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Three referrals to Britain’s Prevent programme were closed before 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana stabbed three children to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in Southport in July 2024.
The killings laid bare systemic failures in how the British state detects and responds to individuals showing warning signs of mass violence.
Between 2019 and 2021, Rudakubana was referred to Prevent by his schools three separate times. Teachers warned about his interest in weapons, mass killings and terrorist attacks.
Yet none of the referrals progressed to Channel, the programme through which agencies assess individuals and coordinate support. The subsequent learning review identified premature closure and failures to gather information. Rudakubana lacked a clear political motive, and officers treated his vulnerabilities as matters for other services without adequately assessing the cumulative danger.
These failures were examined by the then interim Independent Prevent Commissioner, Lord David Anderson of Ipswich, whose July 2025 report highlighted the difficulty the Home Office’s counter-terrorism programme faces in responding to warning signs of mass violence that do not fit a clear political ideology.
The Post-9/11 Legacy
In the years following 11 September 2001, at least 4.5 million people died in post-9/11 war zones from fighting or its indirect consequences, according to a 2023 estimate by Brown University’s Costs of War project.
In Britain, this war opened up a domestic front with the establishment of Prevent in 2003 – a flagship programme designed to identify individuals at risk of radicalisation and provide early intervention. Home Office funding across Prevent-related units reached £49.1 million in 2020–21, according to the independent review published in 2023.
From its inception, Prevent focused exclusively on Islamist terrorism, with early local authority funding allocated according to the size of the local Muslim population. Its remit was broadened in 2011 to include all forms of terrorism.
‘Salad-Bar’ Terrorism
The British approach to counter-terrorism has continued to place considerable emphasis on whether an extremist is “Islamist” or “extreme right-wing”. But that tidy taxonomy is not enough.
According to official Prevent data, 18% of referrals in England and Wales in 2023–24 involved “conflicted ideology”, while 36% involved vulnerability but no identified ideology or counter-terrorism risk. Referrals are concerns raised for assessment, not confirmed terrorist threats.
As MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said in October 2024, straightforward labels “don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”.
Alongside established ideological threats, the British state is confronting “salad-bar” extremism – where lone actors pick and choose from an online smorgasbord of misogynist forums, violence-fixation gore communities, gaming platforms and subcultures glorifying US school shootings.
Radicalised in a digital dark, these individuals are among those who cannot be fully understood through current approaches to counter-terrorism.
Prevent’s guidance has recognised people without fixed ideologies for years. But Anderson’s report identified significant inconsistency in how cases involving a fascination with extreme violence progress through the system.
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Addressing the Roots of Alienation
Proposals following Southport include a new offence targeting preparations for mass killings without a terrorist motive, put forward by Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, in March 2025. His review argued against broadening the definition of terrorism itself.
Anderson’s separate report explored greater use of online evidence, including a suggestion to aggregate anonymised data from school monitoring software, and recommended closer oversight of existing information-sharing obligations.
However, civil rights groups and security analysts question whether administrative expansion can solve the problem.
Dr Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE International, questions whether predictive interventions are viable at all.
“The problem with these reforms is that they operate on the logic that we can make expressions of mass violence disappear – but we can’t,” he said.
“These intervention programmes have no capacity to stop these acts; there just aren’t enough violent individuals that we can study to be able to actually predict anything.”
Instead, Qureshi points to the collapse of social safety nets: “We look to explain mass violence with ideology, rather than looking at our mental health services and the lack of support systems that vulnerable people have access to.
“Prevent fails in getting to the heart of why these people feel alienated and disenfranchised enough to commit these acts in the first place – it doesn’t look at why they feel like they do not belong, why they turn to these spaces in the first place.”
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The Silo Problem
By contrast, Claudia Wallner, a fellow in the Terrorism and Conflict research group at the Royal United Services Institute, argues that while exact prediction is impossible, behavioural warning signs can provide opportunities to act.
“The post-9/11 framework is not entirely obsolete, but it is no longer sufficient on its own,” said Wallner. “It was built around clearer ideologies, networks, and organisational structures than many current cases display.”
Rather than viewing terrorism as an isolated category, Wallner suggests the state must move beyond separate, security-focused responses: “We need to understand terrorism less as a completely separate category and more as part of a broader targeted violence landscape. Low-base-rate violence can never be predicted with certainty, but many attacks are not entirely without warning.”
Waiting for “clearer ideological labels before acting” will not bring about change.
Has Britain learnt enough about terror since 9/11?
When confronted with emerging forms of “salad-bar” violence, the state risks institutionalising its own misdirections. Proposals for wider criminal offences, greater digital monitoring and tighter data-sharing must not become another expression of the illusion that administrative control can predict the unpredictable.
Unless the Government moves beyond rigid labels and addresses the social dislocation and gaps in mental health support highlighted by its critics, Prevent risks remaining a costly, reactive sticking plaster.