Keir Starmer warned the country that there is a “new threat” of terrorism in the UK this morning.
It comes after Axel Rudakubana admitted murdering three little girls in Southport last year in a knife attack while they were attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.
The 18-year-old pleaded guilty on Monday, while also admitting to other 10 attempted murders, producing ricin, and possessing a terrorist document.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper announced a public inquiry into the horrendous case on Monday night, promising to “leave no stone unturned” after the state “failed in its ultimate duty to protect these young girls.”
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference on Tuesday, the prime minister promised this case would be “a line in the sand”, and change would follow.
He warned: “This case was a sign that Britain now faces a new threat. Terrorism has changed. In the past, the predominant threat was highly organised groups with clear political intent, groups like Al Qaeda.
“That threat, of course, remains. But now of course we also see acts of extreme violence perpetuated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online desperate for notoriety.
“Sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.”
He admitted that some people like this may be “harder to spot”, but that is not acceptable.
“If the law needs to change to recognise this new and dangerous threat, then we will change it. And quickly. And we will also review our entire counter-extremist system, to make sure we have what we need to defeat it,” he continued.
He said that Sir David Anderson, the new Independent Prevent Commissioner, is already working to examine the UK’s anti-radicalisation programme to “hold this system to account”.
Rudakubana had been referred to Prevent three times prior to the stabbings.
Starmer also slammed the extent of material available online – while also dismissing claims that funding cuts or immigration were solely to blame for such acts.
Hinting that it was a wider social issue, the PM added that he has a “growing sense” that “the set of unwritten rules that hold a nation together have in recent years been ripped apart.”
The PM continued: “Children who have stopped going to school since the pandemic, young people who opted out of work or education, more and more people retreating into parallel lives – whether through failures of integration or just a country slowly turning away from itself – wounds that politics, for all that it may have contributed, must try to heal.”
Asked by the media if he thinks the Southport stabbings count as a “terrorist attack” and if the public should fear similar acts in the future, he said he thought the incident was an act of “extreme violence clearly intended to terrorise”.
The PM added that it seems different to past threats which come from organised acts of terrorism.
“It doesn’t fit as well in our frameworks,” he said. “That has to be addressed.
“I do think it’s new... It’s not an isolated, ghastly example.”