Flurry of activity
And so on Monday night and Tuesday morning, just hours after Rudakubana’s guilty plea, came a flurry of government activity.
In an early morning Downing Street press conference framed by Union Jacks, Starmer promised a probing public inquiry into the state’s handling of the case, vowing not to “let any institution of the state deflect from their failure, failure which in this case, frankly, leaps off the page.”
In a detail disclosed since Rudakubana’s conviction, the prime minister pointed out that the killer had been referred three times to the British government’s de-radicalization Prevent program, only for it to be deemed that “he did not meet the threshold for intervention, a judgment that was clearly wrong and which failed those families.”
Known for a generally robotic delivery style, the prime minister spoke emotively about the state of mind of British parents as news of the attack broke last year. “It could have been anywhere, it could have been our children, but it was Southport,” he said. “It was Bebe, six years old. Elsie, seven. Alice, nine.”
And Starmer tried to challenge the status quo, too. He acknowledged public confusion about why the murders had not been deemed a terror case under Britain’s existing definition, and saying that, in a world where the U.K. faces a “a new threat” from “loners, misfits” and “young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online,” he had ordered a review of Britain’s terror laws.
“We can’t have a national security system that fails to tackle people who are a danger to our values, our security, our children, we have to be ready to face every threat,” he said.