“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?
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