VIOLENT ATTACKSSouthport Attacks: Why the U.K. Needs a Unified Approach to All Violent Attacks on the Public

By Barry Richards

The conviction of Axel Rudakubana for the murder of three young girls in Southport has prompted many questions about how the UK handles violence without a clear ideological motive. This case has also shown up the confusion in this area, and made clear the need for a basic reframing of how we understand murderous violence against the public today.

The home secretary may be right to keep Prevent focused on violent Islamist and extreme right-wing terror. Yet there needs to be a complementary but distinct strategy to protect against another Southport-style attacker.

The prime minister, Keir Starmer, has come rather late to his observation that the nature of terrorism has changed. Over four years ago it was becoming clear that the “terrorist” threat was increasingly coming from those with no clear and consistent attachment to any specific ideology, let alone any terrorist organization.

This is borne out in the latest data on referrals to the Prevent counter-terrorism scheme. “Mixed, unstable and unclear” ideologies – when added to school massacre fixations and incel cases – outrank both extreme right-wing and Islamist categories.

Rudakubana had an al-Qaida-linked document in his possession, and had claimed to be a victim of racism. But overall his motive was not at all ideological, but is to be found in his mental ill-health.

All the evidence presents him as a profoundly damaged individual who harbored an overwhelming need to inflict deathly violence, unconnected with any political aim. His choice of young children as victims is probably also of psychological significance.

Thus it may not be quite right to say, as the home secretary Yvette Cooper and others have, that Prevent “failed”. A cluster of agencies do seem collectively to have failed here. But Prevent was not designed to deal with apolitical and apparently random attacks on people unknown to the perpetrator.

What has failed is the conceptual frame underlying the UK’s counter-terrorism approach, which sees terrorism simply as an ideologically-driven response to the world. This understands it as basically different from attacks which are apparently not ideologically-driven, and so are seen as more idiosyncratic and psychological, like school massacres (though these have come to fall within Prevent’s remit).

Internal Drivers of Violence
However, it is also true that many of those who do have conventional terrorist aims are also driven by forces in their internal worlds.