‘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.
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Few would deny it was a terror attack. It was also the work of a “loner” and “misfit”. Born in Kent as Adrian Elms, Masood constantly changed identities, drifted into a life of petty crime, and twice was jailed for cutting men’s faces with knives. Alienated, resentful and brimming with rage, he came under the spell of Islamism while in prison.
Though Islamic State claimed responsibility for Masood’s attack, there was no evidence linking him to any terror group. His story, I wrote at the time, of “a petty criminal, lacking direction, but… finding in Salafism a sense of order and meaning, and of making sense of his inner furies, is not unusual among jihadis”. In many other cases, the line between ideology and mental illness is even less distinct. Six months before Masood’s attack, Zakaria Bulhan rampaged through London’s Russell Square, stabbing six people, killing one. Originally regarded as a terrorist, Bulhan was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and ordered to be detained indefinitely in Broadmoor maximum security hospital.
The previous year, 19-year-old Damon Smith had left a homemade bomb on a Tube train in London. Police discovered in his flat an article titled “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom” from Inspire, an al-Qaida magazine. There was, though, nothing to connect Smith to any extremist network and he knew little about Islam. He had Asperger’s syndrome and behavioural issues. Bombs were “something to do when he was bored”, he told a psychiatrist. Again, the boundary between terrorist fury and the fury of disturbed minds is unclear. The evolving character of jihadism has helped blur that line. The original jihadis were mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Later came elite expatriates from the Middle East who went to the west to sow terror, most notably on 9/11. The first wave of European “homegrown jihadis” emerged in the wake of the Iraq war of 2003. The Syrian civil war that began in 2011, and the emergence of Islamic State, gave rise to a new wave of wannabe jihadis that consisted, in the words of terrorism researcher Rik Coolsaet, of gang members, for whom “joining IS is merely a shift to another form of deviant behaviour”, and “solitary, isolated adolescents, frequently at odds with family and friends, in search of belonging”. Or “loners” and “misfits” in Starmer’s language. Then, as IS disintegrated, “low tech” terrorism emerged – perpetrators causing terror through the use, not of bombs and AK-47s, but of everyday objects such as knives and cars.
This is a history of the degeneration of an already degenerate ideology, the end-point of which is the meaningless, yet depraved, low-tech murderous assault in which violence is not so much a means as an end in itself, a spectacle, and in which the border between the “political” and the “mentally disturbed” becomes almost impossible to discern. It’s the road that runs to Southport. Rudakubana may be judged not to have been driven by ideology, but with much Islamist terror the “ideology” is less a developed form of political thought than a nihilistic desire to cause carnage and mayhem, distress and pain.
At the same time as the character of Islamist violence has shifted, rage has become a more menacing feature of public life. The social and moral firewalls against such behaviour have weakened. The influence of institutions that help inculcate people with a sense of obligation to others, from churches to trade unions, has declined. So has that of radical movements that once might have given social grievance a progressive political form. The politics of identity has nurtured a more fractured sense of belonging. Cracks now exist in which are spawned angry individuals, inhabiting a space beyond normal moral boundaries, whose inchoate rage is shaped by a misanthropic, often profoundly misogynistic, outlook. Some find in Islamism the balm for their demons and the justification for their actions. For others, such rage might be vented through white nationalism or racial bigotry or simply through the act of terror itself. The fraying of social bonds has been compounded by the paralysis of state institutions. Police, Prevent, school authorities, children’s services – all had evidence of Rudakubana’s unrestrained violent fury. None did anything about it.
Such catastrophic failure is a recurring theme. Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber, who again in a horror attack targeted young girls idolising a pop star – in this case, Ariana Grande – was known to the authorities, family, friends and community leaders having all contacted the police. No action was taken. Usman Khan, who in November 2019 killed Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones at a conference near London Bridge, was monitored by the police, probation services and MI5, all of whom demonstrated, in the words of the inquest jury, “unacceptable management and lack of accountability”. Beyond the sphere of terrorism, a common feature of cases from Baby P to Grenfell Tower to the grooming gangs is the devastating breakdown of state functioning.
In the wake of the Rudakubana trial, everything from the online sale of knives to mass immigration has been presented as facilitating, even explaining, the killer’s unconscionable actions. Until we are willing to rebuff the easy soundbites and performative prescriptions, and confront the deeper reasons people like Rudakubana emerge through the cracks, they will continue to do so.
Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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