The PM’s warm words will count for little. Starmer’s pledge is reminiscent of the one made by Theresa May in June 2017
Keir Starmer has pledged to act in light of the revelations about Southport killer Axel Rudakubana. The 17-year-old murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year, and it has since emerged that Rudakubana – who also pleaded guilty to owning an online version of an al-Qaeda training manual – had been flagged for his radicalism on three occasions between 2019 and 2021. As the Prime Minister explained: ‘On each of these occasions, a judgment was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention, a judgment that was clearly wrong and which failed those families.’
Starmer acknowledged those failings and he made a promise to the families of the victims: ‘We must, of course, ask and answer difficult questions, questions that should be far-reaching, unburdened by cultural or institutional sensitivities and driven only by the pursuit of justice. That is what we owe the families.’
Will the PM be able to live up to his resolute words? Starmer’s pledge is reminiscent of the one made by Theresa May in June 2017 in the aftermath of the Islamist attack on London Bridge that left seven dead. Days earlier, another Islamist had killed 22 people when he detonated a bomb at the Manchester Arena. Speaking outside Downing Street, the then PM declared that Britain was guilty of displaying ‘far too much tolerance of extremism’.
‘Enough is enough’, she said, adding: ‘We need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations.’
As the Guardian remarked at the time, May’s bold words echoed those of Tony Blair’s and his ‘Rules have changed’ speech in the wake of the 2005 Islamist attacks in London that killed 52. Blair launched a 12-point plan to combat Islamic extremism in August 2005; among the measures were tightening border control, increased scrutiny of places of worship suspected of promulgating extremism and more deportation of foreign nationals guilty of ‘fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs or justifying or validating such violence’.
As the Guardian commented in June 2017, much of Blair’s 12-point plan ‘remains unimplemented’.
Similarly, for all May’s strident rhetoric no difficult or embarrassing conversations about Islamic extremism were forthcoming.
On the contrary, it was arguably made more difficult to broach the subject when in 2018 the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims proposed a new definition of Islamophobia as ‘rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. All political parties subsequently adopted this definition, except for the Tories.
They may have been a contributory factor to the muted response in 2021 to the murder of MP David Amess; rather than mention the Islamist ideology that guided the killer, some in Parliament blamed the crime on the ‘corrosive space’ of social media. Writing in The Spectator, Sam Ashworth-Hayes lamented the ‘shameful silence’ surrounding the murder of Amess.
Will the latest outrage finally lead to ‘difficult questions’ being asked and to hell with cultural sensitivities? Or will – as happened in 2005 and in 2017 – the political class conclude that in fact these questions are too embarrassing to discuss?
Most likely the latter. Britain likes to think of itself as a multicultural shangri-la, and only the ‘far-right’ would dare suggest otherwise.
Danny Shaw, former adviser to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, speaks to Katy Balls and James Heale about the case on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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