February 7 2025 - 1:00pm
When, at the end of last month, Keir Starmer announced a public inquiry into the Southport massacre, he vehemently condemned Axel Rudakubana, who he couldn’t bring himself to name, and promised that he would “not let any institution of the state deflect from their failure”.
He was specifically referring to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalization scheme, to which the killer had been referred three times. “Yet on each of these occasions,” he said, “a judgment was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention. A judgment that was clearly wrong. And which failed those families.”
On Wednesday, the Government published an independent “learning review” into Rudakubana’s contact with Prevent over a 17-month period between 2019 and 2021. The review is long, poorly-written and full of jargon such as “extreme vulnerability” (read: susceptibility to extremism). But the overall narrative endorses Starmer’s conviction that Prevent failed badly.
The review shines a vivid light on Rudakubana’s case management and gives a detailed picture of why he was referred. It also tells us quite a bit about his thoughts, his interests, and his “issues”. Notes highlight his disruptive behavior in class, including asking an art teacher if “we have a picture of a severed head”. One note in particular stands out: “AMR [Rudakubana] has been researching school shootings, has been talking about stabbing people and that the terrorist attack on the MEN [the 2017 Manchester bombing] was a good thing.”
What the review also makes vividly clear is that he was at no point radicalized, and that he had no ideology other than a sadistic interest in violence — and this was despite the best efforts of Prevent police officers to find one. According to one note from 2020: “AMR did not display any extremist views or ideology.” Many other notes similarly record the absence of ideology throughout his contact with Prevent.
What the Southport killer did have, however, was an abundance of grievances, but these were personal, not political, and were aimed at various schoolmates and teachers. Indeed, he saw himself not as an aggressor but as a victim. “He felt he was being persecuted by his teachers who were trying to get him into trouble,” says one note. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Rudakubana was not radicalized, the review concludes that Prevent still nevertheless failed in managing his risk and that he should have been prioritized for Channel, a voluntary program intended to foster ideological change in the thinking of extremists.
The entire argument that sustains this conclusion rests on the concept of vulnerability — that because Rudakubana had autism and had been bullied he was somehow highly susceptible to being “drawn into terrorism”. According to this argument, it doesn’t matter that he had no ideology; what mattered instead was that, because of his “extreme vulnerability”, as the review puts it, he theoretically could have been radicalized and could have gone on to commit an act of terrorism. “Static vulnerabilities can make an individual highly susceptible [to violent extremism],” the review observes, suggesting that the Prevent officers were so preoccupied with finding ideology that they missed his “vulnerability”.
But here’s the problem: there just isn’t any solid evidence to show that “vulnerability” is a driver, much less a predictor, of violent extremism. This is further compounded by the vagueness with which the Prevent scheme identifies vulnerabilities, which range from “a need to dominate and control others” to “being at a transitional time of life”. Nor is there a shred of evidence to support the review’s assumption that a Channel intervention would have diverted Rudakubana from his path toward terrible violence.
The other problem with the review is that it gives support to the idea, currently afoot within the Government, of widening the remit of Prevent to include behaviors that are outwardly disturbing — watching gore, say, or idolizing Andrew Tate — but which have little relation to violent extremism or terrorism.
This idea is bad not just because it risks stigmatizing a lot of troubled people who are not extremists, but also because adding countless misfits and malcontents to Prevent’s already overburdened caseloads is likely to create further confusion and drift in a scheme that is already in disarray.
