Axel Rudakubana should never have been free to kill

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.