‘Britain faces a new threat,” Keir Starmer claimed last week after Axel Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the murders of three young girls in a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport; terror not just from “highly organised groups with clear political intent” but also “acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety”. The Crown Prosecution Service, to the outrage of many, has refused to categorise the Southport killings as terrorism because “there is no evidence the purpose was to advance a particular political or ideological cause”.
This, though, is not a new feature of terror assaults. “What such attacks expose is the continuing degeneration of Islamist terror and the increasingly blurred lines between ideological violence and sociopathic rage.” I wrote those words almost eight years ago after an attack on the Houses of Parliament by Khalid Masood in March 2017. Five people were killed, including Masood himself, after he drove a car at pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before running into the grounds of the parliament building and stabbing a police officer.
