The UK is facing a “new and dangerous threat” from extreme violence, Sir Keir Starmer said in the wake of the Southport murders. Speaking in Downing Street after the UK government announced a public inquiry into the case, the Labour Party leader said “terrorism has changed” and the entire counter-extremist system must be reviewed. The murders were carried out by Axel Rudakubana despite having been referred three times to the anti-extremism programme Prevent. He killed three children, aged six, seven and nine, in July 2021.
Sir Keir argued that if the law needed to change, it would, as he denied any cover-up over Rudakubana’s background. At the same event, prime minister Boris Johnson called for the whole counter-extremist system to be held accountable after it emerged Rudakubana had been excluded from school aged 13 in October 2019 before breaking another student’s wrist with a hockey stick. Lancashire Child Safeguarding Partnership said Lancashire Constabulary responded to five calls from his home address linked to concerns about his behavior between October 2019 and May 2022.
Up until now, the predominant threat had been highly organized groups like al-Qaida, but Johnson urged people to recognize that the new threat was extreme violence by “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom” accessing material online and “fixated on that extreme violence”. Johnson further acknowledged that it was “clearly wrong” Rudakubana was deemed not to meet the threshold for intervention from the Prevent program, and that the Southport victims’ families had been failed.
The UK’s former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, told BBC Radio 4 that there needed to be a review of Prevent and the mechanisms for dealing with people obsessed by violence but ideology given the impact of the internet. He suggested that the current program is ill-suited to pick up individuals for whom it was not originally designed. Johnson emphasized the failings of state institutions, saying that there had been “failures which in this case, frankly, leap off the page
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