AXEL Rudakubana won’t serve life in prison. The Southport stabbings were not an act of terror.
Firstly, Starmer ruled out a whole life sentence for Rudakubana because Sir Keir ‘takes our commitment to international law seriously’. Rudakubana, you see, was a handful of days under 18 when he committed his barbarous acts and the UN tells us that a child can’t receive ‘life imprisonment’ – so believes a blinkered Starmer.
Secondly, our officials refused to call the attacks terrorism because ‘there was no clear ideological motive’, though Rudakubana was charged with a terror offence.
The people of the UK, on the other hand, would have at the very least chosen a life sentence for Rudakubana, with a substantial number calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty. Further, they would have called his acts what they were: terrorism. They would not have hidden behind obfuscating legaleseto describe what they saw. To do so would have been an insult to all who witnessed the attacks. These two simple facts show beyond doubt the unbridgeable gap that now separates the UK establishment from its people.
Troublingly, Starmer carries with him the conviction that the UN and other international organisations such as the European Council have supreme authority over the United Kingdom. In this radical framework, he takes his own interpretation of international law to the most extreme position, denying as it does the UK her sovereignty.
This view, ironically, is not reflected in these self-same institutions. Indeed, both the UN and the European Council grant nation states discretion according to their culture and national law. The texts recognise the same supremacy of states that Starmer himself hubristically repudiates.
For instance, on the definition of childhood, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child says that ‘a child means every human being below the age of 18 years’ with the caveat ‘unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier’. The age of 18 is given only as a default standard to maximise agreement amongst the great diversity of national signatories. It is, of necessity, an international fudge.
Countries have the sovereign right to set the age of majority earlier, among many other things. They might allow youngsters to vote or join the military at 16. As it happens, one can join the forces at 16 in the UK. One can also vote at 16 at local and national elections in Scotland and Wales. In other words, 16-year-olds are treated by our own authorities, under certain circumstances, as adults.
As we know, Rudakubana was just short of 18 when he committed his act of terror. He was born in Wales, a country in which he could have joined the army and voted.
We thus see the intriguing contours of an argument through which he could have been treated as an adult, had there been the will to do so, and therefore be given a full adult life sentence. But that will was totally absent. Sir Keir Starmer and his team instead chose to cleave rigidly to their rickety dogma, thereby denying victims the thin solace that Rudakubana would never be free again.
In so doing, they diminished the law, themselves and Rudakubana’s crimes.
What is worse is that Labour’s view on the definition of a child, let alone that of a man or woman, is fluid and based on expediency, not principles. Indeed, the ground is being prepared to change electoral law in which adulthood will be redefined.
In an Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) paper entitled ‘Modernising Elections’, Dr Parth Patel and Dr Ryan Swift urge ministers to introduce ‘an Elections Bill to address growing voting inequalities and revitalise democratic participation’.
Oddly, the paper assigns a fall in voter participation in 2024 to inequality, not to a lack of meaningful choice. In 2016 and 2019 electoral participation reached record highs because voters felt it worth the candle. In 2024, however, the choice between Sunak and Starmer was felt by many as being no choice at all. With what was on offer, it was a miracle that anyone bothered to vote at all that year.
In addition, Starmer and his party benefited enormously from the first-past-the-post system, winning a deeply uninspiring one-third of the popular vote and simultaneously securing a barely believable two-thirds of Commons seats.
Regardless, the Institute for Public Policy Research pleads with Labour to upturn the election process that gave them so much with so little by allowing non-citizens to vote, scrapping ID requirements altogether and lowering the voting age to 16.
Ostensibly to fight ‘inequality’, the report asks the government to legislate to gerrymander the electoral process, in order to ‘combat populism’.
But why bother with vote-rigging when the results have hitherto worked so much in your favour? No politician has been elected to office in the UK with less popular support than Starmer and lost the little he had so fast. He has become more unpopular in six months ‘than any other PM in over 40 years’.
Having benefited from the Conservative Party’s self-destruction, Labour can sense an irrecoverable collapse in support similar to that of Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada and the Socialist parties of France and Germany.
There is ever-increasing support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Last month his party topped a poll with 26 per cent, ahead of the Tories on 23 per cent and Labour on 22 per cent.
In six months since the last General Election, Labour has lost a third of its support while Reform has doubled its own. The reasons are simple: Sir Keir Starmer’s views are deeply and necessarily unpopular because they deny the nation.
He believes in international lawsand separate communities, living on the same plot of land, detached from the unifying concept of the nation. In short, he wills, wittingly or not, the Balkanisationof Great Britain.
All the signs point to Starmer sticking rigidly to his worldview come what may because of his convictions both that he is right and righteous. Nevertheless, his stance cannot easily survive a direct electoral confrontation with a coalescing movement headed by Nigel Farage that demands a return to proper border controls, financial continence, and proper punishment for wrong-doers, among many other things.
There is a strong possibility that Starmer will heed the calls from the IPPR, Labour’s sock-puppet, and change electoral law to give himself a non-sporting chance to defeat Farage under the guise of ‘equality’. He will passionately argue for the reduction of the voting age to 16, making teenagers adults in the process.
Shamefully, what he will do to try to save his political career he will not do for the Welsh youth who wasn’t a terrorist.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on February 3, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
