Southport and the ‘lone wolf’ policy conundrum

Good morning. Axel Rudakubana has been handed one of the longest jail terms in UK history — he will serve at least 52 years in prison before becoming eligible for parole. It comes after he admitted to the murder of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, at a dance class in Southport last July.

It is highly likely he will never be released.

It is also very probable the law will end up being tweaked so that in the event of a similar future case (the only reason why Rudakubana did not receive a whole life sentence is that he was 17 at the time of the murders) the possibility of parole in cases like these is downgraded from “wholly theoretical” to “non-existent”.

The more complicated question is about how and if the UK counterterror system should change in response. I wrote a bit about that earlier this week, but now that he has been sentenced and I can write more freely I want to revisit some of it and address some of the trade-offs and some of the misconceptions about the policy challenge.

The future of UK counterterror policy

The challenge that the Southport murders pose for the British state is that it is not a mental health story or a “traditional” terror story. Many of your responses to Tuesday’s newsletter talked about the deleterious effects of cuts to children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and other youth services more broadly during the last government.

I’m not saying that these cuts have not had important negative effects for the health and happiness of people in the UK. But they were not a factor in this case: Axel Rudakubana was not, and is not, mentally ill. His defence team did not submit any evidence of mental illness and indeed their submission in mitigation was deliberately and explicitly thin. Rudakubana’s defence was led by Stanley Reiz KC, one of our most respected criminal defence lawyers. He had a Rolls-Royce defence team, and you can be sure that had there been an even halfway-plausible case to be made in mitigation about Rudakubana’s mental health they would have found it and made it.

This isn’t a case about a young man of unsound mind committing a series of horrific crimes. It’s one of a young, violent man consciously planning and choosing to commit an atrocity. But nor is it one of a young, violent man doing so in service of a particular cause. Police seized 43 electronic devices from Rudakubana’s house, and were able to access the contents of 32 of them. They contained more than 164,000 downloaded documents spanning a vast range of extreme violent imagery and information. But what they did not contain was any evidence of an underlying motivation beyond a desire to commit a horrific act of violence.

Rudakubana was known to CAMHS, had been expelled from his school, and was three times referred to Prevent, the deradicalisation programme. He had been convicted for assaulting another student. In November 2019, he was referred to Prevent by a teacher after searching for information about mass shootings on a school computer. In February 2021, he was again referred, this time after a pupil reported he had uploaded images of Muammer Gaddafi to Instagram. Two months later he was referred again by a teacher who noted that he had two tabs open about the 2017 London Bridge attack. Between October 2019 and May 2022, Lancashire police responded to five calls about his behaviour from his home address.

One reason why Rudakubana’s referrals to Prevent didn’t go anywhere is that on no occasion did Prevent find evidence of any underlying ideological reason for Rudakubana’s behaviour other than an interest in violence. And he did not end up being detained for his own safety and that of others because he was not mentally ill. The UK, like most states, essentially has two routes to pre-emptively stop atrocities, and neither fitted Rudakubana. The challenge facing the government is: is it possible to construct a route that would?

Anyone who is familiar with mass shootings will note some immediate similarities. Martin Bryant, who in 1996 killed 35 and injured 23 others in Port Arthur, in what was the deadliest massacre in Australia’s history, had studied the Dunblane massacre which occurred earlier that year. Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings, was reportedly transfixed by the 1996 Columbine high school massacre.

Now, most mass killings are not considered to be acts of terrorism, though there are occasional calls in the US to treat all school shootings as terrorism, and calls in many parts of the world to treat some or all forms of domestic violence as terrorism. (I will return to both of these at a later date as they have implications for how the British state might respond to the Southport murders.)

Our understanding of why mass shooters — and more broadly, “spree killers” who may use other weapons — do what they do is not very good, in part because so many mass shooters either end up shooting themselves or being shot by law enforcement. Our ability to detect “lone wolves” of any description is already limited. Frankly, the only policy lever that any nation has found that works to reduce this problem is gun control. It’s the lever that Britain pulled after Dunblane, and tightened further after the Plymouth shooting in 2021. It’s the lever that Australia pulled after Port Arthur, too.

The state clearly failed multiple times to spot the threat that Rudakubana posed. While it may be easy to look at the list of instances and go “well, why is the home secretary fretting about making it harder to buy kitchen knives on Amazon?”*, that is misplaced. While taking steps on the purchase of knives addresses a very small part of what went wrong here, this is the lever that we know works. Yvette Cooper is absolutely right to want to make buying a knife as tough as she possibly can. We will never be able to outright stop the use of knives, so there is a limit to how far she can go, but she is absolutely right to explore it.

Both Cooper and Keir Starmer have argued that this case is a reason to change the UK’s counterterror system so that it is better geared up to address and monitor “violence for the sake of violence”, and the new, more incoherent “pick and mix” terrorism that MI5 director-general Ken McCallum warned about in his annual threat update last autumn. They have asked Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer, to review whether the UK’s definition of terrorism needs to be expanded.

What we define as terrorism matters in this case because we grant greater powers to law enforcement to detain, search and monitor people if they are engaging in acts defined as terrorism than we do common murderers.

There are inevitably trade-offs here. For example, there would be reductions in freedom and liberty if we were to increase the scope of what is and isn’t considered to be terrorism. It also places strain on the security services and on the UK’s counterterror resources. As Hall himself said in an interview with the Times:

The PM talked about whether we should have a new sort of terrorism where violence is used to terrorise. But it’s quite hard to create a barrier, if that is the new criterion, between real terrorism and stuff that is not. For example, football hooliganism will terrorise people, criminal gangs will terrorise, arguably domestic violence terrorises, and, if I were a mother in Lucy Letby’s ward — I would be terrorised.

I have been asked to examine this, and I will keep an open mind, but I think it is expanding the definition too much. What is the functional point? To unleash pre-crime offences that allow police to intervene early. But you can only do that if you have got the resources and the manpower. Police and MI5 are focusing on the existing terror threat and the huge increase in state threat activity which now takes a significant amount of their time. They would be overwhelmed.

This is genuinely difficult. Taken together, Hall’s review, Cooper’s beefed-up scrutiny of the Prevent programme and the new inquiry into the failures to pick up Rudakubana will provide a useful framework to assess how and whether we should go further.

An important difference between Islamist extremist terror (roughly 75 per cent of MI5’s counterterror caseload) and the extreme far right (roughly 25 per cent) is that Islamist extremists tend to aim for mass death, while the extreme far right tends to go for specific targets.

There are exceptions to that, of course, but “mass death” may well be the way to square this circle. Rudakubana was cultivating ricin for that very purpose. Treating violence designed to inflict mass death for its own sake as a form of terrorism might be a way to marry Starmer’s desire for greater powers with Hall’s justified concerns about it swamping the security services.

*Full disclosure, one of the pundits to have been thoughtlessly and reflexively dismissive of that measure is me, as listeners who heard me on LBC’s Cross Question will know. Several of you wrote to take me to task about it and rightly so. I’m always grateful for the many thoughtful replies and emails I get from Inside Politics readers. They sharpen my thinking immensely and I am sorry I have been particularly sloppy at replying to them recently.

Now try this

I’m off to see the West End transfer of what was far and away the best play I saw last year — The Years, the stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir. There are still tickets here.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

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