Hatred directed towards migrants and people of different ethnicities is being seen among Nottingham’s children and young people, a community leader has warned.

Various areas across the country were given Government money in 2024 to tackle hate crime and reduce community tensions, following the Southport attack the same year.

Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar were murdered at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July 2024, and knifeman Axel Rudakubana further seriously wounded eight other children and two adults during the attack.

The day after the incident, riots started to break out following claims Rudakubana was a Muslim asylum seeker.

Riots have been said to have had a lot in common with the race riots in the 1950s in Nottingham, when violence broke out in 1958 in St Ann’s – stoked by tensions over increased migration from the Caribbean.

Nottingham was given £600,000 to help quash any further unrest, half of which was awarded to community groups in the form of grants for various activities.

Keiren Thompson, who runs Helping Kids Achieve, received up to £7,500 last year.

Mr Thompson, who won the BBC Sports Personality Unsung Hero award in 2019 for his work, runs sports sessions and offers mentoring for young people.

He said there has been a marked up-tick in anti-immigration sentiment and Islamophobia among young people.

“I’m starting to see that creep through into young people, because a lot of adults are spewing hatred to migrants and people of different ethnicities,” he told the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

“So that is starting to trickle down into young people, seeing what their parents are doing and saying, particularly with some parents bringing them to rallies and protests. They display the same behaviours.

“Two to three years ago young people would not be saying this. We do workshops with young people around the awareness of saying stuff like that.

“We will give them awareness of why it is good to live in a diverse country, and we educate them on different nationalities.

“Young people may not know enough about different cultures and beliefs, and we celebrate different young people that come into our sessions, and help them say positive things about each other.

“We try to combat one thing, then another pops up. One fire is put out then another starts, so we try to stay ahead of the curve.”

Money was given to the city after the Government identified it as having been “significantly affected by the violent disorder that took place between July and August 2024”.

The council says it has since employed dedicated community cohesion staff members, who travel around in a community van to various events across the city.

Dozens of community groups have been running events such as community picnics, gardening, and far-right awareness courses, for anyone and everyone in the city – including faith groups, minorities, the LGBTQ-plus community, and white working class residents.

During a meeting on Wednesday (July 8), Cllr Matt Shannon (Lab), executive member for community protection, neighbourhoods and communities, said the council had been seeking to rebuild face-to-face trust with some groups being impacted by more recent events.

Recently, he says, a Sikh gurdwara in Basford was visited in response to an up-tick in hate incidents after the murder of student Henry Nowak.

Vickrum Digwa was jailed for life with a minimum of 21 years in June after fatally stabbing the 18-year-old in Southampton last December.

“There is a little bit of this funding left, and the agreement from the oversight group is that it is going to be used to extend some of the successful projects that have taken place over the last couple of years,” he said.

“One of the big external pressures that is faced is there is a huge amount of narratives and rhetoric being fed around by politicians, by hostile states, a huge variety of things, on anti-migration and racist narratives.”

A dedicated community cohesion and hate crime officer is expected to be in place by September this year to help further tackle tensions resulting from these narratives.