Starmer hints at tougher laws to block ‘tidal wave of violence’ online

Tougher laws could be needed to regulate the “nightmares of the online world”, Sir Keir Starmer said after it emerged Axel Rudakubana trawled the internet for extreme violent content before the Southport atrocity.

The Prime Minister said users can view a “tidal wave of violence” on the internet, and that there are tougher rules for films shown in cinemas unlike for the material freely available online.

Rudakubana had a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual, which led to him being charged with possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism, which he admitted on Monday.

When police searched Rudakubana’s home in Banks, Lancashire, after he carried out the Southport murders on July 29, they found knives and poison, as well as images and documents relating to violence, war and genocide on his devices.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she had asked tech companies to remove the material he looked at and also pledged tougher restrictions on the online sale of knives after it emerged Rudakubana bought a blade from Amazon.

The Prime Minister said the teenager represented a new kind of threat, distinct from politically or ideologically motivated terrorism, with “acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety”.

At a Downing Street press conference, Sir Keir said: “To face up to this new threat there are also bigger questions.

“Questions such as how we protect our children from the tidal wave of violence freely available online.

“Because you can’t tell me that the material this individual viewed before committing these murders should be accessible on mainstream social media platforms.

“That with just a few clicks, people can watch video after horrific video. Videos that in some cases are never taken down.

“No – that cannot be right.”

Sir Keir said the attack in Southport was not an “isolated, ghastly example”, pointing to evidence from mass school shootings in the US.

He said: “This is a new threat, individualised, extreme violence, obsessive, often following online viewing of material from all sorts of different sources.

“It is not a one-off. It is something that we all need to understand and have a shared undertaking to deal with within our society.

“That is not just the laws on terrorism, the framework on terrorism. It’s also the laws of what we can access online.

“We still have rules in place in this country about what we can see at a cinema, yet online you can access no end of materials.

“We have to ensure that we can rise to this new challenge, and that is what I’m determined to do.”

The Prime Minister said there was a “growing sense” that “the set of unwritten rules that hold a nation together have in recent years been ripped apart”.

“Children who have stopped going to school since the pandemic, young people who opted out of work or education, more and more people retreating into parallel lives, whether through failures of integration or just a country slowly turning away from itself, wounds that politics, for all that it may have contributed, must try to heal,” he said.

The Home Secretary told the House of Commons that details of Rudakubana’s online activities would be set out in court on Thursday when he is sentenced.

She said: “The prosecution will provide more detail on Thursday about the material Rudakubana searched for online, but I can tell the House the Government is this week contacting technology companies to ask them to remove dangerous material that he accessed.

“Companies should not be profiting from hosting content that puts children’s lives at risk.”

She also told MPs that laws around the sale of knives online would be tightened in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring.

“Despite the fact that he had been convicted for violence and was just 17, he was easily able to order a knife on Amazon.

“That’s a total disgrace and it must change.”

Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation which campaigns on online safety, said the Prime Minister is right to signal a review of the law “to protect children and society from a growing melting pot of extreme and violent threats”.

He said: “We are deeply concerned about the growing threat of violent motives and ideas fomenting online, including those which are fuelling a wave of sadistic grooming to coerce children into grooming and self-harm acts.

“Regrettably, our calls for Ofcom to respond to this urgent threat have so far fallen on deaf ears.

“The only credible response can be for Sir Keir Starmer to commit to a reworked and strengthened Online Safety Act that tackles this growing tsunami of increasingly interconnected and deeply disturbing harm.”

The provisions of the Online Safety Act are being gradually implemented but Downing Street said further action could be taken.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “From the spring, the Online Safety Act will bring in new rules for online platforms, which is the right thing to do to ensure illegal content, illegal mis- and disinformation, hateful content, is removed.

“So those new requirements will be there.”

He said the Government was “not going to take anything off the table as we do that work”.