Britain faces a new terrorism threat from "extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom", Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said, following the guilty plea by a teenager who murdered three girls in a knife rampage that sparked riots.
Mr Starmer highlighted systematic failures over the handling of Axel Rudakubana, who had been referred to the government's anti-extremism Prevent scheme three times between 2019 and 2021 over concerns about his obsession with violence, but was never recommended for further intervention. The Prime Minister said the failure of state institutions “frankly leaps off the page”.
Experts have also told The National that much of the government's approach to de-radicalisation in its Prevent programme needs to rapidly change to deal with the rise of the new extremism.
Hinting at laws to tackle a "tidal wave of violence" on the internet, Mr Starmer said there were tougher rules for movies in cinemas than for material freely available online.
Rudakubana, 18, who was born in Wales to Rwandan parents, admitted murder before his trial was due to start on Monday. He also pleaded guilty to 10 charges of attempted murder and possessing the poison ricin and a terrorist manual. He will be sentenced on Thursday.
His guilty pleas prompted the government to announce a public inquiry into the events leading up to the killings in the north-west town of Southport on July 29 last year.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament that the government would bring in new laws to protect children using the internet but that “companies should take responsibility before then”.
She would contact big tech to remove “dangerous material” that Rudakubana had accessed. “Companies should not be profiting from hosting content that puts children's lives at risk,” she added.
Getting worse
The threat from online radicalised individuals is going to get worse, said Dr Antonio Giustozzi of the Rusi think tank, therefore rapid action is required in what has become a “global debate”.
“We have this entire new generation of people socialised essentially on social media, online gaming all the time,” Dr Giustozzi said. “It's not surprising that within this category of millions of people some might pick up the vulnerable who become easy to exploit.”
While there is a threat to freedom of speech, young people need to have a more critical awareness of media they consumed, he said.
Terrorism has changed
Mr Starmer said the Southport murders last summer showed terrorism has changed and he will alter the law if necessary to tackle the “new and dangerous” threat.
"The blunt truth here is that this case is a sign Britain now faces a new threat," he added. "Terrorism has changed. In the past, the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent, groups like Al Qaeda.
"That threat, of course, remains but now, alongside that, we also see acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake."
He added that the law needs to change rapidly to recognise the new threats alongside a review of Britain's "entire counter-extremist system to make sure we have what we need to defeat it". He warned that with "just a few clicks, people can watch video after horrific video" that sometimes are never removed. "That cannot be right," he said.
Reform Prevent
A law change is “long overdue”, as well as reforms at Prevent, which is “underfunded and likely out of date”, said Gareth Westwood, of the Sibylline intelligence company. Both the law and the organisation have to be “brought into the 21st century”.
Prevent is too focused on people with extreme ideologies, rather than those “obsessed by violence”, said Jonathan Hall, the UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Two decades ago the threat was “Islamist terrorism coming from Al Qaeda” with preachers and a radicalising ideology that could be targeted usually with de-radicalisation.
“But we’re living in a different world now, which is the internet world, where people don’t go to individuals, they’re not part of groups,” he said. “They just become obsessed by violence." He used the example of school massacre-fixated individuals in America who were “really, really dangerous”.
The Prevent system was not designed for those individuals so the inquiry need to look at “how do you pick up these people”.
Laws not agile
Mr Westwood said it was vital to allow the security services and police to prosecute terrorism without having to prove allegiance to specific groups, such as religious extremists like ISIS.
“The security services have been knocking on this door because the burden of proof under current counter-terrorism laws is high and not agile enough to deal with these folks who are increasingly radicalised, not just being sent videos by Al Qaeda but computer games, forums and substantial disinformation,” he said.
Another method of tackling online incitement could be through large-scale media resilience training for the public, said Dr Giustozzi. “We need to get people more aware of the risk of social media as many are naive about what they find there.”
Ms Cooper said she has ordered a “thorough review” of Rudakubana’s referrals to the Prevent anti-terror programme “to identify what changes are needed to make sure serious cases are not missed”. There are "grave questions" about how a network of government agencies failed to identify and act on the risks, she said.
"There were so many signs of how dangerous he had become, yet the action against him was far too weak. So, families need the truth about why the system failed to tackle his violence for so many years."
