finance

Badenoch’s post-Southport argument is worrying


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Good morning. What should we be talking about in the wake of the Southport murders?

On Friday, I set out why Axel Rudakubana did not fit into either of the British state’s models for dealing with people who might end committing crimes such as his. For people with specific mental illnesses, hopefully they end up being detained under the terms of the Mental Health Act. And for people who would kill for a cause, hopefully they are spotted by Prevent and dissuaded from supporting or committing terrorist acts. (Or they are stopped and arrested before carrying out a terrorist plot.)

Whether the UK’s approach to identifying and combating terrorism should change as a result, and if so how, are going to be a topic of serious debate over the coming days, weeks and months. We expect the imminent publication of the review into when Rudakubana came into contact with Prevent and what the counter-terrorism programme could have done differently. I will set out my thinking on it once I’ve digested the report.

For now I want to talk about the arguments advanced by the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, that what we really should be talking about in the wake of these murders is “integration”, partly because some of what she is missing is important to my concerns about the broader criticisms being made of the UK’s Prevent programme. Some more on that below.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com

The trouble with Badenoch’s evidence

Axel Rudakubana was born and raised in the UK. His parents, who were Tutsis who had left Rwanda before the genocide, were Christians (like 92 per cent of people in Rwanda). They were both churchgoers. As an 11-year-old, he appeared in a commercial for Children in Need dressed as Doctor Who. But as he entered his teenage years, something changed. He became obsessed with violence. He came into contact with various bits of the state, none of which spotted the danger that he posed.

So when Kemi Badenoch says “it is absurd that we are debating online knife sales more than we are integration and how we safeguard our societies from ideologies and violence”, it is hard, frankly, to see how that relates to this case.

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In terms of the broader question of “how do we keep British citizens safe from terror”, yes. According to the most recent data release, there were 234 people in prison in Great Britain for terrorism-connected offences. Of those, 65 per cent are categorised as holding Islamist-extremist views, 27 per cent are categorised as following extreme rightwing ideologies. The remainder hold “Other” ideologies — mostly causes that have been the inspiration for terrorism in the recent past, such as animal rights. Their threat has, for the moment, been pretty comprehensively dismantled by counter-terrorism police and the security services.

Safeguarding the UK from ideologically motivated terrorism is a much bigger deal and challenge than random acts of violence motivated by obsession with violence, at least at the moment. Identifying and tackling problems of ideology is both what Prevent is set up to do, but it is also how we distinguish between terrorism and all other forms of crime.

And indeed, one important thing that we need to balance when we consider how and if the UK’s approach to countering terror and extremism should change is whether any alterations would damage our efforts against these much larger threats. (That, and other topics, is the subject of a must-read piece by the UK’s independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, which you can read here.)

But in terms of the specifics of this case, no. Actually “just how hard should we make it for the rest of us to buy knives?” is a relevant policy debate. “What does the UK do well and badly in terms of integrating people into the country?” isn’t. Badenoch was pressed on the topic by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg yesterday and she gave the following answer (emphasis mine):

There are a lot of people like Rudakubana who, despite being here from childhood or born here, they are not integrating into the rest of society, they hate their country. They are being told that everything about the UK is terrible, he had materials about white genocide and so on. If you are being inculcated in hate, you are not integrating well, and there is so much we can do across the board and not just on religious extremism, extremism across the board.’

I am really not sure where Badenoch has got this idea from: Rudakubana had materials about genocides and atrocities, yes. The more than 164,000 pieces of material he had ranged from Gaza, to Grozny, to Iraq, to the genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust. I suppose some of that could be categorised as “white genocide” but Badenoch seems to have unearthed a motive and a consistency to Rudakubana’s interests that neither the Crown Prosecution Service nor the police have. (Over on Bluesky, Sunder Katwala offers a plausible theory as to the source of Badenoch’s belief.)

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When pressed by Kuenssberg on where she had the evidence for her claims about integration, Badenoch responded:

My evidence is my personal experience. I am saying this as someone from a similar African Christian background, born in this country, that the country we make to make people feel a part of the whole is very limited.

But Badenoch’s background is not similar to Rudakubana. She was born in the UK (in an era when being born in the UK still gave you an automatic right to citizenship) but she spent the first 16 years of her life in Nigeria. Rudakubana was born in the UK and grew up in the UK. These backgrounds are about as far apart as well, the 2,000 or so miles separating Nigeria from Rwanda.

This is part of what looks to be a pattern: that Badenoch does not familiarise herself with the particulars of a policy row or a subject but defaults to what her prior convictions tell her, regardless of whether they fit the facts or not.

I think that her failure to do the reading also explains this Guardian scoop. In 2015, when Badenoch was a member of the Greater London Authority, she was one of the co-authors of a report that criticised Prevent, suggesting that the programme could alienate communities. Such terms are near-identical to the ones she now castigates Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper for signing up to. (She said on X last week: “When the Conservatives were trying to toughen the Prevent anti-extremism programme, [Keir] Starmer and [Yvette] Cooper were running for office on manifestos worried about Prevent ‘alienating communities’.”)

I don’t think that her failure to write a dissenting opinion, as one other member of that GLA committee did, is because her “true” opinions are closer to Labour’s 2019 manifesto than she lets on. I think it’s because in 2015 she didn’t do the reading, just as she has yet to demonstrate a grip on a topic at Prime Minister’s Questions. This is obviously a problem because our system works best when the leader of the opposition is across the detail of what the government is doing.

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But it is particularly important on this topic, because the specifics of this case are so unlike most of the threats the UK faces. When the government proposes some potentially far-reaching changes to our response to terrorism works, the leader of the opposition really needs to be across the facts of this specific set of crimes to do her job properly.

Now try this

For reasons I don’t fully understand, when I try and read a grown-up novel in January and February, my brain revolts: I read slowly, fitfully and there is no pleasure in it. I used to fight against this but the only consequence was to prolong the problem. So in the first two months of the year, I either read non-fiction or children’s literature. At the moment I am rereading what I think is actually my favourite of Salman Rushdie’s many excellent novels, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, one of two novels he wrote for his children.

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