Delayed revelations only made Southport worse

Nobody excels at finding a hornets’ nest and kicking it quite like Keir Starmer. Learning that the PM is devoid of political instinct or even the most basic room reading ability has been one of the odder aspects of having “the grown ups back in charge”.

Smearing those demanding an investigation into grooming gangs as jumping on “a far-Right bandwagon’ was a particular high – or rather, low – light. Yesterday’s statement about the Southport attacks proved another. What the PM clearly considered an exercise in clarity in fact provoked as many questions as it answered.

In analysing the motivation behind Axel Rudakubana’s unspeakable massacre of three little girls, the PM cited social fragmentation, truancy and online harms. We regulate cinemas, he argued, so why is there a free-for-all on the internet?

Judging by these remarks, a social media crackdown now looks inevitable. The availability of violent material online, though perhaps a factor, feels like more comfortable intellectual terrain for politicians than questions about immigration and assimilation. It cannot be allowed to supersede other vital conversations.

The PM and his colleagues stress the contempt of court angle; arguing that they couldn’t divulge sensitive information earlier lest it had prevented a fair trial taking place. Indeed, Starmer claimed he “would never be forgiven” for divulging information to the public at the time.

But this goes against the view of his own independent terror investigator Jonathan Hall, who has argued that an “information vacuum” contributed to the riots. The public learnt the facts when Rudakubana was charged in October, disclosures which evidently did not endanger later trials. Is “contempt of court” proving an excessively capacious shield to hide behind?

ITV reporter Paul Brand pointed out that the PM could have made public some of what he knew about Rudakubana before any charges were made; a question the PM ducked with legalistic waffle and, inevitably, a call for further online regulation.

Journalists and politicians are, rightly, cautious about pre-trial publicity. Yet we have seen examples on the flipside verging on active misinformation, such as characterising Rudakubana as a Welsh Christian when this was evidently not the full story, or the widespread use of the angelic choirboy photo instead of a more recent snapshot.

On July 30, the day after the murders, Merseyside Police said that the incident was “not currently being treated as terror-related”; a line which the PM, ministers and officials maintained for months. On July 31, Angela Rayner described speculation that the attack was terror-related and that details were being kept from the public as “fake news” and “conspiracy theories”. Yet in yesterday’s statement Starmer said that he “knew the details as they were emerging”. This not only challenges government avowals at the time, but poses its own questions about contempt of court.

After all, saying “this is not a terrorist attack” clearly prejudices prosecutors who seek to argue the opposite, since defence counsels can rightly say “well the PM said it wasn’t”.

Information was released and denials made which could have prejudiced a trial. Why, then, does official concern only ever go in one direction? The PM and his colleagues notably had no such qualms about labelling scores of people “far-Right” and “thugs” long before their cases reached court. Do they really think the public will be oblivious to these discrepancies?

As I wrote at the time, there is never any excuse for thuggery. Anyone who vandalises property or commits violence deserves jail time. The wider crackdown on memes and merely offensive posts is a different matter, however, suggesting that the state is rather more obsessed about “backlash” than the issues which may have triggered it. This isn’t just wrongheaded, it risks further undermining of the social contract.

Many will contrast yesterday’s snappy announcement of an inquiry, with the delay and obfuscation accompanying calls for a full national inquiry into the child-rape gangs; including, crucially, the power to compel witnesses to appear, which small local inquiries will not have.

This could cause grief not just to previous governments and public officials but members of Starmer’s own party, such as Shaun Davies MP who, as leader of Telford and Wrekin council, initially sought to block a local inquiry into child sexual exploitation. In some cases people jailed following the riots received longer sentences for Facebook posts than were imposed on grooming gang members for child rape.

The PM also gave no explanation for why the terror charges, including details of the Al-Qaeda bomb manual and ricin production, were brought so long after the incident. Last November, it was reported that charges had been delayed by two weeks over fears of public disorder; so as not to clash with a potential firearms officers’ strike in the wake of the Chris Kaba affair. This in itself indicates an alarming level of state interference in prosecutorial decisions. We already know about significant massaging of the narrative when politically expedient; and there is doubtless more that never reaches the public domain.

In their concern about “community cohesion”, the worrying conclusion is that the authorities spun a narrative which neither revealed what actually happened nor consistently stuck to maintaining silence and waiting to see what came out in court. Small wonder that many are losing faith in a system which often seems better at policing narratives than policing the streets.