The strange silence around the Southport attacks

There are certain rules in British public life that are worth noting. Such as this one: if someone is killed by a jihadist or someone who could plausibly be connected to immigration in any way, the British public will not be informed of the possible motive – or at least not until it becomes impossible to conceal it any longer.

Certain rules follow on from this. One is that ‘wise’ heads will inform anyone who does mention a likely motive that they must be exceptionally careful not to prejudice any forthcoming trial. There then comes an insistence that there will be a time and a place to debate these things. Quite often, that time and place never arrives.

We have seen this enough times now, from the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby to the murder of Sir David Amess; from the Ariana Grande concert attack to the Taylor Swift dance class massacre. This last has come back to the fore with a suggestive revelation this week. Readers may recall that back in July a maniac went into a children’s dance workshop in Southport and started knifing the participants. Three young girls – Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar (aged six, seven and nine) – died of their injuries. Many others had  life-changing wounds.

For the time being, it is safe to say that such horrors are relatively uncommon in the UK. We do not have such attacks on a daily basis, so it is inevitable that as well as being angry, the British public might be curious about how such a grotesque and unusual attack could occur. But the police seemed strangely unwilling to release any information. And this is when people can surmise something with considerable accuracy: if the attacker had been a far-right extremist of the kind we are told is so common in our country, and had shouted ‘I’m doing this for Oswald Mosley’, then we would have heard about it.