There has been a failure here

Sometimes, even the dishonest speak the truth

I tried and I failed, and I’m tired and weary.

-Charlie Rich

I do not like to use this Substack to post about breaking news or to comment on events as they unfold. But yesterday morning’s news conference - billed as an ‘Address to the Nation’ - by Sir Keir Starmer has to be an exception, because of its genuinely extraordinary content.

First, a bit of context for foreign readers. As you are probably aware, on 29th July 2024, a boy just shy of his 18th birthday went on a knife-wielding rampage at a summer Taylor Swift-themed event for kids in the town of Southport, killing three little girls. This sparked days of civil disturbances across the country, chiefly targeted at mosques and ‘asylum-seeker hotels’, partly driven by rumours that the attack had been carried out by an Islamist terrorist and/or asylum-seeker.

In that initial period, the British regime does what it now customarily does in such situations by insisting that the attack was ‘not terrorism related’, and allowing only a tiny bit of information to trickle out about the perpetrator - that he was ‘Welsh’ and a ‘quiet choirboy’; his name was not made public. Everybody sensed that there was something fishy about this (it is interesting how official lies or half-truths seem to be accompanied by a veneer of falsity that one can almost smell), and sure enough we later learned that although it was strictly true that the suspect had been born in Wales he was in fact of Rwandan parentage, and that although he may at one stage have been a ‘choirboy’ he had in his possession an Al Qaeda training manual and had been manufacturing ricin in his bedroom. Now, the trickle of information has become a flood: Axel Rudakubana (as we now can call him) was known by schoolmates to be a dangerous loner who kept a ‘kill list’, had been purchasing weapons and was obsessed with murder and genocide; and, worst of all, was well-known to local police and the operators of the UK’s counter-extremist programme, Prevent.

It is important to say that this pattern of facts is ambiguous. It might be that the official line now being put out - that Rudakubana was just an isolated weirdo, perhaps in the Elliot Rodger mould, who loved violence and hated the world - is in fact the case. If so, then it may be, strictly speaking, true that he was not in fact motivated by ‘terrorism’ in the sense of having a political goal of some kind. But the problem now is that which should have been evident to the authorities at the time and which should be evident to our political class in general, and which is indeed evident to boys who cry wolf everywhere: if you habitually don’t tell the truth, people start to doubt everything you tell them. And this is the position which the British public now finds itself in. We feel like whenever a politician or public figure opens his or her mouth we simply don’t know whether he or she is telling us porkies.

The fault for this, in fairness, lies across the political spectrum and it is an issue that has been afflicting British governance for a very long time (at least since the days of the Iraq War). But we now I think seem to have entered a new era of cynicism, in which the mutual contempt between governing and governed is becoming naked: we know they’re concealing the truth; they know we know it; all that matters whenever there is a flare-up of public emotion is keeping a lid on the truth for long enough to allow the outrage to simmer down so that we can muddle through to the next crisis.

It was against this background that Starmer stood up to give his latest speech. Last Monday, Rudakubana pled guilty to the offences he was charged with, and Starmer obviously thought that now was the time to say something important.

One can assume he delivered his speech having it in his mind that he would appear statesmanlike and unify the country. The problem with this is that Starmer is not statesmanlike and does not himself consider unity to be important: he likes to alienate, sneer at and prosecute those who he thinks to be his political opponents or who he perceives to be in some sense deplorable. The idea that he could rally the country behind a shared message is in itself therefore faintly silly. But I’d like to focus in particular on what he said in response to questions from the press about what he had known about the attacks in the immediate aftermath, and what he chose to keep secret:

Let me address the facts as you put them to me. There has been a failure here and I don’t intend to let any institution of the state deflect from their failures and I acknowledge that readily here.

Yes, I knew the details as they were emerging. That is the usual practice in a case such as this. But you know and I know that it would not have been right to disclose those details.

The only losers if the details had been disclosed would be the victims and the families because it ran the risk the trial would collapse. I am never going to do that.

Cleaning off the cloying gloss of sanctimony which is always smeared over all of Starmer’s utterances, what he says here is important. A lot of the media commentary on his speech will hone in on the idea that he ‘knew the details as they were emerging’ (one can assume this means on the very day the attack occurred) and kept them secret in order to prevent the trial against Rudakubana collapsing or being himself found in contempt of court. I have my doubts about the plausibility of that story, and we learned only this afternoon that Merseyside Police (the force with authority over Southport) wanted to release ‘as much information’ as possible in order to ‘negate speculation and conspiracies’ but were stopped by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Another, perhaps more likely, explanation - and the one which will be the subject of endless press speculation - was that the details were kept secret so as to prevent public disorder spreading and to protect ‘community cohesion’. But I’m not sure that people will pick up on what I think is the real story here - which is what all of this says about Keir Starmer’s character and priorities.

