The inconvenient truth about Southport Did Nigel Farage have a point?

When Nigel Farage sensed that something shady was going on in the Government’s handling of the Southport massacre last July, where Axel Rudakubana murdered three young girls at a Taylor-Swift-themed dance class, he was widely rebuked for spreading misinformation that helped stoke the riots that followed. “Was this guy being monitored by the security services?,” he asked in a video posted on X the day after the atrocity. “I wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us,” he added, clearly dissatisfied with the police’s announcement that the attack was not being treated as terror-related.

Neil Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism policing, was particularly critical of Farage, who he accused of giving “succour” to the far-Right, as well as “undermining the police” and “creating conspiracy theories”. Public figures such as Farage, Basu advised, should “keep their mouth shut”. This, by the way, is the same Neil Basu who earlier this month accused Elon Musk of trading in “dangerous rhetoric” about Britain’s grooming gangs; Basu clearly thinks that Musk should keep his mouth shut, too.

Well, Farage couldn’t keep his mouth shut and the more his Left-leaning critics pushed back against him and tried to turn the Southport attack into a story about the far-Right, the more he felt that a cover-up was underway. This is typical now of how Britain treats these crimes, with each political faction talking past the other, asserting a claim to victimhood.

When some three months later the Crown Prosecution Service announced two further charges against Rudakubana, including one under the terrorism act, Farage was positively vociferous. “Perhaps I was right all along,” he said in another video. On Monday, after Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all 16 charges against him and it transpired that he had been referred three times to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalisation scheme, Farage was unequivocal: “I was right all along.” He again referred to a “cover-up” and suggested that had the authorities disclosed “the truth” at the outset the riots of last summer might not have happened. “This is two-tier policing…it is an outrage,” he added with cold indignation.

But was he right all along? And what really is “the truth” that the authorities were withholding? On the question of whether Rudakubana was being monitored by the security services, which was Farage’s original suspicion back in July, he is categorically wrong: he wasn’t being monitored by the security services. Indeed, he wasn’t being monitored by anyone, although he became known to a range of services in 2019 as his mental health declined and he engaged in increasingly erratic and threatening behaviour. This is what prompted the referrals to Prevent.

It is probably important to clarify that Prevent doesn’t collect intelligence on terrorism suspects nor monitor their activities. Instead, it’s a programme intended to foster change in the mindset and behaviour of those who have come to embrace an extremist ideology but not yet committed any offences. And because the Prevent officers who dealt with the Rudakubana referrals were not convinced that he’d been radicalised into an extremist ideology, those referrals went nowhere. Had it been otherwise, and had Rudakubana exhibited support for, say, the Islamic State or some other terrorist group, he would almost certainly have been invited to attend a “Channel” programme, where a mentor would have attempted to challenge his extremist convictions. Even so, it would have been well within Rudakubana’s rights to have refused any such invitation, since Prevent has no statutory powers to compel a referred person to cooperate.

But if there was a cover-up, as Farage claims, he might be disappointed. Because it isn’t the one he thinks it is: Rudakubana was not a terrorist. Which is to say that his motive in carrying out the atrocity in Southport was not political. He had no ideology, no injustices he wanted to avenge or draw to public attention, no burning cause that radicalised him and turned his mind to murder. What he had instead was a deep fascination with murder itself and the dark pornographic culture surrounding it.

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the Southport attack, was first referred to Prevent in 2019 when he was 13: he had been searching for material on US school shootings at his school. A further two referrals were made in 2021, after he had sought out material on Libya and past terrorist attacks, including the 2017 London Bridge atrocity carried out by an Islamic State-inspired cell. According to official sources, this material was not terrorist propaganda, but consisted of news articles. On each occasion Prevent officers were satisfied that Rudakubana’s behaviour, though concerning, did not meet the threshold for intervention by Prevent.

In a statement on Monday evening, Merseyside police described Rudakubana as “a man with [an] unhealthy obsession with extreme violence”, elaborating that “no one ideology” could be deduced from his online interests and behaviour. “And that is why this was not treated as terrorism,” the statement clarified. It also made clear that the police had failed to locate a motive behind the Southport massacre.

Among the 164,394 documents that Merseyside police sifted through on the digital devices Rudakubana had access to, there was an item solemnly titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual”. It is a crime under Section 58 of the 2000 Terrorism Act to possess such a document, since it’s deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. But this doesn’t necessarily demonstrate, much less prove, sympathy for jihadist ideology and the authorities clearly believe that Rudakubana’s possession of the document was a function of his acute and abiding interest in violence. Many on the Right, though, leapt on this as evidence of Islamist hatred.

The authorities, for their part, insist that there has been no cover-up and the statement by Merseyside Police directly challenges this accusation. “We have been accused of purposely withholding information, this is absolutely not the case,” it said. “From day one,” it went on, “we have constantly been in touch with the CPS who have advised us on what information could be released. We have wanted to say much more to show we were being open and transparent, but we have been advised throughout that we couldn’t do so as it would risk justice being delivered.”

It is on this last score, then, that Farage is on stronger ground, for it isn’t entirely clear why the authorities were so slow in disclosing details about who Rudakubana was and whether he was being monitored by the security services, especially given the fervent public interest in the case and the unlikelihood of this information jeopardising the prosecution of Rudakubana. These actions only inflamed suspicions on the Right and consequent righteous anger on the Left.

Farage is also onto something when he invokes the spectre of two-tier policing, for let’s imagine, as I did when I first wrote about the Southport massacre in August, that Rudakubana was not the son of Rwandan immigrants to Britain, but a white teen who had targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Would the police have exercised the same degree of caution in releasing information about the suspect and would they have been so quick to rule out declaring the atrocity a terrorist incident? It seems unlikely, given its fierce commitment to anti-racism and its keenness to publicly demonstrate that commitment.

Let’s also imagine that rumours were rife about the white teen and how his parents were known racists with links to a white-supremacist group. Riots ensue, with black youths at the forefront. Would Starmer and his government rush to condemn the rioters as mindless “thugs”, as they had done in the case of those who rioted after Southport — or would they instead have empathised with their “legitimate anger”, which is how Neil Basu spoke about the grievances of BLM protesters in 2020.

And let’s imagine further that the police subsequently discover a copy of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto on the teen’s computer, a document that sounds the alarm about the ethnic replacement of white Europeans through mass immigration and calls for terrorist violence to put a stop to it. Would the authorities, in announcing the new charge, have the patience to explain that that possession of this document, though contrary to UK terrorism legislation, does not by itself indicate a commitment to far-Right ideology, as they had done when announcing the same charge against Rudakubana? This also seems unlikely, especially given the inevitable accusation of racism that would follow.

Farage is right to point out — and to keep pointing out — the double standard in operation here. But the facts of the Southport massacre are not just inconvenient for the Government, they are for all those who want to believe in a sinister cover-up over jihadist terrorism.

The bigger and more urgent question is how or whether the authorities can stop the next mass-casualty atrocity from happening. Clearly, Prevent, in its current form, is singularly ill-equipped to discharge that task, primarily because its remit is to prevent political radicalisation and not manage the personal miseries of deeply disturbed people. Moreover, even if its scope were widened to include the risk of mentally unwell people who are morbidly fascinated by violence, it’s unclear how this would work in practice, what coercive powers it would be given and how it could work in an effective way.

Of all the inconvenient truths that Southport exposes, perhaps the most troubling one is our powerlessness to stop the recalcitrant few whose violence is as senseless as it is unpredictable. But it is within our power to respond to any horrors that might befall us by refusing to play politics in their aftermath.