by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Axel Rudakubana’s massacre of girls in Southport was aided by the staggering ineptitude of state agencies.
Now we know: the Southport massacre was an atrocity foretold. That obscene slaughter of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in July 2024 was, in the words of the families’ lawyer, ‘not only predictable’ but ‘preventable’. The moral failures of the killer’s own parents, alongside the institutional failures of the British state, helped to sow the foul seed of that act of evil. This is now a story not only of one young man’s barbarism but of the murderous incompetence of the state itself.
The first report of the Southport Inquiry has been published and it is damning indeed. Axel Rudakubana’s frenzied slaying of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King, and his severe injuring of eight other children and two adults, could and should have been prevented, the report says. If his parents and Britain’s protective agencies had done their ‘moral duty’, the toxic threat he posed might have been neutered, and the precious lives of those girls saved.
The 760-page report, the product of nine weeks of inquiry, does not hold back. It lambasts Rudakubana’s parents for withholding information about their son’s purchase of lethal knives and his attempts to make the toxin, ricin. It says they knew he had tried to leave the house the week before the Southport massacre to launch some kind of attack at his old school. Most damningly of all, the report says his parents knew there was ‘empty knife packaging’ in the house on the day Axel took a taxi to Southport, but they failed to inform police. If they had made state agencies aware of their true knowledge of their son’s ominous behaviour, he would ‘undoubtedly have been taken into care or held in custody’, the report says.
They must bear ‘considerable blame’ for what occurred, it decrees. Worse, these moral failures in the home were then compounded by the grotesque failures of the institutions of society. The ‘sheer number of missed opportunities’ to clock Rudakubana’s murderous menace – and do something about it – was ‘striking’, the inquiry said. Body after body seemed almost blasé about this strange young man who was feverishly obsessed with violence and in the grip of demented fantasies about causing catastrophic harm. Their staggering ineptitude essentially aided his atrocity.