British readers will cast their minds back to the aftermath of the Southport attacks and the disorder which followed. They will agree with me that violence, and incitement to violence, were deplorable reactions to what had taken place and that a police response was entirely appropriate. They will naturally condemn the way good, law-abiding Muslims were made to feel unsafe last August. But they will also remember the sheer ferocity with with which the criminal justice system - at Starmer’s clear behest - treated people who had not participated in violence or incited it, but simply said distasteful, unwise things online in the heat of the moment on social media. They will remember the wince-inducing harshness of the sentences that were meted out to people who were often better described as foolish (or just drunk) rather than hateful. (Ed West wrote very well on this subject last autumn.) And readers will also remember the speed and efficiency with which information was released about those involved in purported criminal activities. Here is a video of Starmer speaking on the 5th of August 2024. Pay careful attention to the following lines:

‘We’ll ramp up criminal justice…there have already been hundreds of arrests. Some of them have appeared in court this morning. I have asked for early consideration of the earliest naming and identification of those involved…who will feel the full force of the law.’

On top of this, they will probably also remember Starmer’s declaration at the time of the intent to use facial recognition technology and Criminal Behaviour Orders to restrict people’s movements in advance of their even becoming involved in criminal activities, and his threats to social media companies in respect of crime ‘happening on [their] premises’. They will probably also remember what was perhaps the worst aspect of Starmer’s response to the riots, which was to insist that what was going on was ‘pure violence’ and entirely ‘far-right thuggery’ and thereby to tar peaceful protestors, or just those who wanted to express concerns about issues regarding immigration and integration, with the same brush as the actual racists and violent criminals. And readers will recall the message that all of this sent out: mind your Ps and Qs. Don’t talk about this issue. Don’t speculate about it. Don’t even venture an opinion about anything connected to it. Just accept the official story about a Welsh choirboy gone wrong, and go about your business.

For Starmer to have behaved in this way was one matter - it certainly restored public order and made people very scared to say anything much at all. But for him to have encouraged such a clampdown on public discussion of the matter when he himself - as he has now admitted - knew the identity of the killer, his background, his character, and the fact that he had been referred to Prevent, is something else. To make the position absolutely clear: there is no excuse for violence or direct incitement of violence. People should think before they post nasty things on social media. Nobody disputes this. But there was a grain of truth in the initial rumours that spread online, and a legitimate public interest in having the perpetrator’s background discussed and exposed, exactly for the reasons Merseyside Police suggested. And there was also a great deal of perfectly understandable concern about the impact of mass immigration on society that ordinary people - not ‘far-right thugs’ - wanted to peacefully and civilly express at that time, however complicated the story has turned out to in fact be.

That Keir Starmer knew what he knew last August and yet still chose to egg on what now appears to be an almost vindictively harsh approach in sentencing, still chose to smear everybody who raised a peep about the impact of mass immigration in the aftermath of the Southport attack as ‘far-right’, and still chose to deliberately freeze public debate in the manner which he did tells us something about this man. In the run-up to the general election of 2024, and really ever since he became Leader of the Opposition back in 2020, Starmer has always sought to portray himself as a decent, honest, good-hearted person who wishes to rise above the nastiness of contemporary politics. And I, like many other people, was initially taken in by that - I thought him a lightweight, and would never have voted for his party, but I had the view that he was basically a sincere person with daft ideas.

What we have seen in Starmer since he came to office is something very different - a petty, inhumane, almost spiteful man who considers himself to be morally superior to the mass of humanity and has no qualms whatsoever about breaking eggs to make omelettes. This was confirmed in spades yesterday. And what was also confirmed is that he is also not dishonest in the ordinary sense, but in the Lyndon Johnsonian sense of considering matters of truth and lies to be an irrelevance in respect of the achievement of political objectives - what matters is the realisation of aims, not whether or not one is honest. When the opportunity arose for Starmer to choose between honesty and what he thought to be expedient, there was simply no contest.

But he was right about one thing. In his speech, as you will recall, he made the (obvious) point that ‘there has been a failure here’. What he meant by this was presumably that there was a failure on the part of Prevent to take appropriate action when Rudakubana was referred to them. But he could have been speaking much more broadly. Surveying the wreckage of contemporary Britain - the economic gloom, the sense of dilapidation and decay, the feeling of social disintegration, the nihilism of the culture, the torpor that lies across everything like a pall, the appalling way in which the country is governed - it becomes difficult to think of a more apt analysis than that there has indeed been a general failure here. We’re not quite sure what that failure is. But we collectively know it has happened - we sense it viscerally.

The Southport attack and its aftermath fits awkwardly into that picture. It cannot be attributed exactly to any one cause, and these events are in any case always in a sense sui generis - when the Dunblane massacre took place in 1996 we hardly had mass immigration, terrorism, or the failings of counter-extremism programmes to blame, but the event happened regardless. And yet Rudakubana’s rampage had a powerful resonance: this didn’t use to be a country in which little girls were stabbed en masse at summer dance clubs, didn’t use to be a country led by people who appear to loathe it, and didn’t use to be country in which most people were completely contemptuous and fearful of their leaders. Now it is. And it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Starmer is, unintentionally therefore, hitting on an important truth. This is that there really has been a failure - somewhere. Our pressing task is to try to figure out exactly what it was so that we can put it right.