Coulter’s Law, named after its originator, the right-wing polemicist Ann Coulter, holds that the longer it takes the authorities or the news media to identify the suspect in a terrorist attack or other notorious incident the less likely that suspect is to be white. Allow me to propose a British corollary to this rule: the law of displaced culpability. Where the identity or motivation of the suspect in a major crime requires the British state to confront shortcomings in its established doctrines, such as multiculturalism, untrammelled immigration or autonomy-maximising liberalism, it will displace culpability onto another factor, one that is secondary or even irrelevant to the crime but which the authorities feel more comfortable talking about. In the case of Axel Rudakubana, it seems that Amazon is the preferred culprit.
Rudakubana, a Welshman, has pleaded guilty to the murders of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice da Silva Aguiar at a Southport dance class in July 2024. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said it is a ‘disgrace’ that Rudakubana, then 17, was able to buy a knife via Amazon despite a prior conviction for violence. Predictably, the British media has dutifully adopted Whitehall’s framing, with the pro-government Daily Mirror splashing on ‘Total disgrace he was able to buy knife on Amazon’ and the Sun using its front page to brand Rudakubana ‘the Amazon killer’. Ministers are proposing a change in the law that will require anyone purchasing a bladed item from Amazon to record a live video and a copy of their passport to prove their age. Law of displaced culpability: engaged.
The law of displaced culpability protects the governing class and its cherished beliefs from a violent encounter with reality.
Politicians and the papers are more comfortable talking about online retail regulations than they would be about why Rudakubana was at liberty to carry out the murders. Rudakubana – who had produced ricin, who was in possession of an Al-Qaeda training manual; who had been reported to Prevent three times; who had been excluded after taking a knife to school in October 2019; who returned to the school and attacked a child with a hockey stick two months later; who had admitted to carrying a knife more than ten times; who had received five visits to his home from Lancashire Constabulary between October 2019 and May 2022; who had been the subject of five vulnerable child referrals to the ‘Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub’; who was deemed by children’s social care to require support from the ‘Early Help’ intervention service; who had been referred to the ‘youth justice service’; whose father had reportedly stopped him returning to his former school one week before the massacre – was a walking red flag that the authorities somehow managed, or chose, to ignore.
Why is that? In any other circumstances, bearing in mind the Al-Qaeda manual, it would be reasonable to ask whether he was missed because he espoused the wrong kind of extremism. The Shawcross Review found that Prevent ‘takes an expansive approach to the extreme right-wing’ but, in the case of Islamism, the programme ‘tends to take a much narrower approach centred around proscribed organisations, ignoring the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism’. But, as we know, the authorities don’t consider Rudakubana an Islamist because his crimes were not committed to advance that ideology but rather, it is said, to satisfy his fascination with extreme violence in itself. Might it be that he did not match the photofit of a lone-wolf killer that police and the counter-extremism industry have in their heads: angry white male with far-right leanings and a copy of Anders Breivik’s manifesto? Maybe, but the real failing here probably has more to do with policy than political correctness.
Over time, the state has developed an aversion to the long-term confinement of the severely mentally ill, even if the people in question display habitual criminal or anti-social behaviour. For several generations now, it has been considered ‘best practice’ that such individuals be managed within the community rather than treated in a custodial setting. The presumption against placing the insane in secure hospitals was born of revulsion towards over-institutionalisation in the past and the cruelties it allowed to flourish, but noble though the reformers’ intentions were they have contributed to dangerous levels of under-institutionalisation. Candidly, Axel Rudakubana should never have been at liberty to murder because he should have been indefinitely detained in a secure facility.
However, the state is not prepared to confront that question, and so it is displacing the blame to the easier and more populist culprit of internet knife purchases. We have seen this kind of elite denialism before. Following the murder of Sir David Amess, and despite his killer being an Islamist motivated by Amess’s vote for air strikes in Syria and membership of Conservative Friends of Israel, we were treated to the grotesque spectacle of the murdered MP’s colleagues convening in the Commons to blame and urge tighter regulation of social media, despite there being no evident connection between these platforms and Amess’s killing.
Ditto the official response to the Manchester Arena bombing, which encouraged us not to look back in anger and certainly not to look into why the bomber’s parents had been granted asylum in the UK when his father had been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The same went for media coverage of the 2020 Reading Park terrorist, Khairi Saadallah. Two days after Saadallah stabbed three people to death while shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, the Guardianinformed its readers that the killer had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the Libyan civil war. In fact, the psychiatrists who examined him for his murder trial found no signs of mental illness, but the civil war did have an impact on him: he fought in it on behalf of Ansar al-Sharia, an Al-Qaeda-aligned militia. Mental health was the chosen frame because the alternative was asking how Saadallah came to be granted asylum in the UK after informing the Home Office that he had been part of a militant Islamist group. After informing the Home Office.
The law of displaced culpability is a psychic defence mechanism that protects the liberal governing class and its cherished beliefs from a violent encounter with reality. Amazon has questions to answer over how a 17-year-old was able to purchase a knife from its website, but while concerning this is ultimately a secondary matter. Amazon knife sales didn’t kill those little girls in Southport, a dangerous individual who should not have been at liberty killed them. Knives are not hard to come by. Rudakubana was aided and abetted not by online retail practices, but by decades of well-meaning liberal policy that has preferred to manage risks in the community rather than concede that mentally ill people who habitually engage in violent or aggressive behaviour should be separated from the rest of us indefinitely.
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