Comment: 'Lessons will be learned' is not enough in the wake of the Southport inquiry

For the youngsters who attended a Taylor Swift themed dance class in Southport, the occasion should have been a day they would treasure for years. The children had just broken up for their school holidays, it was a warm sunny day, and they had probably been looking forward to the event for weeks.

Then Axel Rudakubana walked in and murdered three of the children, leaving the others scarred for life by the trauma they had witnessed.

It perhaps comes as little surprise that the inquiry into the Southport murders of July 2024 concluded that Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King, and Elsie Dot Stancombe would still be alive today had the authorities - and the parents of the killer - done their jobs properly.

So frequent have these inquiries become, along with the inevitable platitudes that follow, that we have almost become immune to the horror. But the depressing familiarity from the conclusions of Sir Adrian Fulford’s inquiry should not diminish the failings of those involved.

Rudakubana was referred to the Prevent anti-terror programme three times from 2019 to 2021 due to his interest in terrorist attacks and school shootings, but no action was taken because he demonstrated no evidence of a fixed ideology or motivation.

The inquiry heard that Rudakubana’s parents knew their son had purchased weapons and tried to carry out some form of attack at his old school just one week prior to the fatal attack, but took no action.

Sir Adrian said earlier intervention by schools, health workers or police would have revealed Rudakubana's fascination with violence sooner and it would have been better understood.

It probably also comes as little surprise that Rudakubana, who did not show any signs of mental illness, had become fixated with violence after spending considerable time looking, unsupervised, at sordid material on the internet.

How we tackle the growing menace of violent online content is a great dilemma which politicians, health experts and the technology industry are going to need to get to grips with as a matter of urgency. The solution will probably involve tighter restrictions on what can be posted on the web, and more meaningful punishments for the tech giants who make vast sums of money out of this depravity, without taking any real responsibility for the consequences.

There will probably need to be a major review, not just of the flaws and loopholes in policy which the authorities inevitably hide behind, but also of the way in which these authorities operate. And the individuals who failed in their responsibilities need to be rooted out and held to account.

Nothing should take away from the fact that Axel Rudakubana, and he alone, is to blame for the murder of three small children who had so much to look forward to, and he must never be allowed to taste freedom again.

But those in authority who failed little Alice, Bebe, and Elsie Dot must also be made to answer for their failings.

‘Lessons will be learned’ is no longer enough.