The monster of Southport – and his enablers

To the end, he was a monster.

On Monday, Axel Rudakubana – the 18-year-old Brit who murdered three young girls, and tried to kill many more, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July – suddenly changed his pleas to guilty.

Today, we found out just how guilty, how depraved, how evil, he is as he was handed down a 52-year minimum sentence at Liverpool Crown Court – for murder, attempted murder, possession of terrorism materials and production of the biological toxin, ricin.

Having at least spared the victims and their families a lengthy trial, Rudakubana offered them a final insult. He had to be ejected from court for disrupting proceedings, screaming that he was unwell and needed medical attention. He killed defenceless kids, then couldn’t stomach facing their families. Utter scum.

He was 17 when he walked into the Hart Space studio in Southport last summer, pulling out his knife as the girls made friendship bracelets. His age at the time of the attack has spared him a formal ‘whole life order’ – which is reserved for the most hellish crimes, provided the perpetrator is over the age of 18. Nevertheless, the judge reassured a reeling public that Rudakubana would likely never be released from prison.

That felt like a welcome reminder that the system can, on occasion, deliver some semblance of justice, common sense and peace of mind, after a trial that exposed one catastrophic state failure after another.

To say that Axel Rudakubana was ‘known to the authorities’ is an understatement. It’s hard to name an authority that he wasn’t known to. The police, social services, mental-health services, counter-extremism services – he was on all of their radars.

Rudakubana was excluded from secondary school after admitting to carrying a knife on at least 10 occasions. He later returned, breaking a pupil’s wrist with a hockey stick. The police first found out about him from Childline, after he called up saying he wanted to kill someone.

He was referred to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme, three times, after teachers and social workers noticed his growing obsession with school shooters, terror attacks and murderous dictators.

As Sky’s Martin Brunt put it, relaying the facts from outside court: ‘This isn’t someone who fell through the net. He was caught in the net… Nothing was done.’

The Southport horror has not been classed as a terror attack itself, given Rudakubana had no political or religious motivation. The through-line of his grotesque online search history seems to have been mass murder – wars, genocides, bombings – rather than any cause. It seems Prevent lost interest in him for the same reason.

We’ve learned not to expect much from the sclerotic British state, but you don’t have to be a hopeless optimist to think that this really shouldn’t have been the end of it; that a teenager who plainly said he wanted to kill, who was marinated in snuff films of various kinds, and who was known to have carried knives, might – just might! – have triggered more robust intervention.

But of course we’ve been here before. Islamist terrorist Ali Harbi Ali was referred to Prevent seven years before he stabbed David Amess MP to death in 2021. Ali was even put on the more advanced Channel counter-terror scheme, and given ‘extensive support’, before his case was abruptly closed. Police, the Amess family claims, never followed Ali up because of an ‘admin error’.

From catching prospective jihadists to detaining the murderously deranged, the authorities appear gripped by wilful naivety and computer-says-no incompetence. Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, had a long and noted history of violence, arrests and refusing to take his meds before he stabbed two students and a caretaker to death in Nottingham in 2023. Jake Davison, Plymouth’s ‘incel shooter’, had recently been given his gun licence back when he shot and killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl, in 2021. The license was taken off Davison following an assault, but returned to him after he did an anger-management course. If God exists, he has a dark sense of humour.

Whenever there is an ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘sensitive’ dimension to an alleged crime or potential perpetrator, officials become even more crippled. A state that allows child-rape gangs to proliferate for fear of stoking ‘community tensions’, or grants asylum to a convicted sex offender before feigning surprise when he acid attacks a refugee woman and her kids, can no longer claim to care about the safety of ordinary people.

Having failed to protect the vulnerable girls of Southport, the British state then held the entire British public in contempt – holding back information to a degree that went above and beyond what is required by our already draconian contempt-of-court laws. We learned about Ali’s brush with Prevent within days of Amess’s murder, whereas we found out about Rudakubana’s this week.

Even after Rudakubana’s guilty plea, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to release the full details about his background, earning a striking rebuke from the Crime Reporters Association. ‘There has been a worrying pattern whereby forces wanting to provide information to the press have been instructed to stay silent’, it said. Police have complained about being ‘gagged’ throughout by an unusually cagey CPS.

After the racist riots that ripped through Southport and many more deprived towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland following the murders – targeting mosques, asylum hotels and ethnic minorities – CPS lawyers probably felt vindicated in their pleb-fearing censorship. But this turns the truth on its head.

The racists, grifters and conspiracy theorists – those who spread inflammatory rumours about the Southport killer being a Muslim small-boats migrant, out of a mix of stupidity, bigotry and a thirst for retweets – are going to talk their putrid shit regardless. Very Online right-wingers are still insisting Rudakubana is an Islamist, refusing to allow the facts to intrude upon their feelings.

They’re also trying to make this all about immigration, gesturing to Rudakubana’s Rwandan heritage, to the Dark Continent, blithely ignoring that he was born and raised in Britain and that white British kids – from James Bulger’s killers to 19-year-old Cameron Finnigan, the neo-Nazi Satanist who was jailed just last week for encouraging young girls to commit suicide online and possessing terror materials – are well represented among Britain’s most depraved and sadistic inmates.

The point is that the information vacuum left by officialdom after Southport gave the bigots an abundance of silence to fill and to exploit. It meant there was no prompt counter to their nonsense. The slow drip of revelations since then – particularly that Rudakubana, among hundreds of other murder-related materials, possessed an academic study of an al-Qaeda training manual – has allowed the bad actors to wail ever-louder about a ‘cover up’ and claim bogus vindication.

Arguably, the summer unrest was itself a symptom of state failure. State multiculturalism has divided communities along ethno-religious lines. The brunt of illegal migration is borne disproportionately by the most impoverished areas in the country. Real concerns are met with silence. This is the seedbed from which a despicable – though mercifully still miniscule – white identitarianism has grown. The feckless political class has become a recruiting sergeant for the racist right.

Even now, in the wake of the most horrific murders England has witnessed in the 21st century, the establishment cannot look its problems in the face. It would rather launch a crusade against social media, or rail against Amazon for selling Rudakubana his knife, than reckon with its own catastrophic failures and the nihilism that is too often being nurtured in our midst.

Axel Rudakubana, the monster of Southport, is now firmly behind bars. But his enablers remain legion.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater