Axel Rudakubana has been in the papers a lot lately. Because at age 17 he murdered three gorgeous little girls. For the simple reason that… He could? That he wanted to? That he’s a murderous psychopath with no idea about the value of life? Anyway, who knows? Why he murdered them, and injured 8 others in a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport will never be known. Other than to assume, with a degree of confidence, that ‘this geezer is not normal’. Today he gets sentenced. And there are times when even a devout pacifist like me, a preservation-of-life-ist like me, would like to see him hang. After some really nasty torture.

Ok, that probably won’t happen. Murdering 3 people is always a crime. But murdering 3 kids is so much worse. And it shouldn’t be. Yet it is.

So what if he’d murdered 3 other people? How about really useless people? Like if he’d murdered 3 people working for ‘Prevent’? The organisation which was aware of his fascination with murder, his acquisition of knives and his often voiced threats to use them? And yet, because prevent are ‘anti-terrorist’ and Axel showed no ‘ideology’ whatsoever, they just didn’t bother taking any further action. The absolute definitive example of ‘someone else’s problem, innit’. They were presented with the literal ‘accident waiting to happen’ but because that accident didn’t tick the ‘hard right wing’ or ‘jihadist’ terror model, they just left him alone. Or left him to someone else. Without telling them. And this was the other crime. That enabled Axel to commit the actual crime.

I just don’t get how Prevent knew this guy was the absolute epitome of a lunatic, violent attacker, a total danger to society and yet, for lacking in ideology of any of their tickable boxes, they did absolutely nothing. Didn’t refer him, though there’s big questions over who, if anyone, deals with such people, and they didn’t monitor him because he hadn’t yelled ‘alahu Akbar’ when he’d pulled a knife on previous people.

We can be so ‘third world’ here.

I’d despair if Spurs weren’t actually winning a football game at the present time!!!

Happy Thursday

A xxxx