing like the Rwanda plan the Government was so quick to reject. The enforcements are a start, but nowhere near enough. TORIES are whistling in the wind if they expect Sir Keir Starmer to purge every Labour MP who ever made snide comments about colleagues and constituents in messaging apps.