“Terrorism has changed,” the Prime Minister said this morning, responding to the unexpected guilty plea of 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana to the murder of three little girls, and the attempted murder of ten others, in Southport in the summer of 2024. Keir Starmer is right.
The information that has emerged in the last 24 hours about Rudakubana’s unhealthy obsession with gratuitous violence, and his past attempts to act on it, highlight once more that Britain faces a new kind of threat, which is not adequately dealt with by our current terrorism legislation. We have hitherto viewed terrorism as an organised force, perpetrated by groups with flags and symbols, that uses violence and the threat of it to pursue political aims. Few could argue that targeting a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance class, armed with a kitchen knife, intent to kill, was anything other than terrorising. It quickly became clear to the police that this was “no random act of violence” but a “planned and premeditated attempt to commit mass murder”. But did this individual have a “political” or “ideological” purpose by our current understanding of the word?
For someone to be charged under The Terrorism Act 2000, their actions must have been “designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public”. They must also be “for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. It is this last clause which is out of date, and which means we are failing to adequately protect children.
We now know that Rudakubana was referred on three occasions by schools to Prevent, the UK’s scheme aimed at thwarting terrorism at the early stages. The first was in 2019 when he was just 13 years old. That same year he’d been expelled from Range High School in Formby, where fellow pupils recall him having an obsession with despotic leaders including Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler. Several girls have said he had a problem with women, too, and they felt uncomfortable around him. Two months after being excluded, Rudakubana returned to the school, armed with a hockey stick intent on hurting pupils and staff. He assaulted one pupil in the attack, breaking their wrist.
The three Prevent referrals all related, according to the BBC, to Rudakubana’s “general obsession with violence”. One of the referrals is said to have been related to concerns that he had shown in an interest in killing other children in a school-based massacre. “Yet on each of these occasions, a judgement was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention,” the Prime Minister acknowledged, “a judgement that was clearly wrong and which failed those families.”
Failure in this particular case “leaps off the page”, Starmer rightly pointed out, but the wider problem is that the real world has moved faster than the legislative regime. This has been clear from multiple atrocities, but it has taken Rudakubana’s monstrous crimes to acknowledge it. Boys and young men are being radicalised in their bedrooms, not by radical Islamism or the far-right, but in many instances by a hatred and resentment of women, and a feeling that the world has done them wrong. While Rudakubana has also pleaded guilty to producing the biological toxin ricin, and to possessing an Al-Qaeda training manual, it is not at all clear at this stage that his violence was motivated by Islamism. His earlier predilection to violent behaviour appears to have predated the downloading of the document.
When the 22-year-old Jake Davison murdered five people in Plymouth in August 2022, there were strong signs that his links to the “incel” movement may have been a motivating factor. Incels, which stands for “involuntarily celibate”, tend to blame women for their own lack of sexual and social status. His crimes were not classed as terrorism. It seems likely that a hatred of women was also factor in Salman Abedi’s targeting of an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017: 17 of the 22 people who died were female, and some were children. During the official inquiry into the bombing, witnesses described how Abedi was a misogynist who had a “very bad” and “disrespectful” attitude towards women. Sir John Saunders wrote in the third volume of the “Report of the Public Inquiry into the Attack on Manchester Arena”, published in 2023, that, in his view, “misogynistic violence should be recognised as a potential indicator of radicalisation”. He recommended that the Department for Education has schools record instances of violence against girls “so that it is not overlooked should other signs emerge”.
What is clear from the case of Axel Rudakubana is not only that Britain’s terrorism laws are inadequate for the new nature of threat we face, but also that schools must have a way to not just share concerns about pupils displaying worrying signs of violence or adherence to hateful ideologies, but for those concerns to be acted upon. Lord Anderson KC will now look at the Prevent scheme, but more is needed. If we are to have a national inquiry, as the government has announced, it must go far beyond tinkering with existing schemes and laws. It must look at how and why so many young men and boys are drawn to extreme violence in the first place, and what can be done to tackle it before others are killed, and more lives ruined.
[See also: Southport and the rage of England]
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