Axel Rudakubana pled guilty to the murders of three young girls—in the Southport knife attack—on Monday, January 20th, but his conviction poses awkward questions for the Labour government.
Rudakubana also offered an 11th-hour guilty plea for his 10 attempted murders, producing the biological toxin ricin, and possession of a PDF entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual.
When the Cardiff-born son of Rwandan parents carried out his lethal assault on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last summer, there was widespread public horror—and an information vacuum. Growing speculation online was countered with the assertion that releasing any details would prejudice a fair trial and that dissent from the official narrative was “far-right” “disinformation.” Many politicians seemed more angry with public fury than with mass murder on Merseyside.
With Rudakubana due for sentencing on Thursday, January 23rd, he appears to have avoided a ‘whole-life tariff’ on account of his age and guilty plea. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to draw a “line in the sand” against what he describes as the new form of terrorism that the attack represents. This will involve targeting ‘similar’ offenders in future and a national public inquiry into alleged institutional failings.
Starmer admitted to being aware of Rudakubana’s two terror-related offences prior to charges being pressed, although he claims that publicising these could have caused the murder trial to collapse. Also known to officials but withheld from the public was Rudakubana’s past relationship with the government’s own counterterrorist Prevent programme, which has—like Starmer himself—allegedly concentrated on the ‘far-right’ amid a growing death toll from Islamist violence.
At the time, politicians calling for more information were vilified. Now Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has taken to social media and declared:
At last the truth.
The Southport murderer was reported to Prevent three times.
The cover-up has been a disgrace. I was right all along.
His initial response to the murders was partly blamed for public disorder—‘the Farage Riots,’ according to LBC Radio—after he asked for the information that the PM knew at the time and has only recently disclosed.
Labour Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has now announced that there will be a public inquiry into the tragedy. Despite official reluctance to investigate the national scandal of rape gangs in the same way, her prompt response does not bode well, with the likelihood of an investigation of the shortcomings of Prevent turning into an exercise in obfuscation. Or, as commentator Matt Goodwin has it:
most crucially of all—how much more are we not being told?
A performative response to the killings, in the hope that public fury further subsides, is already taking shape. Starmer is gearing up to tackle the new (and largely confected) problem of “loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms”—echoing the U.S. preoccupation with ‘incels’ who become school shooters—to be resolved by another online clampdown on internet content and social media. The remarks were further echoed by Cooper, who will ask the
inquiry to consider the wider challenge of rising youth violence and extremism, because I have been deeply disturbed at the number of cases involving teenagers drawn into extremism, serious violence and terrorism, including Islamist extremism, far-right extremism, mixed and confused ideology and obsession with violence and gore.
Lessons will be learnt … only they won’t.
