Southport: digging the hole deeper
I’ve been in debates much for much of the day today as to whether the Southport atrocity was a terrorist attack. I concluded it wasn’t, and more importantly, so did the judge. That, though, has not stopped Richard Tice and Reform banging that particular drum. In a tweet addressed to Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy, Tice asserts “You personally, the CPS and Govt need to take total responsibility for deciding not to call it a terror incident, & not to inform the people about the back context of the killer”.
The thing about classifying such an atrocity as terrorism is that it requires the police to establish a terrorist motive. They could not rush to judgement. Though an Al-Qaeda training manual was found, there was no evidence of Islamist radicalisation. That didn’t stop Reformers piling in.
I wrote at the time “From the nanosecond the story broke, right wing pundits of Twitter were hoping the suspect would be a muslim/recent immigrant/channel migrant. They were salivating at the thought. The presumption drove them to just make up a story (albeit with reasonable odds it could be true), without any regard to the facts, most of which are still not known”.
The point about misinformation and disinformation regarding the Rudakubana case is worth reminding ourselves of. A fake tweet was put out from overseas claiming the killer was a dinghy migrant. This was amplified by Dave Atherton and Alison Pearson among other big names on the right. Immediately it was assumed to be an Islamist attack, precipitating an attack on a mosque in Southport, regardless of the fact that Rudakubana was not a practicing Muslim, and from a Christian background.
Reform, however, seems to be clinging to the notion that this was indeed an Islamist inspired attack. We’ll come back to that.
Tice is, however, correct in pointing the finger at the CPS. Regarding the decision to withhold information, The Telegraph reports that Merseyside detectives had wanted to provide details about the killer’s background, including his religion and his crimes, but were warned not to do so by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They had also been keen to explain more about a terrorist document and batch of ricin found at his home but were advised against it, police sources have told The Telegraph.
Leftwing pundits were quick to dub the disorder “the Farage riots”, but in the absence of official information, speculation was always going to fill the void. The Tory government bears much of the responsibility for what subsequently took place.
As Matthew Syed points out in The Times, "I also find myself agreeing with those who say that mass uncontrolled immigration cannot be discounted as an aggravating factor in the riots that followed. The “news” that the murderer was an asylum seeker turned out to be fake (he is the son of Rwandan immigrants, born in the UK), but this spark of misinformation would not have proved so combustible without the accumulation of flammable material left in the wake of politicians who serially lied about cutting immigration numbers and then took them to unprecedented levels. This was culpable."
Regarding the precise nature of the attack, it is left to Peter Hitchens to deliver the decisive blow. In is Mail on Sunday piece he remarks:
“A society that does not think does not deserve to survive. The national reaction to the case of the teenage mass-killer Axel Rudakubana is totally unthinking from top to bottom. Does anyone really believe (as Sir Keir Starmer does) that making knives slightly harder to buy will stop knife crime? No. So that's that brilliant idea dealt with. Next? Some try to pretend that Rudakubana, an ignorant, vicious, unhinged dimwit, is a political terrorist because he once looked at a terrorist website on his laptop. They hope this will excuse their dangerous rumour-mongering at the time of the Southport killings, which led to an outbreak of lawless violence. It will not”.
Which brings me to my point. Reform has yet again ploughed into an issue in haste, got the wrong end of the stick, and through lack of attention to detail, only digs the hole deeper. The focus should be on the fact that Rudakubana should never have been here in the first place, and that despite all the warning signals, nothing was done to intervene.
We could go one further and point out that the victims were, by design, little girls, which does suggest a misogynistic incel motive closer to trans ideology than Islamism. I’d argue that if the definition of terrorism could be expanded to include misogynistic violence, it could then also include grooming. That might be a useful campaign for Reform, but instead Reform is pandering, as populists do, to the reactionary mob, and through lack of precision, lashing out in all directions, based on a misrepresentation of the facts, are stoking the situation for political gain.
Ultimately the right has a desperate need for Southport to be designated as terrorism, not only to exonerate themselves for the spreading of disinformation, but also to bend the events to the self-serving narrative.
Elsewhere, nationalists on the further right would have it that this was a racially motivated terrorist attack, with Rudakubana holding an ethnic grievance against white people. This is certainly more plausible than the Reform line that this was an Islamist attack, but the evidence tends to suggest a pattern of behaviour consistent with autism and schizophrenia. He was compelled to kill, and all the warning signs were there.
Ultimately, this is becoming one of the Rorschach tests. Tell me your theory and I’ll tell you your politics with some accuracy. There is an increasing probability now that the water on Southport will be so muddied that no one strand of responsibility will emerge, and the whole thing will descend into an incoherent mess, with the government escaping blame in the chaos. We are there already but it will only get worse over time.
There are peripheral debates as to whether we should now restore the death penalty, and whether Rudakubana should have been handed a whole life sentence. Here we should remind ourselves that Rudakubana was still a minor. As a society we take the view that adults are responsible for their actions. When it’s a minor, the adults in his life share some of the blame.
It is left then for Turbulent Times to ask to what extent are the parents an accessory. “Parental responsibility is still a factor in law and if a child (i.e., less than 18 years of age), with a troubled history of violence orders a knife from an online supplier, and the parents calmly accept delivery, there is good reason to expect that the police would be looking carefully into this aspect”. At the very least, the parents must be deported.
What we can say with certainty is that bureaucratising the sale of kitchen utensils will not prevent another knife rampage, just as censorship of social media is not going to quell public anger at what is a series of very familiar, routine failings on the part of the state. We can also say with absolute certainty that this will happen again, and is more likely to happen for as long as our politicians steadfastly refuse to get a grip on immigration. As such, this bitter row is very far from over.
You hit the nail on the head, immigration! Regardless of the motives or the religion, the perpetrators of these atrocities should not have been here in the first place. Anti mass immigration sentiments have been abound amongst the British population for decades and yet none of the political parties take any heed of this, rolling out tripe like "we are a tolerant people" and nonsense about 'British values'. Sooner or later, alas too late in my view as the longer this goes on the less likely we indigenous Brits are going to come out on top, this is going to come to a head and a lot of nastiness, that nobody wanted, and could have been avoided, will occur. Our political class needs holding to account, properly.
The attempt to spin this into a debate about access to knives is risible. This is similar to the dynamic in the US - where whenever a gun masacre takes place mainstream media & politicians focus exclusively on the perpetrator's weapon of choice rather than what drove them to slaughter innocents in the first place.
I suspect the kind of barbarity we see from Rudakabana is at least partly related to long term drug abuse, which serves to lower peoples' natural inhibitions against extreme violence. That then opens up an interesting debate as to why drug abuse is more prevalent in certain ethnic minority communities than society as a whole.
But certainly Reform are barking up the wrong tree trying to frame this as an Islamist atrocity. The short-sightedness of this is that if a similar attack is ever carried out by some lunatic claiming to be a patriotic nationalist (along the lines of Thomas Mair) - Reform won't have much of leg to stand on when the government uses it as an excuse to crack down on 'far-right ideology'.