Southport enquiry promise of “nothing will be off the table” – let’s hope and pray it delivers
It is often said that however carefully political leaders plan and manipulate policies, it is always the lateral and unexpected events that determine the direction of a country. Most lateral interventions tend to occur well into political regimes, when the main flow of political life has become routine and predictable, and eyes are no longer alert to the unexpected or peripheral.
It is actually quite rare in Western democracies for upheavals to occur in close proximity to regime changes, so it must have come as something of a profound shock to our newly-elected Labour government that just 25 days after their historic victory, the country was not being swept up on the much hoped for rhetoric of renewal and national revival, but was exploding catastrophically into civil unrest and political chaos.
No doubt for politicians the terrible event in Southport on 29th July was seen as a horrendous tragedy that no-one could have imagined, but sadly it bore all the hallmarks of the familiar ‘everyone knew, but no-one did anything’ syndrome that has beset so much of British life in recent decades.
There’s little point in recounting all the details here, but urgent and profound questions have once again been thrown into the spotlight as the circumstances surrounding the then 17 year old Axel Rudakubana came to light. Perhaps most poignant and tragic of the recent revelations was the doorcam footage of Axel’s father intervening desperately to prevent his masked and rucksaked son from getting into a taxi he’d booked to take him to a local school just a week earlier. It was also revealed that on 11th December 2019 Axel took a taxi to his school, Range High, where he threatened pupils and teachers with a hockey stick on which he had written their names. He struck one pupil with the stick and broke her wrist. When police arrived, a knife was found in his backpack. He was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, possession of an offensive weapon and possession of a bladed article and a referral order was imposed. In fact Rudakubana was caught 10 times with a knife before Southport.
What followed was a well-documented and closely observed deterioration of this troubled teenager, with all the usual recommendations, supervisions and recording of his increasingly irrational and deeply dangerous behaviour – yet somehow those in his proximity seemed unable to take any action that prevented him from carrying out the dreadful attack at the Hart Space dance studio.
As if this tragedy wasn’t bad enough, the understandable public reaction unleased a whole chain of social and political events that has brought shame on the British political establishment, has galvanised all sorts of public narratives – valid and questionable – and has left most of our population wondering what kind of country Britain has become.
Arguments about the decline of British life are complex and multi-faceted, and depend largely on where you sit on the political and moral spectrum; but far less forgivable was the action of the British establishment in its immediate responses to the event and its aftermath.
We now know that the prime minister and others knew immediately the detail of Axel’s identity and background and, given the absolute horror of his actions, you might even forgive the prime minister’s decision to withhold information about the teenager’s racial and mental health background. Mr Starmer has since fallen back on the argument that releasing such details could have prejudiced the case and prevented a conviction, and actually that’s not an unreasonable consideration. If it had stopped there, the general public may have understood, but unfortunately we live in the transparent immediacy of a social media age – there were lots of witnesses to the event and the culprit was apprehended at the scene. So it could hardly be expected that the government and the police were ever going to be able to prevent identifying information from circulating almost immediately, and efforts would have been best directed at clarifying misinformation rather than trying to deny that it had any basis at all. The ensuing disconnect between establishment denials and politically-correct messaging – and public outrage and anger – was inevitably going to lead to trouble.
Of course the genuine rage of the general population was always going to be hijacked by extreme political groups, but that’s a well-established problem for liberal democracies. What was less expected – though under a rigid socialist government perhaps not – was the rapid and ruthless hammering down on the subsequent protests, which were actually fairly localised and small-scale. This reaction could have been dealt with very simply and effectively by being honest with the public, engaging with people’s distress and anger, and making firm and meaningful commitments to deal with a crime that everyone knows was not an isolated incident, but was highly symptomatic of a much broader and multi-layered malaise in modern British society.
Longstanding public concerns that have been unresolved for decades now – including Knife crime, unsupported migration, decaying mental health services, social marginalisation and isolation, a deteriorating education system and numerous other social issues – conspired to bring 17 year old Axel Rudakubana to the door of Hart Space, and these same issues were at the root of the public disorder that followed.
Politicians of every party know this, or if they don’t they have little understanding of their constituents, so it was not only foolhardy but a gross misjudgement to respond to the Southport riots as merely a manipulation of a tragedy by far-right extremists, and to conduct an indiscriminate and imprisonment of the protagonists, who were throwing stones and dustbins for a whole variety of reasons. These actions have only served to cement a public suspicion that legislators are aquessing to liberal agendas and dragging their heels over sorting out socio-economic problems that are blatantly obvious to the rest of us, and that our new government has laid out its stall with a determination to crush any such dissent from its avowed liberal socialist agenda.
Over the past few days Mr Starmer has given some indication that he’s keen to acknowledge that changes need to be made in the light of the Southport attack, but so far his determinations have fallen well short of any kind of acknowledgement that widespread social malaises need to be addressed. In fact his initial responses seem to be merely a further hammering down and misplaced fixation with the mechanisms of the law – which of course has already catastrophically failed to prevent a known and monitored young man from committing the most awful crime. For Starmer, who has announced a public enquiry in the wake of the public outrage – he’s quite clear that the state “failed in its duty” to protect the girls, but his entire focus has swung onto the view that what Southport flagged up was the threat posed to the state by a new form of ‘terrorist’ – the “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety.” On the back of this the prime minister has promised that there will also be a no-holes barred investigation into “how we protect our children from the tidal wave of violence freely available online.”
All commendable and necessary stuff, but you can’t help feeling that redefining bedroom loners as ‘terrorists’ and putting a few safeguards on young people accessing the internet really has very little to do with the far wider social and moral issues that led to the Southport tragedy. In his statement of Tuesday (21st Jan) Mr Starmer also promised that “Nothing will be off the table in this inquiry – nothing.” It would be nice to believe that, but his speech set down the absolute boundaries of any enquiry – and those who listened to it will have noted the nuances.
Whilst the Southport case, and the conviction of Axel Rudakubana, has served to sharpen minds mandated with running the country, it will be a double tragedy if the solutions proposed don’t address the deeper social ills that have given rise to such crimes. We hopefully learnt long ago that expanding and deepening the reach of the law, and restricting solutional narratives to narrow and misguided remits will only exacerbate the problem and levels of social disorder, and with more and more citizens getting sucked into definitions of criminality. Such is not the methodology of a liberal democracy, but of a totalitarian state – and that must be avoided at all costs.
Politics and theological ramblings aside, we should all remember the tragic loss of such young lives and the lifelong after-effects on all the families involved …
‘The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.‘ Psalm 34:18
Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian