There is such a thing as society, as the grief of Southport, shared across the nation, shows. Yet Axel Rudakubana never became a functioning member of it and turned into a deadly threat instead. This young man arrived on the verge of adulthood having found no purpose in life beyond a fixation with violence. His story is of a failure of social integration, in one sense or another, yet not in the way that some have argued. The inquiry into why he was not stopped will overturn assumptions about the changing shape of extreme violence and how we prevent it.
The guilty plea on the opening day of the trial confirmed the obvious truth: that Rudakubana had wielded his knife to devastating effect, taking the lives of Bebe, six, Elsie, seven, and Alice, nine, while seriously injuring many others. The judge had little doubt that the perpetrator would have killed all twenty-six children present had he not been stopped.
The murderer will spend his life in prison. Though formally eligible to seek parole in 2076, because he was a week short of eighteen years old on that terrible day, the judge sent a message forward half a century that he would expect any such request to be refused.
Why did he kill? The prosecution described a settled intention to commit a mass killing through an obsessive fixation with violence. Yet, after trawling through 165,000 documents, the police so far see this as most likely to be murder for murder’s sake.
The killing spree resembles the Californian school shooting recounted in the Boomtown Rats’ song “I don’t like Mondays”. The silicon chip inside his head had flipped to overload, yet we could see no reasons “because there are no reasons” beyond shooting the whole day down. Rudakubana’s own defence counsel described him as devoid of empathy or remorse. Among the few things he was reported saying was chillingly telling the police that it made him happy that the children were dead.
This was as evil a crime as anybody can recall. Did Rudakubana’s trajectory to violence have anything to do with his being born in Wales to parents who came here from Rwanda? Some intuitively believe that a black teenager killing young white girls must have targeted them out of racial animosity. Or that misogyny, or an Islamist-influenced hatred of popular culture, must be the motive for attacking girls at a Taylor Swift party.
The liberal-left orthodoxy is that this terrible crime should trigger similar questions, not different ones, to the double-murder of ten-year-olds by the school caretaker in Soham, or the massacre of sixteen primary school children in Dunblane by a twisted and angry former scout master. It remains too soon to make a final judgment.
It certainly seems a plausible hypothesis that a spiralling obsession with genocide might have begun from a personal connection to Rwanda. The family were Tutsi – the victims of a Hutu-led genocide that saw up to 800,000 people slaughtered in three months. His father had once been part of the RPF Army which was to stop the genocide and change the Rwandan government. Every Tutsi family will have lost many relatives in the genocide. Yet his intense fixation on every googleable source of genocidal violence also reflected his diagnosis of autism.
The multiple inquiries – into Prevent and the definition of terrorism – look set to find large gaps in our domestic systems of protection and prevention. The child had phoned Childline as a twelve-year-old to say he had thoughts about killing somebody. He was expelled from school at thirteen for carrying a knife, returning to violently lash out with a hockey stick in the corridors.
That was the autumn before lockdown. Rudakubana became ever more isolated after it, his attendance at a pupil referral unit falling to 1% as he fell off the mental health, child protection and policing radars. He came close to targeting his old school again, just a week before the murders.
Rudakubana was not mentally ill: his defence made no plea about mental health in mitigation. But many parents will hear echoes of their own frustrations in grappling with threadbare post-pandemic systems, trying to protect children from the dangers of self-harm, as much as from harming others.
Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch told the BBC on Sunday that Rudakubana “had materials about white genocide and so on” appearing to infer an ideological racist motive that the police investigation has not found.
There is little evidence of such material in the documents listed by the police, including material on the Nazi holocaust, Rwanda’s tragedy, Sri Lanka’s civil war, Amerindian torture and violence, the British war on the Mau Mau in Kenya, and clashes between slave-owners and slaves.
The dominant use of the “white genocide” term is bound up with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the idea that white Britons are being out-bred by immigrants. It is still used, too, by hardline ethno-nationalists, to object to racial mixing in relationships, such as the marriage of Hamish Badenoch to Kemi Adegoke, or indeed my own marriage. How far there are also materials available which advocate “white genocide” as a desirable violent project is unclear.
Badenoch quickly pivoted away from online radicalisation towards her long-standing critiques of identity politics, critical race theory and decolonisation in the classroom. “They hate their country – and they are being told that the UK is terrible,” Badenoch said.
When asked for evidence that a lack of integration was a key factor in Southport, Badenoch said her evidence was her own personal experience. What that non sequitur demonstrates is that she wants to define her political persona around being willing to ask tough questions about integration, both when it may fit the case, as over grooming gangs, and when it might not, as over Southport.
Some on the right go further than Badenoch. The populist blogger and former academic Matthew Goodwin declares that Southport is not about knives or violent online content but “about hapless Western leaders importing masses of people from high conflict societies, who are more prone to violence, don’t share our values and don’t care about our people”.
This is a more Powellite position, similar to that which Robert Jenrick has been flirting with. One shocking crime by a young man born to African Christian parents in Wales tells us as much about general patterns of integration as the existence of a Conservative party leader who grew up in Nigeria: very little.
Nigel Farage and the Reform Party are also insisting on their own facts about the murder. Reform believes it so obvious that the crime is driven by Islamist ideology – despite the police investigation not finding that – that they are calling for the head of the Crown Prosecution Service to resign for covering up what Reform guessed they would find.
This is the latest stage of a frenzied, shifting quest to turn the post-arrest, pre-trial sub judice rules into the smoking gun of a government cover-up. It is a theory that falls apart with the police and prosecutor’s report about the absence of an ideological cause.
An Islamist motive did sound plausible in October, when new terrorism charges were brought over the possession of ricin and an Al-Qaeda training manual, without communicating the wide range of materials about violence. The manual appears to be more of a “how to” guide in the absence of corroborating evidence of Islamism.
The inquiries may illuminate the costs of treating terrorism policy as a political football. Prevent has faced challenges and controversies across two decades. Heightened scrutiny of Islamist terrorism was essential after 9/11 and 7/7 but it was also a time of increased mistrust and prejudice against British Muslims. But claims that Prevent itself was a “toxic brand” making all Muslims feel spied upon were always exaggerated. In fact, research found that most Muslims – and the majority of the general public – had never heard of Prevent.
There was broad cross-community agreement that the UK government needed a prevention programme with these principles, and that it should tackle Islamist extremism and other threats consistently. Setting the duties of teachers within their broader safeguarding duties had helped to defuse arguments about spying on pupils.
Yet the Shawcross Review of 2023 offered a blunt, back to basics critique. Shawcross saw too much safeguarding of vulnerable young people and too much engagement with unclear and mixed ideologies. Ideology was “essential” to the trajectory towards terrorism; there could be no radicalisation without ideology, his review asserted.
The Home Secretary says that the failure to identify Rudakubana as a threat, despite the referrals, reflected an excessive emphasis on the fact that he was not ideologically motivated. The post-Shawcross recommendations and reforms would have ruled such cases out of bounds entirely. Yet the MI5 threat assessment had the opposite analysis to that of Shawcross – of a growing threat from those with a tenuous ideology, or no ideology at all.
With Prevent focused on ideologies of extremism that can turn people into terrorists, there is no parallel programme of prevention for those who present a violent threat without an ideological cause, but who may fantasise about the notoriety from a school shooting or celebrity assassination.
Violence for violence’s sake feels like an inadequate account of incomprehensible evil. Yet our efforts at prevention must now adapt to the changing shape of the threats we face.
Sunder Katwala is Director of British Future and author of How to be a Patriot