Home Secretary Yvette Cooper vowed to act after killer Axel Rudakubana was “easily able” to buy a knife on Amazon despite having previous convictions for violence.
She said: “That’s a total disgrace and it must change.”
18-year-old Rudakubana pleaded guilty this week to the horrific murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven. Rudakubana killed the girls running amok with a knife at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last July, where he injured eight other children and two adults.
Rudakubana further pleaded guilty to charges of producing chemical poison ricin and possessing an Al Qaeda training manual, while it has emerged that he was referred to the government’s counter-terrorism Prevent programme three times between 2019 and 2021.
He bought the kitchen knife used in the killings online aged just 17 and Ms Cooper said the Government will “bring in stronger measures to tackle knife sales online in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring.”
She also said the Government has ordered a “thorough review” of the killer’s referrals to the Prevent anti-terror programme “to identify what changes are needed to make sure serious cases are not missed”.
Yvette Cooper said the growing problem of young people “obsessed by violence” should be a serious concern in light of the Southport attack.
Responding to a question from Edinburgh East and Musselburgh MP Chris Murray, the Home Secretary said: “What we seem to have is cases where there is extreme violence, or obsession grows around extreme violence, and then you have young people who then may cast around to maybe consuming different kinds of terrorist material, or extremist material, but at its heart may be an obsession with violence as well.
“Actually, the scale of the growing obsession with violence should be a serious concern to us because you do think ‘what are we allowing to happen to our kids and to our teenagers if we’ve seen this kind of obsession grow’?”
And the Government is urging social media companies to take down dangerous material that may be radicalising children.
Ms Cooper said: “There are issues around the responsibility of social media companies and the stronger powers will obviously be brought in as part of the Online Safety Act, but we are urging the companies to take responsibility now and not continue to profit from really dangerous material that is putting kids at risk.”
Gregor Poynton, Labour MP for Livingston, asked what social media and search engine companies could do to stop young people accessing content.
The Home Secretary said: “The thing about social media companies is they have incredibly sophisticated technology and resources. These are the social media companies that know how to target every single one of us on things that we might be interested in, online, and to use their algorithms in all kinds of sophisticated ways.
“They have the capability to do far more to identify this dangerous content and to take action on it. And I do believe that they should use those responsibilities rather than rowing back from content moderation, rather than reducing the responsible action they need to take.”
