Michael Stewart – head of the UK government’s counter-extremism scheme, Prevent – announced he was stepping down last week after a damning review exposed Prevent’s failures in relation to the Southport attacker, Axel Rudakubana. Good. Stewart presided over a truly catastrophic failure, leading to the murder of three young girls. But Prevent’s problems go much deeper than the man at the top.
A so-called learning review, published in February, showed that Prevent had misspelt Rudakubana’s surname in its database, something that may have hindered its ability to assess the threat he posed. We also know that Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021, due to his morbid fascination with knives, terrorist attacks and school shootings. Yet Prevent still closed his case ‘prematurely’, three years before he went on to murder and maim innocents at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
Rudakubana was clearly a ticking timebomb. And Prevent failed in its fundamental task to protect the public. His case was closed because he lacked any coherent terroristic or religious ideology – even though Prevent also caters to would-be killers of this kind.
This is not the first time Prevent, a crucial pillar of the UK’s counter-extremism apparatus, has come in for stinging criticism. William Shawcross’s independent review of Prevent, published in 2023, concluded that the scheme too often ‘bestow[ed] a status of victimhood on all who come into contact with it’. Shawcross argued that it needed to shift focus from ‘safeguarding’ to ‘protecting the public from those inclined to pose a security threat’.
Moreover, there is an increasing threat posed by non-ideological actors, which Prevent is struggling to grasp. The Shawcross review referred to ‘the sharp uptick of “Mixed, Unclear or Unstable” (MUU)’ referrals to Prevent. This often-overlooked category essentially describes a ‘salad bar’ form of extremism, in which different, disparate elements are combined in the mind of a killer. Tracking those with an uncertain, incoherent combination of motivations poses significant challenges for authorities accustomed to dealing with more traditional Islamist or far-right forms of extremism.
Rudakubana seems to fall into the MUU category. He displayed a chilling obsession with acts of terror, genocidal violence and school shootings. He possessed an academic study of an al-Qaeda training manual, material on Nazi Germany and anti-colonialist literature – suggesting the through-line here wasn’t ideology or religion but a revelling in mass violence itself.
The Southport atrocity should be a major wake-up call for our counter-extremism and security forces. It has shown that the Prevent scheme is simply not fit for purpose. Far too many dangerous individuals have fallen through the cracks, with devastating consequences.
Moving forwards, those responsible for mismanaging Prevent cases, especially those that lead to disastrous outcomes like Southport, need to be held to account. The UK’s security architecture also needs to be reconfigured. Powers need to be shifted towards intelligence services and counter-terror policing, and away from public agencies such as state schools and NHS trusts – already-stretched services that have found themselves at the coalface of ‘deradicalisation’ efforts. Crucially, a new strategy for tackling the threat of potential MUU attackers needs developing quickly.
Southport was a dark moment for our nation – all the darker for the fact it could have, and should have, been prevented. These mistakes must never be repeated.
Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.
