This morning Keir Starmer implied but did not categorically say that Islamist ideology was not the motivation of the dreadful Axel Rudakubana. The Prime Minister referred several times to the 18-year-old’s heinous crimes as constituting an example of ‘a new threat’ from ‘loners and misfits’, and to Rudakubana having viewed ‘all kinds of material’ online. Much else was left unresolved. Was the man who murdered three little girls in Southport and maimed many others motivated in any way by an Islamist agenda? Are claims that he attended the mosque in Belmarsh prison while held on remand true or false? Whether the material Rudakubana viewed included ‘extreme jihadi videos,’ as Nigel Farage claimed on GB News last night, was also left unanswered.
Perhaps the hastily-convened inquiry into how the system handled Rudakubana will finally nail these matters. But as of today the public are still in the dark about whether a teenager with an Al-Qaeda manual on his computer who attacked a classic Islamist target – girls dancing to pop music – had fallen into jihadi ways or was just a common psychopath determined to commit mass murder.
Starmer called this press conference because he knows he is in huge trouble not only on Southport but also on the wider issue of abominable things being done to Britain’s girls by males of immigrant heritage, from the Manchester Arena bombing by a young man of Libyan descent to the rape gangs formed by hundreds of Mirpuri Pakistanis.
He pledged to change the system so the Southport murders would come to be seen as ‘a line in the sand’. No line of inquiry about how to better protect the public would be ruled out because of cultural sensitivities, he promised. ‘People will say it’s all because of immigration or funding cuts… neither tells the whole truth or explains this case properly,’ he added.
That at least leaves the door open to immigration of people with primitive attitudes to women explaining some of the upsurge in rape and extreme violence facing girls in our country. Starmer also referred to ‘failures of integration’ being part of the reason for ‘more and more people retreating into parallel lives’.
As to the withholding of basic information about the atrocity in the days following it, Starmer greatly overstated the extent to which his hands had been tied by the laws of contempt of court and the need to avoid prejudicing the trial. ITV’s Paul Brand correctly pointed out that there had been a ‘window’ before charges were laid in which the suspect having previously cropped up on the Prevent radar, having been in possession of ricin, and having downloaded an Al-Qaeda manual all could have been made public. Starmer’s implication that nothing more at all could have been said without risking ‘crashing the trial’ was absurd. It took the Sun’s Harry Cole to get to the nub of matters: why had the authorities insisted for months that the attack was not terror-related when that clearly wasn’t true?
In response, Starmer lurched off into a philosophical discussion as to what constitutes terrorism and how the definition may need to change in future so these kind of attacks are contained within it. Pure sophistry.
As a long-time member of the non-conspiratorialist community, on this one I am content to throw my lot in with millions of fellow citizens who suspect politically correct leadership across criminal justice and politics was bending over backwards to keep Islamist terrorism out of the picture.
The ‘Welsh choirboy’ narrative failed a basic smell test and nobody with an iota of common sense was surprised by its subsequent collapse. Squirming Starmer is a very long way from being off the hook.
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