British PM Keir Starmer says UK faces ‘new threat’ and ‘terrorism has changed’ after Southport murders

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the new threat facing the UK includes ‘extreme violence carried out by ... young men in their bedrooms accessing all manner of material online’.

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has acknowledged the stabbing murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport in 2024 was an act of terror, and should have been labelled as such.

The government on Monday night announced a public inquiry into the lapses that allowed Axel Rudakubana, 18, to murder three young girls on July 29 last year in one of the worst knife attacks in the UK’s history.

At a press conference on Tuesday morning, Sir Keir said “terrorism has changed” and “Britain faces a new threat” after it was revealed the Southport killer had a history of violence.

Sir Keir said the new threat facing the UK includes “extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.”

Rudakubana, who pleaded guilty on Monday to the murder of the three girls, had been referred to the government’s counter-extremism program three times – once in 2019 and twice in 2021 – but no action was taken.

On Monday he pleaded guilty to other charges, including the attempted murders of eight children and two adults, as well as possession of numerous deadly weapons, an al-Qaeda training manual, and equipment to make the biological toxin ricin.

Axel Muganwa Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the murder of three young girls.

At the time of the attacks, Starmer blamed the far-right for the Southport riots that emerged shortly after the murders.

The public was repeatedly told the attacks were not terror related, which has since proved wrong.

Sir Keir said on each occasion Rudakubana came to the attention of authorities, “a judgment was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention, a judgment that was clearly wrong and which failed those families”.

“And I acknowledge that here today,” he said.

Rudakubana murdered Bebe King, 6, Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and he also tried to kill 10 others at the Taylor Swift-themed event last summer.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, who were killed while attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, UK, last year. Picture: AFP Photo/ Merseyside Police

Sir Keir was repeatedly asked by journalists if he could have acted more quickly to stop misinformation about the Southport riots spreading that the suspect was an illegal migrant.

Rudakubana was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents in 2006 and moved to Southport in 2013.

Sir Keir said it was frustrating that different rules applied to information shared online and he could not have disclosed information about the murderer at the time for risk of impeding the criminal trial.