Behold the murderous incompetence of the British state

Now we know: the Southport massacre was an atrocity foretold. That obscene slaughter of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in July 2024 was, in the words of the families’ lawyer, ‘not only predictable’ but ‘preventable’. The moral failures of the killer’s own parents, alongside the institutional failures of the British state, helped to sow the foul seed of that act of evil. This is now a story not only of one young man’s barbarism but of the murderous incompetence of the state itself.

The first report of the Southport Inquiry has been published and it is damning indeed. Axel Rudakubana’s frenzied slaying of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King, and his severe injuring of eight other children and two adults, could and should have been prevented, the report says. If his parents and Britain’s protective agencies had done their ‘moral duty’, the toxic threat he posed might have been neutered, and the precious lives of those girls saved.

The 760-page report, the product of nine weeks of inquiry, does not hold back. It lambasts Rudakubana’s parents for withholding information about their son’s purchase of lethal knives and his attempts to make the toxin, ricin. It says they knew he had tried to leave the house the week before the Southport massacre to launch some kind of attack at his old school. Most damningly of all, the report says his parents knew there was ‘empty knife packaging’ in the house on the day Axel took a taxi to Southport, but they failed to inform police. If they had made state agencies aware of their true knowledge of their son’s ominous behaviour, he would ‘undoubtedly have been taken into care or held in custody’, the report says.

They must bear ‘considerable blame’ for what occurred, it decrees. Worse, these moral failures in the home were then compounded by the grotesque failures of the institutions of society. The ‘sheer number of missed opportunities’ to clock Rudakubana’s murderous menace – and do something about it – was ‘striking’, the inquiry said. Body after body seemed almost blasé about this strange young man who was feverishly obsessed with violence and in the grip of demented fantasies about causing catastrophic harm. Their staggering ineptitude essentially aided his atrocity.

As a schoolboy, he was referred to Prevent, the government’s anti-extremism initiative, three times. This was after he was found to have used school computers to search for school shootings and look up images of weapons. He frequently perused ‘degrading, violent and misogynistic material’, which ‘fed… his already unhealthy fascination with violence’. And yet each Prevent referral was prematurely closed. A few questions were asked, a few boxes ticked, and Rudakubana was signed off. The Prevent officials’ dearth of curiosity, their unwillingness to dig deeper, was astonishing.

It speaks, surely, to the corrupting influence of wokeness. Prevent has been a busted flush for years. It long ago lost sight of the chief terror threat we face – Islamism – and instead chased after that smaller menace that the dinner-party set loves to obsess over: the far right. In 2022 it was found that six out of 11 recent terror attacks had been carried out by individuals referred to Prevent. Now we can add Rudakubana – not an Islamist but certainly a twisted individual – to that shaming list of what we might call ‘Prevent graduates’: people who went on to massacre innocents after receiving little more than a shrug from those charged with protecting us from extreme violence.

The police failed, too. Two years before the Southport massacre, when he was 15 years old, Rudakubana was reported missing by his parents. He was found by police on a bus, in possession of a knife. He told them he wanted to stab someone. He also admitted to thinking about poisoning people. Remarkably, the officers just took him home and advised his parents to hide their knives. If he had been arrested, the inquiry says, a search of his home would have been carried out and the ricin seeds he had bought, not to mention the terror manual he had downloaded, would likely have been found. ‘I have no doubt’, said inquiry chair Sir Adrian Fulford, that had ‘sensible steps’ been taken by agencies – like the arrest of this 15-year-old boy with a knife who openly expressed a keen interest in mass violence – then the ‘dreadful’ massacre in Southport ‘would not have happened’.

Think about this: we live in a country where you can get a knock on the door from the boys in blue for saying men aren’t women, yet a runaway boy with a knife and dreams of murder gets a police ride home. We have police forces who dance like arseholes round the Pride flag and carry prayer mats in the back of their vans in case a local Muslim needs to bow to Mecca, and yet they fail to take seriously an armed teen who’d been referred to Prevent when he says he wants to kill someone. This is indisputable proof that the ‘enwokening’ of the machinery of state is not just vexing and inappropriate – it’s lethal, giving us cops more interested in enforcing moral orthodoxy than saving citizens’ souls.

Other agencies failed catastrophically, too. Emails went unanswered by mental-health services. Promised assessments of Rudakubana’s mindset were delayed time after time. Perhaps the psychiatry industry was too busy catering to the fantasy ailments of the bourgeois ‘worried well’ to look into this troubling young man with a history of violent fantasies. His worsening behaviour, which included murderous thoughts about fellow pupils and teachers, were too often ‘excused’ by professionals as mere expressions of his autism. That there was no sole agency to take responsibility for this hyper anti-social teenager is deeply troubling, says the inquiry. Instead, Rudakubana was put on a ‘merry-go-round referral system’, one it was easy for him to step off in order that he might bury himself deeper in his apocalyptic dreaming. Until 29 July 2024, when he did the thing he told people he would do: knifed innocents to death.

This is one of the most damning indictments of the British state of my lifetime. What ought to be the most protected and cherished thing in a civilised society – the life of a child – was sacrificed at the altar of bureaucratic expedience and dead-eyed incuriosity. We already know we live under a state content to let girls be sexually assaulted if it will help to avoid uncomfortable discussions about multiculturalism. Now we know this same state’s depthless incompetence essentially assisted in the murder of three girls. It brings to mind the searing observation of the cultural critic Terry Eagleton – that evil has ‘a natural affinity with the bureaucratic mind’. It is in the barren moral wilderness of back-covering technocracy that the evil among us often spy an opportunity to strike. The Southport horror shames a whole nation.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.