The UK Government Is to Blame for the Southport Murders
The UK Government Is to Blame for the Southport Murders
“Wokeism” has stymied British policing.
On July 24, 2024, 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana took a taxi to a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, Merseyside, in the north of England. What happened next would shock the UK to its core, sparking days of nationwide rioting and some of the most violent and widespread social unrest in decades.
Within 15 minutes of arriving at the dance studio, Rudakubana had murdered three young girls, attempted to murder eight more, and attacked two adults who tried to stop him. Had they not managed to escape, thanks largely to the bravery of the adults at the scene, all 26 girls in the dance class would almost certainly have been murdered—such was Rudakubana’s ferocious determination to kill and maim as many children as possible. The precise details of the attack are so disturbing—so unconscionably violent and evil—that the families of the deceased have asked for them to never be repeated.
This was one of the “most egregious crimes in British history,” said Sir Adrian Fulford last year at the opening of the public inquiry into the Southport atrocities. “Ordinary language fails to reflect their enormity.” Now that phase one has concluded, we know that Rudakubana’s killing spree was not only premeditated and planned—it was also, in Fulford’s words, entirely “predictable” and “preventable.”
The inquiry report, running to 760 pages and published last week, is scathing of Rudakubana’s parents’ failure to report their son to the authorities. They knew that Axel had developed an obsession with violence, had been amassing a collection of knives, and even had the ingredients to make ricin, a deadly toxin. They knew their shut-in son, who had stopped attending school, only ever left the house with violence in mind. Yet they failed to inform anyone when he left the house on that fateful day in July 2024.
Nevertheless, and this is not to excuse the parents, one has to wonder what might have happened differently had they given more details to the authorities about their son’s behaviour. After all, it’s not as if Axel “slipped through the net,” as the cliché goes. He was caught in the net, multiple times, but nothing was ever done.
The inquiry has found that at least six state bodies—from the police and mental-health agencies to social services and the Prevent counterterrorism scheme—could have taken action that might have prevented the Southport murders. Rudakubana experienced a “merry-go-round” of referrals, assessments and “hand-offs,” with no one agency willing to take responsibility for the risk he posed to others.
Instead, red flag after red flag was ignored or downplayed. His history of violence (he almost beat a fellow school pupil to death with a hockey stick) was known to the authorities. His desire to kill was known to the authorities. His obsession with violent atrocities, from terror attacks to colonial-era massacres, was known to the authorities. None of these led to the kinds of intervention that you might expect from a functioning state.
Incompetence and bureaucratic back-covering certainly played a role here. But it was wokeness that prevented anything from being done, even when serious concerns were raised by professionals who wanted action to be taken.
Rudakubana’s autism diagnosis often led the authorities—including the police—to conclude that his strange behaviour and frightening demeanour could be safely ignored, when instead, as the inquiry found, it ought to have been treated as a risk factor in itself. It made a violent atrocity more, not less, likely.
Most shocking of all, Rudakubana’s race—the fact that he is of black African origin—was explicitly cited as a reason not to take any action against him. When the headteacher of the Acorn School in Lancashire, a specialist school for children who’ve been excluded from mainstream education, warned that Rudakubana posed a “high risk” and should be searched regularly for knives, she was shot down by a children’s mental-health worker. Apparently, the headteacher had “racially profiled” Rudakubana and was perpetuating stereotypes about “black boys with knives.” By this point, Rudakubana had already been expelled from his previous school—for taking a knife into class. This “effectively shut me up,” the headteacher told the inquiry.
As shocking as this may sound, the catastrophic failures that allowed for Axel Rudakubana’s killing spree are far from unusual in 21st-century Britain. Indeed, in February, the inquiry into another predictable and preventable atrocity got underway. The 2023 Nottingham murders, in which the paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane fatally stabbed two university students and a school caretaker, were similarly enabled by a state that is as woke as it is incompetent. Calocane also had a history of disturbing and violent behaviour, but mental-health services were reluctant to hospitalize him due to concerns that young black men are “overrepresented” in detention. He was even allowed to refuse medication for his schizophrenia, simply because he doesn’t like needles. As with Rudakubana, Calocane’s case shows that the comfort of the mentally disturbed comes first, while the harm they may cause to innocent members of the public simply doesn’t factor into the state’s thinking.
Whether you call it wokeness, political correctness, or antiracism, this attitude is lurking in the background of almost every major British atrocity of recent years. The Manchester Arena bomber, who murdered 22 people and injured over 1,000 people at an Ariana Grande concert, might have been stopped had a security guard not feared that intervening would have appeared “Islamophobic.” The now internationally notorious Pakistani Muslim rape gangs were free to abuse tens of thousands of mostly white girls, largely because the authorities feared being accused of racism if they made arrests, or that if the white working classes ever learned the truth, then riots would erupt.
Axel Rudakubana alone is responsible for his murderous killing spree. But the lethally woke and dangerously incompetent British state has blood on its hands, too.
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