Southport Attack

Florence Eshalomi Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member makes an important point: we want to introduce the duty of candour as part of the Hillsborough law. She is also right to talk about the challenges of countering terrorism, extremism and these changing patterns of extreme violence. As the Met Commissioner has said, those with a fixation on violence and gore are also consuming different bits of terrorist and extremist material. The ideology may be unclear, but they pose a danger to the public. This inquiry needs to look at all those issues, and, as part of our Prevent work and counter-terrorism work, we need to act at pace in these areas as well.

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Home Secretary for her statement this afternoon. As many Members have said, our thoughts remain with Bebe, Elsie and Alice. We can all remember where we were that late mid-morning on 29 July. I had just dropped off my two children at their holiday camp at school. When the news broke, I could feel that panic. I almost stopped for a minute to think: are my children safe? We think about the other children and the trauma that they will be feeling, and the first responders who ran towards that danger knowing that they could be harmed.

The Home Secretary has announced an inquiry, but, sadly, there is also the issue of the nature of the violence that children as young as 15 or 16 are viewing online—the nature of the violence that was used on Elianne Andam when she was tragically stabbed in Croydon on 27 September, and the nature of the violence that Axel Rudakubana used on these three girls. How will the Home Secretary ensure that the institutions which, if we are honest, failed to see those warning signs will not fail in the future? What will the inquiry do differently, so that, as a House, we will not be coming back to recount dangerous tragedies again in the future?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right to describe how every parent and grandparent will have felt on hearing those awful descriptions on that day in July. She is also right to focus on what our young people—our children—are seeing online. If we do not face up to this, the damage that we could be doing to generations down the line is disturbing and troubling. That means that social media companies need to take responsibility. The Online Safety Act 2023 will introduce stronger codes and requirements, but the companies themselves also need to take some responsibility, instead of going backwards, which they are at the moment.