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Stop blaming Amazon for the Southport killings

Blaming online retailers for Axel Rudakubana’s heinous crimes is an absurd displacement activity.

Lauren Smith

Topics Politics UK

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It seems the British authorities have finally found the true cause of last year’s horrific Southport killings. Apparently, it’s Amazon, the online retailer.

‘The Amazon killer’, thunders today’s front page of the Sun, alongside the mug shot of Axel Rudakubana, who pleaded guilty this week to stabbing three young girls to death at a dance class last summer. It has since emerged that the knife he used was ordered from Amazon, when he was 17 and therefore underage. Writing in the Sun’s inside pages, UK prime minister Keir Starmer brands Rudakubana the ‘two-click killer’. The Mirror front page quotes home secretary Yvette Cooper, who says it is a ‘total disgrace he was able to buy a knife on Amazon’, and has promised stricter ID checks for buying age-restricted products online.

There are certainly questions to be asked about how an underage teenager was able to evade Amazon’s identity checks. But is this really the most pressing issue that the Southport killings have thrown up?

It’s hard to escape the sense that this sudden focus on Amazon and age verification is a deflection from far more serious state failures. As The Times put it yesterday, there might have been as many as ‘15 missed opportunities’ to have prevented the Southport atrocity. An obviously disturbed Rudakubana came into contact with multiple state agencies, yet the red flags were continually ignored and he repeatedly slipped through the cracks.

Since his guilty plea on Monday, we now know that Rudakubana was referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme three times as a child – once in 2019 and twice in 2021. Despite his obsession with violence, ultimately he was not flagged as a serious threat and no further action was taken. At age 13, he was expelled from the Range High School in Formby because he had carried a knife to school with him. Two months later, he returned to school to attack a pupil with a hockey stick, which resulted in a youth-justice referral order. He admitted to the authorities that he had carried a blade more than 10 times.

On top of that, Lancashire Police visited his house at least five times in response to calls about his disturbing behaviour. They alerted multiple other local agencies that something was awry. Social services were well aware of his violent disposition, but apparently decided that more robust intervention wasn’t necessary.

This is a catalogue of catastrophic state failures. The prime minister says he wants to establish exactly what went wrong to allow these killings to take place. That is welcome. But the government’s sudden determination to pin these horrific crimes on online retailers feels like the mother of all displacement activities.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.

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