“Loners and misfits and young men in their bedrooms accessing all sorts of material online” – are these the “new threat” to our security? That’s how Sir Keir Starmer put it as he told us last week that “terrorism has changed”.
The government says it has no plans to change the definition of extremism. So, then what does need redefining? Or does the “new threat” fall into some other category that perhaps in the US they would call “school-shooter”?
Southport killer Axel Rudakubana is indeed a misfit, an aberration, but even the most clearly defined terrorists often are. Sometimes they have mental health problems. Often there’s a criminal background and a pattern of escalating violence in their lives.
In 2017, Khalid Masood killed four people and injured 50 when he drove a car down the pavement of Westminster Bridge, before fatally stabbing a police officer who was protecting parliament.
Masood was a known extremist and Islamic State claimed responsibility for his actions, but research by criminologists at Birmingham City University found Masood’s history of violence was a means to assert his “manliness” and regain power that may have been lacking elsewhere in his life.
He also had a previous knife crime conviction, often got into fights and researchers say that “there is evidence that within prison he wanted to kill someone”.
No one is quite sure how Masood was radicalised, probably in jail, but perhaps he was just looking for a reason to justify his desire to kill – and extremism provided it. There is an argument that in many cases ideology is a mask, or at least secondary in significance to a person’s violent nature.
Our definition of terrorism comes from the Terrorism Act of 2000 and is the use of threat of violence designed to influence government or intimidate the public for the purpose of a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
The Incel movement
New and weird forms of ideology can potentially form a plank for terrorism. The Incel (involuntary celibate) movement is one, and it definitely falls into the “misfit” category. This sub-culture is focused on members’s feeling that they are being denied their right to intimate relationships. A deadly attack in a Toronto massage parlour in 2020 by an Incel-inspired man was described as an act of terrorism by a judge in Canada.
Research by Swansea University for the Commission for Counter Extremism said this phenomenon was more aligned to the need for mental health support rather than counter-terrorism interventions, and that is partly where debate lies now with Rudakubana.
He did get mental health support after it was determined he had an autism spectrum disorder, but he stopped engaging with it two years ago. The well-publicised deficiency in our mental health services needs as much attention here as any alleged failure in the anti-terrorism Prevent system.
‘More volatile would-be terrorists’
In October 2024, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum made the point that it was becoming harder to determine whether an act of violence was ideologically motivated or driven by another factor like mental health.
He said: “We’re encountering more volatile would-be terrorists with only a tenuous grasp of the ideologies they profess to follow. People viewing both extreme right-wing and Islamist extremist instructional material, along with other bits of online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.”
Mr McCallum described a “dizzying range” of beliefs, “pick-n-mix” ideologies, and a “crowd-sourced model” where people pull on hatred and misinformation from a multitude of mostly online sources.
He said: “Today, an attacker may have no connections to other terrorists. They might not be on our records. And there’s often no claim of responsibility.”
160,000 documents seized in Rudakubana probe
Rudakubana again fits into the ‘pic-n-mix’ classification. He had a copy of Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The al Qaeda Training Manual, but he also had documents about Nazi Germany and the Rwandan genocide.
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From 160,000 documents seized and examined, it was concluded he was simply obsessed with extreme violence, not a political or religious ideology. You could say violence was his ideology.
In October 2017, when teenagers Thomas Wyllie and Alex Bolland were arrested for plotting to massacre fellow pupils at their school in Northallerton, their planned actions too did not conform to an ideology.
The seeming act of terrorism committed by Emad al Swealmeen in November 2021, when he blew himself up in the back of a taxi outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital, was eventually found to be motivated by a mix of anger over his failed asylum application and poor mental health.
Prevent and its deradicalisation programme
The Prevent programme, set up to stop the spread of terrorism in the UK, clearly is not ideal for these kinds of cases.
Around 6,000 to 7,000 people are referred to it every year and only a few hundred are selected to go on a deradicalisation programme called Channel.
This can’t be a catch-all for anyone intent on mass murder. The number of people referred to Prevent with “conflicted” or no ideology has been growing and now makes up 36% of all referrals.
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Rudakubana fell into that category in the three times he was referred.
The first came after he did online searches around mass shootings, the second because of posts he made on Instagram about Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, and the third when he was found to be researching the London Bridge attacks. In each case, a judgement was made that he did not require intervention.
Read more from Sky News:
Reeves says ‘no stone should be left unturned’ in inquiry
Former social worker warns over ‘holes in the system’
‘Individuals pose a serious concern’
Dame Sara Khan, the former counter-extremism czar, told Sky News: “There is no effective system in place to deal with such individuals and they will continue to pose a serious concern.”
It’s hard to quantify the number of success stories from Prevent because, by definition, they lead to nothing happening. But Rudakubana is the fourth person known to the programme, who has gone on to commit an act that many would call terrorism.
The others include Reading knife killer Khairi Saadallah, Parsons Green bomber Ahmed Hassan, and the man who murdered MP Sir David Amess. Ali Harbi Ali managed to convince people at Prevent that he was reformed, when, actually, he was becoming ever more devoted to Islamic State ideology, ever more obsessed with murdering a politician.
His ideology and choice of a political target puts Ali Harbi Ali firmly in the terrorist bracket. But is it worth trying to glean an understanding of Rudakubana’s motives from his choice of victims? After all, he is the second mass killer to target children enjoying pop music from a female artist. Like the Manchester bombing at Ariana Grande’s concert, his was an attack on innocence.
Perhaps the best explanation for this was from the woman taking the dance class, Leanne Lucus. She told Liverpool Crown Court: “He targeted us because we were women and girls – because we were vulnerable, easy prey.”
Add to this the Islamic State terror threat to a Taylor Swift concert in Austria last summer, it seems angry young men; be they Islamic terrorists, Incels, or misfit loners, often have a misogynistic streak, taking out their rage on women and girls.
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It’s clear a new strategy is needed, and as Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley told LBC, they can never stop every violent man.
He added: “We need to be as good as possible at it and there are too many, young men, online, obsessing about this violent material. Some of that is how we intervene with individuals, some of that’s about the rules for online material and what people can digest and watch.”
MI5 says the internet is becoming ever more central to terrorist activities – surely that is the frontline of this battle, and one that seems to be getting further out of control with tech bosses choosing not to monitor and regulate content.
With easy access to whatever he wanted to watch, Rudakubana was able to curate and indulge his warped fantasy in his bedroom, until he was ready to inflict it on the softest of targets. Does that make him a terrorist or just a monster? A young girl who he attacked but miraculously survived, perhaps found the best word: “Coward.”
