Starmer promises extensive investigation into state’s handling of killings that sparked riots across the U.K. — as his critics cry “cover-up.”
LONDON — Keir Starmer has spent much of his premiership taking brickbats from the populist right.
On Tuesday, he tried to get ahead of the fight.
In a carefully choreographed series of announcements meant to maximize the United Kingdom prime minister’s impact, Starmer promised a full and unflinching look at the state’s failure to protect three schoolgirls, who were stabbed to death last July at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the town of Southport.
The horrific killings were followed by a wave of disorder across the U.K., with far-right groups seizing on claims — pushed on social media — that British authorities had deliberately avoided identifying the killer, 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana in the aftermath of the attack.
Elon Musk, the X owner and Donald Trump ally, even waded into the row, boosting false claims about the government’s policing of the riots and its disclosure of Rudakubana’s identity.
It is not standard practice in the U.K. to name a suspect before charges are laid, but into that immediate vacuum about the killer’s identity poured claims that the suspect was a newly arrived refugee — helping to turbocharge the far-right response.
A police decision not to declare the incident terror-related also raised a host of questions about the state’s treatment of the crime.
That narrative continued Monday night as Nigel Farage, leader of the insurgent Reform UK party, responded to Rudakubana’s guilty plea — a surprise move at the start of his murder trial — by accusing the state of “the most astonishing cover-up.”
He pointed to Rudakubana’s possession of an al Qaeda training manual, a fact not revealed until October, when further terror charges were brought against him. “I think that we need an apology from the home secretary and an explanation as to why we have been denied the basic truth,” Farage said.
Flurry of activity
And so on Monday night and Tuesday morning, just hours after Rudakubana’s guilty plea, came a flurry of government activity.
In an early morning Downing Street press conference framed by Union Jacks, Starmer promised a probing public inquiry into the state’s handling of the case, vowing not to “let any institution of the state deflect from their failure, failure which in this case, frankly, leaps off the page.”
In a detail disclosed since Rudakubana’s conviction, the prime minister pointed out that the killer had been referred three times to the British government’s de-radicalization Prevent program, only for it to be deemed that “he did not meet the threshold for intervention, a judgment that was clearly wrong and which failed those families.”
Known for a generally robotic delivery style, the prime minister spoke emotively about the state of mind of British parents as news of the attack broke last year. “It could have been anywhere, it could have been our children, but it was Southport,” he said. “It was Bebe, six years old. Elsie, seven. Alice, nine.”
And Starmer tried to challenge the status quo, too. He acknowledged public confusion about why the murders had not been deemed a terror case under Britain’s existing definition, and saying that, in a world where the U.K. faces a “a new threat” from “loners, misfits” and “young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online,” he had ordered a review of Britain’s terror laws.
“We can’t have a national security system that fails to tackle people who are a danger to our values, our security, our children, we have to be ready to face every threat,” he said.
The British government’s attempt to get on the front foot — and pitch Starmer as a change agent, leaning on his record as a reforming director of public prosecutions — marks a clear shift for an administration that has at times seemed buffeted by external events.
Starmer’s government, elected on a landslide last year, is struggling in the polls and acutely aware of the threat from the populist right represented by Farage.
By pitching the administration as proactive investigators of wrongdoing, and Starmer as a man personally angered by state failings, the government will be looking to see off charges from the likes of Musk that the Labour government represents the failed establishment. The pressure is now on for that inquiry to deliver.
Still, Starmer rebutted one of the central charges from critics of the government’s response — countering that only revealing crucial details amid a police probe and ahead of a verdict would have seen the “vile” Rudakubana walk free.
“I would never do that and nobody would ever forgive me if I had,” he said. “That is why the law of this country forbade me or anyone else from disclosing details sooner.”
The U.K. prime minister is gambling that, on this highly charged issue at least, a restive British public will be content with due process over the sound and fury of his loudest critics.