The list of painful questions left behind for a wounded Britain by the trauma of the Southport stabbings is a long one. It starts with asking why Axel Rudakubana, jailed last week with a 52-year minimum prison sentence, did it. But that soon segues into wider issues of statecraft and policy. In particular, it asks whether there are measures we could now take that might, just possibly, contribute to stopping some future Rudakubana from doing the same thing.
Here the issues become more substantive. Problems of family support and parenting. The too ready availability of knives. The influence of social media. The impact of poverty. The role of schools and of exclusions. The place of policing. The repercussion of imprisonment. The effectiveness of youth services. The relevance, if any, of ideology. All these, and more. And they are merely subject headings, the doors to more detailed responses.
After the shock has been articulated, this is where politics and government would most usefully now lead the conversation. Yet, with some exceptions, this is not the debate that politics and government have yet provided. This is a public deficit for which all parties bear a share of responsibility. But it risks a disturbing consequence. It may allow the lessons of Southport to slip slowly and quietly into the British state’s too-difficult box.
For Labour, as the party of government, the policy response thus far has inevitably been procedural. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has set up a public inquiry into Southport, has appointed David Anderson to review the Prevent anti-terrorism programme, has asked Jonathan Hall KC to report on possible amendments to terrorism law, has promised further restrictions on knife sales, and has opened the door to a loosening of contempt of court law.
All this is predictably thorough, even exemplary. Cooper is proving to be one of Labour’s more sure-footed ministers. But hers is largely a defensive strategy. Inevitably, any changes are all in the future, perhaps distantly so. More significantly, everything Cooper says is overshadowed by the government’s own shackles on public expenditure. So Cooper cannot get on the front foot, and Labour backbenchers are not in the business of making her life difficult by raising thorny issues.
Remarkably, neither are the Conservatives. That’s partly because their 14 years in government bequeathed the Britain into which Southport erupted, as well as bequeathing the British state that was unable to intervene to prevent it. But it is also because the Tories are perpetually looking over their shoulders at Reform. As a result, they too often say what they assume Reform would say, rather than focusing on serious statecraft or policy.
In the House of Commons on Monday, there was a prime example of the way parts of the Tory opposition have become sidetracked from the main issues. On Sunday, the centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange published a version of a leaked Home Office internal paper on possible changes to the legal definition of extremism, including misogyny and online disinformation. The paper was not government policy. Yet on Monday, front- and backbench Conservatives queued up to denounce it for nearly an hour as though it was.
It all made for high-octane Commons indignation about alleged Labour wokery. But it was not in any way a serious attempt to deal with some of the desperately serious and difficult issues raised by Southport, let alone to bring Britain closer to finding a solution. As such, unfortunately, Monday’s exchanges were all too representative of parliament’s response thus far.
No government and no society can wholly prevent a Southport. There is no network of surveillance or preventive intervention that would be both tolerable and effective. Yet there are serious policy options all the same. Some of these were the subject of Wednesday’s BBC One documentary by Idris Elba on knife crime. Indeed, Elba’s programme would be an infinitely better starting point for serious policymakers than anything that was being said in the Commons this week.
There were no culture wars or conspiracy theories in Elba’s documentary, and very little false reassurance either. Elba focused instead on facts. Knife crime has doubled in a decade. There are an average of four knifings a week. Two-thirds of perpetrators are white. Most knives are specialist weapons, not kitchen tools, often bought online, as in Rudakubana’s case.
But these are not irresistible trends, about which nothing can be done. Elba’s documentary had ideas about what could be done. Social media glorifies knives – restrict it. Prison is expensive and sometimes counterproductive – spend the money on mentor programmes, which, as a police officer in Coventry argued, “definitely work”. School exclusions – the Rudakubana example again – increase the chances of reoffending. Restore youth services budgets after years of starvation.
Central though knife crime is to any attempt at a policy response to Southport, other things matter too. The Prevent programme is a mess. It should not be broadened but narrowed, while specialist programmes should focus on the people Keir Starmer has dubbed “loners” and “misfits”. Government transparency and clearer use of language will not eliminate the influence of conspiracy theories and political charlatans, but it will do something to counter them, and it may increase trust.
The trouble with politics, one Tory MP observed to me this week, is that it fastens on to the points of disagreement. As Elba’s documentary shows, this is not where the public is at all. The public gets that there is an awful problem, and a lot of fine people are doing what they can to solve it. It is time that politics and government caught up.
