Could calling attacks like Southport terrorism help prevent them?

The teenager who murdered three children, Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, and Bebe King, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July will serve a minimum of 52 years in prison.

Axel Rudakubana had a long-standing obsession with violence, killing and genocide, but prosecutors said there is no evidence he ascribed to any particular political or religious ideology.

He admitted a terrorism offence for downloading an al-Qaeda training manual. But the knife attack has not been treated as terrorism by police or prosecutors, and the judge stressed that he “must accept” that there was no evidence of terrorist cause.

He added, however, that Rudakubana’s culpability is “equivalent to terrorist matters, whatever its purpose”.

Following Rudakubana’s guilty pleas earlier this week, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared “terrorism has changed” and Britain is facing a “new threat”.

In the past, he said, the main threat was organised groups like al-Qaeda, but that we now also face extreme violence from “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety”. They are sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, he said, but are fixated on extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.

But what the prime minister described has been happening for years.

“This is not a new threat,” says Barnaby Jameson KC, who has spent years prosecuting terror cases. “In the last decade we have seen a plethora of terrorist cases involving young males who have become self-radicalised in isolation online.”

What is new is that the prime minister has now indicated this problem must be urgently addressed.

The question now is how he will do it – and, if this has been going on for so many years, why has it taken until now to do so?

At present, the police, courts and MI5 work to a definition in the Terrorism Act 2000.

That defines terrorism as the use or threat of violence designed to influence the government, an international governmental organisation, or to intimidate the public or a section of it, with the use or threat of violence for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

Put simply, for an attack to be treated as terrorism the authorities must conclude it was for some kind of cause.

But various terror offences can be – and are – used to charge and disrupt people who are not defined by prosecutors as having a terrorist motive. On the flipside, it is also true that cases which some think should be classed as terrorism, are not.

Several recent cases show how fluid the counter-terror system can be when presented with cases falling outside the main ideologies, showing these issues are not as new as the prime minister suggests.

Counter-terror police, with their particular focus on preventing violence in the first place, have investigated plots that are not defined as terrorism, including two teenagers jailed in 2018 for planning a school massacre in North Yorkshire.

Another investigation prevented a massacre in Cumbria the same year. The “loner” responsible was convicted of possessing terrorist manuals, but prosecutors said the motive was “not terrorism” and related to hatred and revenge.

In 2021, a 16-year-old boy from Birmingham admitted three terror offences for possessing gun and bomb manuals. He had a general fascination with terrorism, violence and so-called ‘incels’.

From age 11, he had constantly posted in a forum about the Columbine massacre. The prosecution case was that he did not hold any fixed ideology.

On the other side of the spectrum, a vehicle attack in Westminster in 2018 – in which a man drove at cyclists and police officers outside Parliament – was prosecuted and sentenced as terrorist-linked, despite no evidence of any extremist motive, on the basis that the act and location meant the attacker must have been acting for a terrorist purpose.

The case shows a motive does not need to be clear for a case to be treated as terrorism.

But a notorious double murder that was inspired by an extreme ideology – the stabbings of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2020 – were not defined as terrorism despite the killer clearly being motivated by his adherence to Satanism and the occult.

It is up to the police, namely the senior national co-ordinator for counterterrorism, to declare an incident as terrorism.

In the past, this has happened quickly in notorious cases, including after the Manchester Arena bombing and the Westminster Bridge attack. Both were carried out by known extremists.

One reason why police may now take longer before making a declaration – even an incident that may appear likely to be classed as terrorism – is because of an explosion in a taxi outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021, which was initially declared a terrorist incident.

After a long investigation, however, detectives eventually concluded there was no evidence the Liverpool bomber held extremist views of any kind and that his precise motive remained unknown, but it was likely driven by anger towards the British state for repeated rejections of his asylum claim and exacerbated by his own mental health struggles.

Despite such examples, the central focus for MI5 and police is terrorism as defined by the law, rather than a broader group of people presenting a more general risk of violence.

If the government is now going to ask that more time be devoted to this wider group, MI5 and the police may well ask for more resources.

As things stand, both are currently devoting increasing time to investigating state espionage in the UK, particularly from Russia, Iran and China, which means they’re spending less time on terrorism investigations.

Within those investigations, detectives focused on the extreme right spend an increasing amount of time dealing with young people who engage in a range of harmful activity, including sexual offences.

Certain online spaces have seen a blending with the occult, Satanism, misogyny, and a general ultra-violent misanthropy, creating toxic new groups that bleed back into the real worlds.

Some of those involved are often mentally vulnerable, creating additional sensitivities around interventions, whether they involve criminal investigations or not.

Some neo-Nazi groups created by teenagers and young people online have been outlawed as terrorist organisations, joining a list that includes Hamas and the IRA.

The challenge of preventing lone attackers in the UK is nothing new. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the main threat was from elaborate plots directed by groups like al-Qaeda, such as the plan to blow up transatlantic planes using bombs disguised as drinks.

