What could have been done to prevent the appalling Southport murders, asks Michael Lavalette 

Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 52 years on Thursday. He couldn’t be given a full-life term because he wasn’t eighteen at the point he made the attack, but this detail is unlikely to matter in the long term. He will be seventy before he can be considered for parole, and it’s unlikely he will ever be released.

Rudakubana launched a ferocious attack on a Taylor Swift themed event in the north-west town of Southport on 29 July last year. He murdered three young girls, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Stancombe and Bebe King and was charged with the attempted murder of eight others.

Details of the brutality of the attack were revealed in court and were truly shocking. Rudakubana had stabbed victims several times and with such force that bones were broken. Many survivors have been left deeply traumatised and, in Southport itself, the events continue to cast a long shadow over the town.

At the time of the attack, a range of far-right ‘influencers’ and far-right activists took to social media to claim that a Muslim refugee had initiated an ‘Islamist’ attack to kill young children. Such claims provoked an outburst of racist riots starting in Southport itself and quickly spreading across the country. In the attacks, mosques were targeted, as were hostels and hotels where refugees were placed.

Yet none of the far-right claims were true. Rudakubana was born in Cardiff to a Christian family. He was neither a refugee nor a Muslim. And his motivation was neither political nor religious. Rudakubana’s horrendous attack on the young girls in Southport was exploited by the far right to foster and generate division and hate.

Whilst it is now absolutely clear that there was no religious or political motivation behind the horrific attack, what we do know is that Rudakubana was a deeply disturbed young man fascinated by violence. He spent hours each day online playing violent games, watching violent videos and soaking up stories of war, violence and school shootings in the states.

What went wrong?

Rudakubana was a young man who struggled with autism and isolation during his teenage years. There were numerous points at which psychiatric and social-work intervention could have been initiated, but these opportunities were missed. He had been picked up by police on two occasions for carrying a knife; the police response was to tell his mum to ‘keep knifes out of his reach’!

He reportedly took a knife to school on at least ten occasions, leading to his permanent exclusion. He made contact with Childline, informing them he wanted to kill someone. There was a referral to the local Child Safeguarding Board, who identified him as a vulnerable young person, but no significant support was put in place.

His parents were deeply worried about his fascination with knives. He had been violent at home and his parents had specifically asked for help as they were struggling with his behaviour.

The full Inquiry that has now been launched will no doubt look at these missed ‘opportunities’, but it is surely not inappropriate to note that child social care, social work and psychiatric services have been under brutal financial limitations over the last decade; that educational, social work and social-care workers are stretched with huge caseloads, and that resources have been squeezed out of public services. In circumstances like these, a disturbed child from a ‘relatively secure home’ is unlikely to get much support and the family will be abandoned to deal with the consequences on their own.

The only state intervention of note was that Rudakubana was referred to Prevent, but Rudakubana was not deemed a threat under the terms of Prevent. Prevent was initially set up by Tony Blair’s government in the early part of this century. It has been heavily criticised as a state strategy to target young Muslims on a range of spurious grounds. For example, open support for Palestinian resistance during the present genocide could provoke a referral – and certainly many schools have used the threat of a Prevent referral to clamp down on any signs of support for Palestinian rights over the last sixteen months. But in the case of Rudakubana, Prevent didn’t identify him as a concern because he had no political or religious agenda. And that is perhaps another indicator that Prevent isn’t fit for any purpose.

Starmer and some Labour politicians are now suggesting that the ‘solution’ to the Prevent failure is to expand the definition of ‘terrorism’ to include attacks like the one launched by Rudakubana. There is no doubt that the Southport attack was terrifying, but ‘terrorism’ has a specific definition that relates to the political or religious aims of the act. Rudakubana, in these terms, wasn’t a terrorist. His act had far more in common with the (unfortunately regular) attacks on schools and universities that occur in the US. And in this regard, we really do need to ask what it is about our society that glorifies guns, knives and violence, leading some young men to engage in the most brutal acts of murder against groups of young children and young people in this way.