The Southport killings: False comfort is no comfort at all

Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, and Bebe King (Merseyside Police)

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Today I want to look at a hard but necessary question: what happens when there are no constructive policy responses to a horrific crime? Not just no easy answers but no answers at all, and all we are left with is modern echoes of the old Biblical lament

“A voice was heard in Ramah/ Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning/ Rachel weeping for her children/ Refusing to be comforted/ Because they are no more.”

Matthew 2:18

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The UK has just witnessed one of the worst trials of my lifetime. It was over in a day. Axel Rudakubana, now 18, pleaded guilty to the murder of three girls – Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine –and the attempted murder of eight other children, and two adults who tried to save them.

He’s only 18 himself (17 at the time of the crime) and received a minimum sentence of 51 years. The trial judge added, “I consider at this time it’s likely he will never be released and will be in custody for all his life”.

The case has had consequences far beyond the grief Rudakubana brought to the families of the dead and the trauma he inflicted on the survivors.

News of the murders in July provoked race riots and attacks on asylum seekers across England. They were legitimised by the fake news of Elon Musk – the first time the world’s richest man had interfered in the UK’s internal affairs. To the mobs on the streets, migrants and Muslims were somehow collectively responsible for a psychopathic boy – who was born and raised in the UK by parents who desperately tried to control him.

The rioters committed a kind of sacrilege as they turned the corpses of the slain girls into weapons for a political battle.

They were hardly alone in that. Nigel Farage claimed the state was guilty of "the most appalling cover-up I think I've ever seen" because the police did not instantly reveal that Rudakubana had accessed an al Qaeda manual on the Web.

The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch spent hardly any time commiserating with the families of the dead before attacking Keir Starmer for failing to safeguard society from violent ideologies. The Starmer government itself scrambled to reform the monitoring system so that it could identify individuals “obsessed with school massacres” and “Islamist extremism” in future.

They are likely to be mere gestures for a reason that offers the smallest crumb of comfort in these grim days.

It is highly improbable that the state will ever know how to recognise and stop criminals like Axel Rudakubana in advance because they are incredibly rare.

Before I go any further, I need to acknowledge that although the attempts to punish innocent Muslims and asylum seekers were deeply sinister, the wider anger and demands for action were not.

The details of Rudakubana’s crimes were so horrible that many reporters self-censored. But what they told us was bad enough.