by Nicholas Wallace
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is under pressure to respond to nightmarish crimes against children that horrified his country and exposed state failures.
On 29 July last year, Axel Rudakubana, then aged 17, stabbed to death three girls aged six, seven and nine, and attempted to murder eight other children and two adults, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the quiet seaside town of Southport on Merseyside, 20 miles north of Liverpool.
The riots that followed marked the early weeks of the country’s new centre-left Labour government, led by Starmer.
The killer is now behind bars, but evidence presented in court suggests authorities missed several opportunities to stop him. The government has promised an inquiry.
The atrocity, and the riots that followed it, have made the prime minister a target for Elon Musk, who frequently posts extreme and personal attacks on Starmer to his 215 million followers on X.
’Shock and revulsion’
The full depravity of Rudakubana’s crimes is difficult to convey in writing. Some details were so disturbing that portions of the judge’s remarks at sentencing last Thursday were cut from radio broadcasts.
The judge at Liverpool Crown Court ordered that the killer serve at least 52 years of a life sentence before being allowed to seek parole, but said he’ll probably never be released.
Had Rudakubana been just nine days older when he attacked, the judge said he could – and would – have sentenced him to life without parole.
"What he did on the 29th of July last year has caused such shock and revulsion to the whole nation," said Mr. Justice Julian Goose.
Not since the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger in north Liverpool by a pair of sadistic 10-year-olds has the Merseyside region – named for the river that flows out to the Irish Sea at its heart – witnessed such sins that cry to heaven.
Then as now, the killer’s motive defies explanation.
’A long preoccupation with violent killing’
Rudakubana, who pleaded guilty to all charges, had "a long preoccupation with violent killing and genocide” Goose told the court.
Detectives found an al-Qaeda training manual on the killer’s computer. He also possessed ricin, an extremely dangerous toxin, which he had delivered to a neighbour’s address.
But there was no evidence of a political, religious, racial or ideological motive, the judge said. That means the attack doesn’t meet the legal definition of terrorism.
Nevertheless, "this extreme level of violence is equivalent in its seriousness to terrorist murders" said Goose.
Some are unhappy with the conclusion that Rudakubana isn’t a terrorist. Britain is grimly accustomed to terrorist attacks, and the nightmare in Southport feels like one of the worst.
The prime minister addressed those people directly last Tuesday, the day after the killer pleaded guilty. Starmer said that given the planned attack on small children, "I understand why people wonder what the word ‘terrorism’ means."
He called Southport "a sign."
"Britain faces a new threat. Terrorism has changed" Starmer said. "If the law needs to change to recognise this new and dangerous threat, then we will change it."
But the "new threat" he described is essentially ’lone-wolf’ attacks, which the country has faced for years.
Rumours and riots
At the end of July, belief that an Islamist terrorist was responsible sparked riots in Southport, Liverpool, and several other English towns and cities, as well as in Northern Ireland.
Fanning the flames was a social media frenzy that demanded answers faster than the authorities were able to give them. That frenzy filled the void with false rumours that the then-unnamed suspect was a Muslim and an asylum seeker.
Rudakubana is neither. But because of his age, police and media did not immediately publish his identity due to reporting restrictions that normally apply when a defendant is a minor.
Accurate reports that he was born in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, were insufficient to dispel suspicion that this was another Islamist terrorist attack.
The country has experienced several deadly knife attacks carried out by Islamists, many of them born in Britain. Islamists also targeted British children in 2017, when a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester murdered 22 people, including seven minors.
It only took three days for a judge to tell the press they could report freely, but it was too late. The riots had too much violent momentum for new information to make any difference, and they continued for several more days.
Rioters targeted mosques and hotels accommodating asylum seekers, as well as indiscriminately attacking public and private property.
Enter Musk
The riots drew the attention of the world’s noisiest and most erratic pundit, Elon Musk, who mused that "civil war is inevitable" in Britain.
The X owner has intervened in other European countries’ politics. But his interest in Britain since last summer appears obsessional. Musk posted about British politics 225 times in the first week of January alone, according to the Financial Times.
Much of what he posts about British affairs is untrue, or a gross distortion of the truth.
As late as 5 January, Musk, whose grandmother was from Merseyside, posted the false claim that the Southport killer is a Muslim, adding, "Prison for Starmer."
Last summer, Starmer promised tough justice not only for rioters, but also for those "whipping-up this action online." Some were jailed for brazenly inciting violence on social media, others for posting memes that the court found offensive.
Musk claimed Britain was "releasing convicted paedophiles from prison in order to put people in prison for Facebook posts."
The grain of truth there is a loophole in an early-release policy that could allow some sex offenders to go free, despite assurances they would not. But the government announced the flawed scheme, intended to ease prison overcrowding, weeks before the riots began.
Musk also libelled the prime minister over Britain’s long-running ’grooming gangs’ scandal.
The government is resisting calls for a full national inquiry into child sexual abuse in English towns by gangs of largely British-Pakistani men, whom local authorities were slow to investigate. Starmer was chief prosecutor for England and Wales when the scandal erupted.
Musk said Starmer was "deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. That’s what the inquiry would show."
The prosecution service has come under fire for giving up on some early cases, but a BBC investigation found no evidence that Starmer was responsible for those decisions.
The government wants local inquiries into the scandal and says it will conduct a "national review" of the evidence, but some victims want a government-led inquiry.
State failures
Musk’s attacks on the prime minister vary from petulant to libellous. But he is responding to a real national conversation, albeit distorted by his chronic addiction to social media.
On 20 January, the government announced an inquiry into what the state got wrong with the Southport killer. For example, concerned individuals referred him to Prevent, Britain’s counter-extremism programme, three times in the five years before he attacked.
The Sunday Times revealed over the weekend that counter-terrorism officers concluded Rudakubana’s obsession with mass shootings was merely "an interest in news and current affairs."
The murderer of Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021, the perpetrator of the 2020 Reading knife attack, and the 2017 Parsons Green train bomber – all three of them Islamist terrorists – had also been referred to Prevent, The Times reported on Friday.
’Nothing will be off the table’
The prime minister is not the villain Musk says he is, but nor is he a visionary. Some of his efforts to reassure the public appear desperate.
Rudakubana used a kitchen knife that he bought from Amazon, so Starmer has promised a crackdown on such knife sales.
That idea smacks of ’something must be done.’ Kitchen knives, by necessity, will always be readily available.
There are also doubts that broadening the official definition of terrorism will do much good.
Neil Basu, former counter-terrorism chief at the Metropolitan Police, told the BBC it could divert resources from fighting terrorism as currently understood, and instead recommended a "Prevent for non-terrorists."
Nevertheless, it is possible that the inquiry will uncover what British authorities, particularly those involved in Prevent, could have done differently.
"Nothing will be off the table in this inquiry," Starmer promised last Tuesday.
But it’s also possible that even if the authorities had done all they reasonably could, the terrifying result might have been the same.
Even if they had ample resources, security and mental health services cannot track every dangerous psychopath.
"It may well be that people like this are harder to spot" the prime minister said last week. "But we can’t shrug our shoulders and accept that."
*first published in: Euractiv.com
By: N. Peter Kramer
