Southport Attack

James Cleverly Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. We are raising with the companies some of the particular dangerous material that this terrible offender accessed online, and the police and prosecution will say more about some of that material later this week.

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the issue around online knife sales. We know that in the case of Ronan Kanda, who was brutally murdered with a ninja sword, that the perpetrator was able to buy that online and pick it up with no age checks at all. In this case, for a 17-year-old to be able to get the knife he used online from Amazon, that is frankly shocking. Commander Stephen Clayman has been doing a review for us of online knife sales and the kinds of checks that should be taking place. We will bring forward new measures to tackle this problem based on that review.

[Mr James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)]

I am particularly drawn to the line in the immediate learning review where it concludes that “too much weight was placed on the absence of ideology, without considering the vulnerabilities to radicalisation”. Much of the challenge over the summer was because there was an understandable lack of public understanding of the distinction between a terrorist incident and a non-terrorist incident. Had this person done exactly the same thing but been driven by a desire to create a caliphate here in the UK, it would of course have been defined as a terrorist attack. The fact that it was not is of no solace to the families who lost loved ones. Is it not now the time—I appreciate this could be part of the review, but I urge the Home Secretary to ensure it is given particular emphasis in the review—to get rid of this entirely arbitrary distinction of motivation and to focus exclusively on the risks and actions?

[Yvette Cooper]

The former Home Secretary makes an extremely important point because, from the point of view of the families and the community, the attack was intended to terrorise the community, and their real concern is about the scale of the harm. They saw the loss of children’s lives and the impact on the community.

The law is set out in the Terrorism Act 2000, and there is serious consideration for different agencies about the nature of the response. If there is an ideological attack or motivation, it may be that a counter-extremism response—the kind of support that the Channel programme provides—is targeted at the extremist ideology that needs to be challenged, tackled and taken down. Alternatively, if the issue is around mental health or an obsession with violence and gore, it may need a different kind of response. But the right hon. Member is right that the threats from the point of view of the community will feel the same. That is why the law needs to be looked at again, but it is also why we need to have this inquiry, which can look at where the gaps are in the way that different state agencies respond, because we have seen those growing gaps—obviously, in the most traumatic of ways in this case.