Why wasn’t the Southport killer stopped?

Now that the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been sentenced for his horrific crimes, we can try to understand how he was free to kill, and what can be done to stop crimes like this in the future. Between 2019 and 2021, this young man was referred three times to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme. On each occasion they took no further action.

Yesterday the government released a redacted version of the ‘learning review’ conducted by Prevent, carried out in the wake of Rudakubana’s attack. It’s a limited piece of work, and far from the full public inquiry we need. The reviewer wasn’t able to interview anyone involved, so limited their investigation to information stored on Prevent’s database. As is often the way with official documents, it’s heavy going, but there are some disturbing details within it, which point to serious failures and incompetence.

We read that Rudakubana was first referred to Prevent, aged 13, in December 2019.