It’s not just on Britain’s trains that I no longer feel safe

On the same evening as the Huntingdon train knife attack, I watched a group of kids at a major railway station chanting ‘Rule Britannia’ and shoving strangers, says Victoria Richards. Following a spate of unprovoked stabbings, and with groups hellbent on stirring up racial tensions, I’m starting to fear the worst for our country

Two events occurred on Saturday night, with alarming synchronicity: I was travelling through London on my way to meet friends, when I had to walk through Liverpool Street station. As I crossed the platform on my way to take the Tube to King’s Cross, a mob of kids – for that’s the only way they could be described – descended the stairs.

They were intimidating both in number (there were around 20 of them) and behaviour, for they were loudly and aggressively chanting the words to “Rule Britannia”.

They were also aged around 14 or 15, at a push. Gen Alpha, if you can believe that. Small, white, male, shaved-headed… and wearing mean and surly expressions to match the red St George’s crosses painted on the sides of their faces; flags that – thanks to the likes of Tommy Robinson and his far-right followers – have come to signify fear, violence and racism.

Led by a couple of ringleaders at the front, carrying cans of beer (presumably someone older had to buy them for them), they traipsed through the station, fumbling the words to the unofficial national anthem. When a couple of adults stopped and stared – one asked them under his breath, “What are you doing?” – they shoved them. Then they lurched, unprovoked, into the path of a tourist who looked European and pushed him, too.

I stopped to ask him if he was OK – he was, but was shaken up. All I could think of seeing these boys, the same age as my daughter, was: “Is this what London has become?”

Transport secretary says there will be an increased police presence at stations after a number of people were stabbed on a train on Saturday in Cambridgeshire (Yui Mok/PA)

And then, on the train, I heard about Huntingdon.

A savage and similarly unprovoked knife attack on the 6.25pm Doncaster to London service, leaving 11 people injured, including a “heroic” train guard who is in a “critical but stable condition”.

Anthony Williams, a 32-year-old from Peterborough, has since been charged with 11 counts of attempted murder, one count of actual bodily harm and one count of possession of a bladed article. The motive for the attack is not yet known.

There’s something rotten at the heart of London, right now – you can see it on our streets, as well as in the news. It simply doesn’t feel safe.

The list of sobering and unpleasant events in the centre and borders of our capital city goes on and on: from the triple stabbing in Uxbridge last week, in which Wayne Broadhurst, 49, was killed while out walking his dog; to the violent unrest that broke out in Epping – the town of my birth – as groups of so-called “protesters” gathered outside of the Bell Hotel after Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman days after he arrived in the UK in a small boat. Kebatu has since been sent back to Ethiopia – but only after he was wrongly released from prison, sparking a 48-hour manhunt, and paid £500 to not challenge his deportation.

We have also witnessed dozens of police officers injured in clashes with nationalist thugs as groups of up to 110,000 marched through the streets on the command of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who goes by “Tommy Robinson”). Robinson, a far-right mouthpiece for disharmony and divided communities, organised the protests in September, supposedly in the name of “uniting the kingdom” – and it was anything but.

Last weekend also heralded the unpleasant and unwelcome return of Ukip (remember them? I know – barely), as part of a series of events in locations around the UK promoted as a “mass deportations tour” – until police intervened. Organisers described it as a “crusade” and called on attendees to “reclaim Whitechapel from the Islamists”.

It is all starting to look like a deliberate strategy of provocation. Yesterday, after the Huntingdon attacks, the disgraced and divisive SAS: Who Dares Wins star Ant Middleton – who has declared he’ll run for London mayor for Reform UK in 2028 – tweeted to urge his followers to “travel in big groups and arm yourselves as legally as you can”, adding: “YOU ARE NOT SAFE IN YOUR OWN COUNTRY!”

Uniting the kingdom? There’s no unification about it – only stoking racial tensions and stirring up trouble. And for those of us who actually live here, rather than travelling in to take part at the first sniff of trouble, London feels more febrile than ever. It feels rough and unsettled, it leaves us nervous around groups of children who are bastardising British values without really understanding what they stand for – and it is putting us all in danger.

And the really shameful part, as we saw spread on social media after the Southport stabbing, in which teenager Axel Rudakubana killed three young girls during a dance class – are those who intentionally weaponise hideous, tragic incidents like Huntingdon to divide us further, which could – in turn – have the unforeseen effect of increasing the chances of more attacks. Is that really what they want?

We already know that children as young as nine are being radicalised by their far-right relatives and are being used as “pawns” to perpetrate violence and destruction; we saw kids joining the Southport riots last year, because (a report found) they “looked fun”. We know there are parents who, unthinkably, take their kids to violent, post-protest skirmishes and say they “regret it” later; and those who stand with babies outside of an Epping hotel, watching “mindless thuggery” take place, doing nothing to stop it.

All I know, as a mother of two, is that when I see groups of kids like the ones chanting “Rule Britannia”, I feel both worried – and ashamed. And I ask myself one question, which you should be asking yourself too: What are we teaching our children?