Axel Rudakubana is guilty, and nobody else

Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport massacre in which three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in the town near Liverpool. The crime led to rumours being spread that the attacker was an immigrant, which was a pretext for racist riots in cities across the country. Rudakubana was sentenced to detention “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence, with a minimum ‘tariff’ of 52 years, which means he will not be considered for parole until he is 70. (A juvenile, as he was a few days shy of his 18th birthday at the time of the attack, cannot be sentenced to a whole-life sentence.) Much has been revealed about Rudakubana’s violent past and his obsession with violence, but the same people who cheered on the summer riots last year have still not let go of their belief that Rudakubana was a Muslim, or motivated by “Islamist ideology” (when he was brought up Christian and no evidence exists that he converted), or that the incident has something to do with immigration because his father was a Rwandan refugee in the mid-1990s. The prime minister, meanwhile, has responded with the promise of a public inquiry and that nothing will stand in the way of making sure such a crime cannot happen again; in other words, he will surely find something to ban or some obstacle put in the way of people living their lives to make sure that particular horse cannot bolt again.

It has been reported that Rudakubana was referred to Prevent, the scheme for intercepting and diverting people who have (or appear to have) started on a path which may lead to involvement in terrorism, several times since age 13, when he was expelled from his secondary school after declaring his intention to take a knife to school to attack an alleged bully, and each time declared unsuitable for their intervention because he appeared to be motivated by no particular ideology. It’s no secret that Prevent was first aimed at Muslims, and it’s well-known that Muslim parents fear their children being referred to it on the basis of a political opinion they have expressed in class about something like Palestine. It’s also a fact that right-wing securocrats have poured scorn on the suggestion that anyone but Muslims poses a major threat, dismissing it as wokery or “political correctness gone mad”, despite the declining influence of groups like Al-Qa’ida and then ISIS and the decreasing potency of the actual terrorist attacks inspired by them (stabbings and vehicle rammings rather than shootings and bombings, which suggests the lack of both know-how and access to materials) and the increasing frequency of incidents associated with extreme misogyny and the “Incel” subculture. Prevent had not been allowed to keep itself up to date since the “war on terror” years in which it was set up, thus it had no means of diverting people driven by more straightforward hatred than ideology.

Some of the same people who hyped the “rape gang” controversy out of nowhere two weeks ago have clung to the lies they spun during the riots last summer. Axel Rudakubana is Black, therefore it’s about immigration, as they see no difference between immigrants and their descendants born here (some of whom are of mixed parentage). If his father had not been granted asylum quite legitimately more than ten years before he was born, this atrocity would not have happened; the idiot logic on which so much anti-immigrant policymaking is based. They tell us over and over again that these things happen because we “allow people to immigrate who do not share our values”, regardless of whether the perpetrator was ever able to immigrate or ever had a choice about being born here, let alone where their parents or even grandparents had been born, or whether that hostility was born from the violent racism Black and Asian people suffered for much of the three decades after they began settling here. The simple fact is that school shootings have become a routine fact of life in the USA where guns are readily available and some young people will be living in homes where there are automatic weapons. That is not true in the UK, but everyone is aware of them and when people know that is one way of expressing their anger, the likelihood that someone will do it increases. It is a case of the “genie being out of the bottle” which cannot be shoved back in again.

Some more mainstream figures have been making some equally ridiculous suggestions. On Tuesday, the home secretary Yvette Cooper promised a public inquiry into, among other things, “how Axel Rudakubana was able to murder three girls at dance class despite being on the authorities’ radar” according to the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. The answer is that up until the day of the crime, he had not committed any crime serious enough to merit restricting his access to children; all his violence had been directed at adults or his own schoolmates, not children much younger than himself. We put those sorts of restrictions on known child molesters, not tearaways with morbid obsessions. The government complain that a video of a bishop being stabbed in Sydney last year was still available on Twitter everywhere except Australia; the video would have been copied numerous times making banning every copy of it impossible, and his being able to view it before setting off probably was not the reason he did the murders anyway. The previous government has already legislated onerous requirements for operators of “social media” websites to ensure the safety of teenagers who might use them, resulting in a number of forums either blocking British users or shutting down, as they cannot afford to comply (of course, the major players such as Facebook can and the unscrupulous will not); it has been observed that the government reacts to every such incident by looking for ways to control the Internet rather than to improve the services which might have been able to help Rudakubana well before he committed these murders. That, of course, would cost money.

In her interview with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1 yesterday, the Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch blamed the attack on people who “despite being here from childhood or born here, they’re not integrating into the rest of their society; they hate their country, and they’re being told that everything about the UK is terrible”. Kuenssberg pointed to the Rudakubanas’ involvement in the church and their son’s Christian upbringing and asked Badenoch what her evidence was that the crimes were anything to do with lack of integration; she responded with an irrelevant aside about rape gangs, and by claiming that it was a ‘problem’ that every time ‘we’ try to “have these conversations”, they were shut down by demands for evidence. The BBC noted that the judge who sentenced Rudakubana did not mention his supposed lack of integration. Rather, this was a loner who had developed obsessions and fascinations with violence and such people exist among many other ethnic groups as well. Kuenssberg, despite asking her for evidence, did not make that point at all, nor did she reinforce the point that claims need evidence.

Finally the same people looking to blame immigrants are also casting blame at Axel Rudakabana’s family (with one racist numbskull on Twitter drawing attention to how his innocent brother’s wheelchair was funded by public donations); there is an assumption that they must have known and said nothing over the five supposed years between his expulsion from his first secondary school and the July 2024 murders. They are actually facing a police investigation for failing to report one of the later incidents; what we do know is that his father had intervened to prevent him going off armed in a taxi to carry out another violent attack. If he gave up reporting, it’s because he had given up expecting any results. Peter Hitchens tells us he has a “sneaking suspicion” that Rudakubana’s sudden change of personality at age 13 was due to marijuana use, but offers absolutely no evidence; given that he has been arrested numerous times since age 13, he would have had at least one drug test, so surely the police will know if he had used cannabis or even if he was acquainted with any dealer, since you can’t simply buy the drug at the corner shop.

But ultimately, the Southport massacre was one person’s idea from beginning to end and that person is Axel Rudakubana, and he is now in prison where he is no danger to society. It’s not his family’s fault, it’s not his school’s fault, nor the fault of other Black people, or Rwandans, let alone asylum seekers, Channel boat migrants or Muslims, none of which he was. By the same token, the fault for the August riots lie with none of those people either, nor even with Keir Starmer who followed legal protocol by refusing to divulge more information than was appropriate, but with those who participated, those who spread the misinformation that fed them and those who made excuses. If it’s a time to face up to anything, it’s the destruction of the services which might have guided him away from his fascination with destruction, and maybe kept him off the streets and safe while doing so. If our government want to honour the three girls who were murdered and make it less likely that such an atrocity might ever happen again, they might like to put some of those things back in place and reconfigure Prevent to tackle the growing tendency of extreme online misogyny. To people like Matt Goodwin, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, it’s an opportunity to talk about the same things they’ve been talking about for years, diverting everything onto. Rudukabana was Black, therefore it’s a race issue and by extension an immigration issue rather than an issue of misogyny and our broken education and mental health systems. One can be reacted to with violence; the other will take time and money.

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