Why does Keir Starmer find it so hard to use the word ‘terrorist’ when talking about a man who buys ricin and a machete online, reads up about killing people in an al Qaeda training manual – and then goes out and stabs to death three young girls attending a dance class? When asked this week whether he regarded the crimes committed by Axel Rudakubana as a terrorist act, the Prime Minister couldn’t quite bring himself to do so, instead referring to it as an act of ‘extreme violence clearly intended to terrorise’.
The fight against terrorism seems to have been infected by the fear of appearing racist or Islamophobic
Starmer has obfuscated over the Southport killings since they occurred in July. Like the police, he immediately declined to treat the attack as terrorism. He said this week that he did not disclose the fact Rudakubana had been referred to the anti-extremism programme Prevent three times before the murders because he was ‘obeying the law of the land’. He insisted that had he, or the police, shared such information with the public at the time then it could have led to a future trial collapsing. Yet as the Conservative MP Nick Timothy has pointed out, this claim makes no sense. Details about the 18-year-old’s history and his possession of terrorist materials were disclosed in October, when he was charged with the possession of ricin. It could not have prejudiced a trial to have released such information in July.
Withholding such details only served to fuel rumours. Social media was rife with allegations – some untrue, such as the claim that the attacker was an asylum seeker. However, some were correct: yes, Rudakubana had a long history of extremism. It is galling to learn he had been referred multiple times to Prevent, yet on each occasion had been assessed as not reaching the threshold at which further action was required.
The Prime Minister has, at last, acknowledged the state’s failure to monitor Rudakubana properly. But Starmer still seems unable to appreciate that withholding information on the attacker helped feed the riots that followed. It is little wonder that he quickly became known as ‘Two Tier Keir’. When the riots broke out he had no hesitation blaming the ‘far right’ – asserting that there was some shady white supremacist organisation behind them. In fact, the police officer in charge of UK counter-terrorism later revealed that foreign bots were used to help fill the vacuum of official information. For a week, the ‘far-right riots’ were allowed to become the main story, rather than the terror attack itself.
The refusal to release information on Rudakubana in a timely fashion fits into a pattern of behaviour by those in power. When acts of violence are perpetrated by right-wing extremists, their ideology is instantly put up for public debate. Yet on the – far more common – occasions when we have had Islamist terror attacks, crucial details are withheld. When Conservative MP David Amess was murdered in 2021, the public conversation revolved around a general growth in distrust of politicians. We were invited to think that it was public anger over the expenses scandal and the like which had ultimately led to Amess’s slaughter, rather than Islamist extremism. It was the same with the murder of three gay men in Reading in 2020: the fact that they were killed by an Islamist terrorist was marginalised.
A similar attitude can be seen in the drift of Prevent. Set up by the Blair government in 2003 in the wake of 9/11, its initial focus was on Islamism, acknowledging that this was by far the biggest terror threat facing Britain. Yet those who ran the programme – and those, such as teachers and social workers, who made the referrals which fed into it – steadily allowed themselves to be distracted by accusations from the Muslim Council of Great Britain and others that it was discriminatory.
In 2018, a paper in the scientific journal Nature accused Prevent of being ‘Islamophobic’. As a result, Prevent steadily tilted. By 2023, far-right suspects made up 19 per cent of referrals and 46 per cent of the people advanced into the Channel programme – which involves intense monitoring and mentoring. By contrast, suspected Islamist extremists made up only 11 per cent of referrals and 18 per cent of Channel cases.
This is in direct contrast to the balance of terror attacks which have occurred since Prevent was set up. From the London Tube bombings of July 2005 to the beheading of Lee Rigby in 2013 to the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017, Islamist terror attacks have become an all too regular part of the backdrop of life in Britain, causing around 100 deaths in the past two decades. As for British far-right extremists, they can be claimed to have killed two: MP Jo Cox in 2016 and a man outside the Finsbury Park mosque in 2017.
As with the grooming gangs scandal, the fight against terrorism seems to have been infected by the fear of appearing to be racist or Islamophobic. At least in the case of the Southport killings, we are going to have a public inquiry which can and must address that point. Terrorism is terrorism, whatever the warped ideology which lies behind it.
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