Cooper announces Southport public inquiry

Yvette Cooper has this evening announced that the government will be setting up a public inquiry looking for ‘answers’ on how the Southport attack could have taken place, along with reforms to the Prevent programme. This comes after Axel Rudakubana changed his plea to guilty in his trial for murder and attempted murder. In fact, Cooper has revealed that the government had already commissioned work investigating the failures that allowed the attacker to become so dangerous, but had been unable to publicise it due to the active court proceedings. The Home Secretary’s statement followed Keir Starmer’s promise to ‘leave no stone unturned’ in the pursuit of answers, and includes a list of what the government is now trying to find out, and how. 

The reason Starmer made that promise, and the reason Cooper explained in her statement that the government had been ‘constrained in what we were able to say’ during the prosecution, is that an element in the violent unrest over the summer was an accusation that the government was in some way covering up what it knew about the attacker.