This era saw the creation of the main terrorism laws now in use, which defined a series of offences – including preparing acts of terrorism and possessing terrorist instructions – that we see in the courts, used to disrupt and stop people before they commit acts of violence.

But with the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) group over a decade ago, the threat moved away from plots directed by organisations and towards acts of violence by individuals inspired by online propaganda and instructions from groups like IS, but who might have no direct contact with them.

In the decade since there have been multiple plots and attacks by lone actors, including people using knives and vehicles as weapons, making it harder to spot their plans because the preparations are relatively low-key.

Extreme right-wing violence, which has emerged as a major issue, has predominantly followed the same pattern: plots and attacks by lone actors, often very young, who are typically inspired by material accessed online.

For years, counter-terror police have been registering their concerns about this group. (Indeed, they are only a group because the authorities have defined them as such.)

The point is illustrated by the number of them referred to Prevent, the government-led counter-extremism programme. In the year to March 2020, 51% were for individuals with a “mixed, unstable or unclear ideology”, of which almost half had no concern identified following an initial assessment.

In the years since, the way in which that group is classed has changed, with newer categories for concerns about school massacre radicalisation and the misogynistic incel ideology, which makes direct comparisons over the years difficult.

However, the government’s own figures for 2023/2024 show the largest single group referred to Prevent – 36%, meaning 2,489 people – were defined as individuals with a vulnerability present but no ideology or counter terror risk, with 19% classed as extreme right-wing, 13% as Islamist radicalisation, and 2% relating to concerns regarding school massacres.

From these thousands of Prevent referrals, 7% were adopted as cases requiring intervention by a multi-agency panel. But the figures for interventions show how the largest group of original referrals – the mix of people with a general interest in violence but no clear ideology – get increasingly filtered out of the programme.

For cases involving intervention, 45% related to extreme right-wing radicalisation, 23% to Islamist radicalisation, 18% to individuals with “conflicted concerns”, and 4% for school massacre concerns.

The Southport attacker himself was referred to Prevent three times by “education providers” because of concern about his interest in violence and extremism, but each time officers assessed he did not need meet the threshold for intervention – assessments since found to be wrong by an official review.

When you get to actual investigations by MI5, which is the UK’s lead agency for counter terrorism, the figures change again, with the organisation’s director general Ken McCallum saying last year that 75% relate to Islamist extremism and 25% to the extreme right.

However, he acknowledged that “straightforward labels like ‘Islamist terrorism’ or ‘extreme right wing’ don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see,” and that MI5 is encountering more people accessing “both extreme right wing and Islamist extremist instructional material, along with other bits of online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.”

What the figures show is that a large group of people – about whom there are real concerns – neither end up in Prevent, nor being investigated by MI5 or counter-terror police.

The prime minister said this week it may be that such people are “harder to spot,” adding that we “can’t shrug our shoulders and accept that”.

But what his government is proposing to do about it is currently unclear.

The government could consider broadening the definition of terrorism or creating new offences to tackle the threat of violence from non-terror offenders.

It could also change the way in which the threat of violence from non-terror suspects is monitored and managed.

Neil Basu, the Met’s former head of counter-terror policing, this week said that a “Prevent for non-terrorists” is now necessary and will require a “big bill” if we want to be safe.

The government has appointed Lord Anderson KC, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, to review the Prevent scheme, although it was the subject of a highly critical review two years ago commissioned by the previous government.

Jonathan Hall KC, the current independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has been asked by the government to consider whether the definition does need to change. Speaking to the BBC, he says: “There appear to be three reasons for expanding the definition of terrorism.

“The sense that only terrorism captures the horrors of attacks like the one by Rudakubana; because doing so brings in counter-terrorism powers; and because terror laws focus on pre-cursor offences and preventing attacks in the first place.

“However, to change the definition you would need to work out what violence to include, and what to exclude.

“If it was no longer necessary to prove a political, religious, racial or ideological cause, would the touchstone be methodology, or number of victims, or desire for notoriety or terrorising impact? Would serial killers like Lucy Letby be included or not?”

On the question of which resources are used to tackle the threat, he argues that “we must ask who is responsible for the risk posed by people like Rudakubana. This is about risk management and public protection by law enforcement, not welfare interventions.

“We can learn from how terrorist subjects of interest are managed by every mechanism available, such as non-terrorism prosecutions or use of civil orders.”

Now the Southport attacker has been sentenced, the focus will be on what the government next does to tackle the issues articulated by the prime minister.

Top picture credit: Merseyside Police and PA

BBC InDepth is the new home on the website and app for the best analysis and expertise from our top journalists. Under a distinctive new brand, we’ll bring you fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions, and deep reporting on the biggest issues to help you make sense of a complex world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re starting small but thinking big, and we want to know what you think – you can send us your feedback by clicking on the button below.