The Cost of Silence

What the Southport Inquiry reveals

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Like most British people, I’m not sure I will ever forget the moment I heard about the Southport atrocity.

The murder of those poor little girls. The senseless violence. The ridiculous attempt by the state to convince us that the monster responsible, Axel Rudakubana, was just as “British” as the children he murdered. And the entirely understandable wave of rage that swept across the country.

Which is why the judgement of the Southport inquiry - that this atrocity “could and should have been prevented” - doesn’t just stick in the throat but makes me, no doubt like many of you, feel sick.

Axel Rudakubana was not some unknown figure slipping through the cracks. He was well known — to police, to social services, to mental health professionals.

In fact, he was known to two separate police forces, two mental health services in the National Health Service, the local council, social services, and his family.

Yet nobody stopped him.

He brought knives to school - repeatedly. He was found on a bus carrying a knife and literally told police he wanted to stab somebody. He attacked another pupil. He consumed violent and extremist material online. How many warning signs do authorities need?

But this isn’t only about our utterly incompetent state institutions.

It’s also about a very specific moment that tells us much about not only about what went tragically wrong in Southport but what is going very wrong in our country, and indeed the West, more generally.

Read this short description of the moment I am referring to in The Times:

“In late 2021, Rudakubana’s head teacher felt she was “shut up” and pressured into playing down the risk he posed after she was accused of racial profiling of the troubled teenager.

Joanne Hodson had warned colleagues at the Acorns School in Ormskirk, Lancashire, a pupil referral unit where Rudakubana was enrolled after being expelled from another school for carrying a knife, that he should be regularly searched for weapons.

But when Hodson described Rudakubana as “sinister, cold and calculating” in a draft education health and care plan, the mental health case worker Samantha Steed said that she was stereotyping him as a “black boy with a knife”.

The language was taken out, eroding the formal picture of the risk posed by Rudakubana, while Hodson told the inquiry that the accusation “effectively shut me up”.

That’s right.

The very real and urgent threat posed by Axel Rudakubana to the British people was essentially downplayed and brushed under the carpet because a public official feared they might be accused of “racism”.

I’d say this is shocking but it’s not really, is it? Because in modern Britain - thanks to the ideology that now dominates our taxpayer-funded institutions - it’s become depressingly familiar.

In 2024, it was a mental health services worker worried about being branded a “racist” in Southport.

In 2017, it was a security guard at the Manchester Evening News Arena who failed to challenge Salman Abedi, the Islamist terrorist who went on to murder 22 children and their parents, because he too feared accusations of “racism”.

And for thirty years before that, across England’s towns and cities, countless public officials likewise failed to confront the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs and the systematic sexual abuse of white working-class, non-Muslim girls because they too were afraid of being labelled “racist” or “Islamophobic”.

They are not identical cases. But they are all connected by a common thread: a clear and visible reluctance within our public institutions to act when risk intersects with questions of race, identity, and culture.

This reluctance has now hardened into something that is very dangerous and quite clearly costing lives - a form of institutional paralysis due to political correctness and ideological pressure from above.

Instead of asking questions such as: “What is the actual threat or risk here?” The people who are supposed to keep us safe instead ask: “How might this be perceived?” And too often the latter question trumps the first.

None of this is accidental.

As I’ve warned for some time, it reflects an ideological worldview that has now spread across our public institutions — police, the NHS, universities, schools, the BBC - and taken hold of our national culture.

It tells people that the real sin is not failing to stop harm, sexual assault, or even murder but saying something that might be interpreted under this regime as being in some way discriminatory or hateful.

The accusation of “racism” has become so powerful, so career-threatening, that it can now even override the most basic duty of the state: to protect its own citizens.

This is what happens, in other words, when a woke ruling class stretches concepts such as “racism”, “Islamophobia”, “hate”, or “far right” to try and discredit legitimate views they happen to disagree with, and control the national conversation.

People adapt. They moderate their language. They avoid difficult topics or conclusions that conflict with the guiding impulse of this worldview. They look the other way when reality undermines theory.

Not because they do not see the obvious risks and dangers but because they can also see the personal and professional costs of speaking up about it. Silence is just easier.

And so three little girls will never grow up. Families are left with unimaginable grief. Many other children and their parents who simply went to a pop concert will never come home. And hundreds of thousands of vulnerable girls and women are raped and sexually assaulted by Pakistani Muslim gangs that were enabled by the very institutions that were supposed to keep these girls and women safe to begin with.

So what now, many people will ask?

If we are really serious about preventing this from happening again and taking on the deeper problem then I think we need to do three things.

First, we need to root out the culture that allows this to happen in the first place.

We need to fully root out all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) frameworks and state-sponsored political correctness from our taxpayer-funded institutions.

DEI is not a neutral policy. Far from it.

It is turning our public institutions such as our universities, schools, police, the NHS, councils and social services into openly biased and highly politicised institutions that now see their main role as being to police and control and the public square.

This needs to end. Now. So that public officials can speak openly and honestly about the threats we face and the safety of our own people is put before this desire to impose ideological conformity.

Second, we need accountability. Not more reports and inquiries but real consequences for those who shut down legitimate concerns or fail to act when the warning signs are clear.

Public officials who fail in their duty to protect the British people should be named, shamed, sacked, and even jailed. No exceptions.

And third, we need to restore something that should never have been lost: common sense. A system in which people are judged by their behaviour, not shielded by their racial, sexual, or gender identity.

What is happening in our institutions today is, put frankly, an embarrassment.

They have been captured by a political ideology that should have no place in the public square. A regime of censorship, taboos, concept-creep and Orwellian hate laws which, as I set out in Chapter 6 of my book, needs to be completely dismantled.

Because today, as we have learned yet again with the Southport inquiry, it is costing lives. Another tragedy that “could and should have been prevented”. But wasn’t.

Because small-minded, weak officials once again decided it was more important not to upset the fashionable groupthink in BBC-Westminster Land than intervene, speak the truth and do their bloody job.

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