Was there a Starmer Southport Plot?

The Southport case is turning into a political debacle before it reaches court. That's because both Starmer and the police have created the impression they are biased or perhaps even dishonest.

Was there a cover-up after the Southport stabbings?

The Merseyside police and the UK government assure us there wasn’t. To say people remain unconvinced though is an understatement. The source of the growing suspicion that we were misled or at least …played …are the behaviour of the police and the character of Keir Starmer.

It was on the 27th July that 18 year old Axel Rudakubana is alleged to have walked into a Taylor Swift themed dance class in the Merseyside town of Southport and stabbed eleven people. Three little girls died: Alice Dasilva Aguiar aged nine, Bebe King aged six and Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven.

Eight other people were critically injured, six of whom were also children. It was such a horrific attack it sent shock waves across Britain. Perhaps understandably the police and the authorities seemed initially as shocked as anyone else. For a few crucial hours there was an information vaccuum.

Unfortunately, this only allowed rumours to spread and like Chinese whispers these became ever more gothic. Some online pundits claimed the suspect was an illegal migrant, others a Muslim inflamed by misogyny. They had no evidence to back these claims but soon there were protests and some of those turned into violent riots, including an attack on a mosque and a hostel housing asylum seekers.

With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to say now the police should have been more proactive. It took them an age to release the name of the man they’d arrested. This in itself might have calmed some of the tensions by puncturing online claims he was an Afghan illegal immigrant.

The one scrap of information that was rushed out was the stabbings were not a terror attack. And it is this insistence that has now come back to haunt the police and the judicial system.

This week Merseyside Police revealed they are adding two new offences to Rudakubana’s charge sheet. Two ….err…terror offences. Rudakubana is now accused of possessing terrorist material, namely a PDF file of guidance from those nice boys at Al-Qaeda, and of producing ricin, a highly toxic poison which has been used in terror attacks in the past. There was a twist though.

Serena Kennedy, the Chief Constable of Merseyside, said the stabbing was not being treated as a terrorist incident. No evidence, she argued, pointed to a terrorist motive. In other words the police think a man is guilty of terror offences who stabbed eleven people but he is not a terrorist because he did not conduct his alleged stabbing spree with a terrorist motive. The terror induced was presumably incidental. Or something.

I tend myself to put down apparent chaos like this to cock-up not elaborate conspiracy. I also tend to give the police, of all people, the benefit of the doubt they know what they are doing. They are the people on the ground and the only people in possession of the evidence.

However, given the accusations something is not quite right here I decided to look for myself, if nothing else to satisfy my curiosity. What I uncovered was troubling.

Speculation about a possible cover-up centres on whether the police deliberately kept the terror charges secret for longer than they needed to in order that as many rioters were safely jailed as possible. And perhaps out of fear, if they revealed the alleged terror link, this might give credence to those online claims of terrorism they were so quick to dismiss in July.

The idea the delay is suspicious has been roundly dismissed by some legal eagles, especially those who tend to support the government.

They may well be right. No one disagrees, least of all me, the police have to be very cautious indeed about the information they release to the public about a suspect or during an ongoing investigation. Everyone has a right to a fair trial, and any information that could prejudice a case has to be restricted.

Yet the strange feeling something is not as it should be refuses to go away. Our collective antennae that detect the whiff of bullshit have been activated and they just keep quivering.

The official version of events is failing to convince much of the public and that’s entirely because of the inexplicable behaviour of the police and Keir Starmer. It’s this which has undermined public trust. For that they have nobody to blame but themselves.