Is Axel Rudakubana Making Fools of His Jailers?

Last week, our state authorities turned one of Britain’s most notorious child murderers into a victim to be pitied rather than punished. Axel Rudakubana – the son of Rwandan migrants who, in a fit of Islamist-inspired rage, slaughtered three young girls and attempted to butcher 10 others – was transferred from Belmarsh high security prison to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act. Among other things, he will now have access to a state-of-the-art gym, an on-site café and a swimming pool, and all for the princely sum of £300,000 per annum, instead of the £60,000 it costs to keep him incarcerated at Belmarsh. Perhaps these amenities will transform him back into the angelic Welsh choirboy he was purported to be before his orgiastic descent into bloodlust and violence. Or perhaps they will provide a degree of luxury for an irredeemable monster with a long history of manipulating the credulous.

I suspect the latter, as do the families of the little girls so cruelly taken from them. Prior to his sentencing last year, the court found that a mental disorder was not responsible for his actions. One might therefore reasonably wonder what has changed. Furthermore, the Southport Public Inquiry claimed that before the attack there were “strong indications” that Rudakubana had researched “mental health explanations and defences that might be available to him following a criminal prosecution”. This points to an individual well-versed in manipulating a system mired in progressive groupthink – a system that views perpetrators as victims and, in the process, callously ignores the bereaved (the real victims) and sneers at their pleas for justice.

This is the latest act in a morality play that exposes the perverse and iniquitous consequences of the radical Left’s malign capture of the British state. Rudakubana took a knife to school on 10 separate occasions, attacked a pupil with a hockey stick and searched school shootings in America during an ICT lesson. In what world does this catalogue of warnings go without meaningful intervention? He had just one conviction. One! Despite carrying a knife into school on 10 separate occasions. Furthermore, when Joanne Hodson, his former headteacher, described him as “sinister”, “cold and calculating”, she was swiftly rebuked and accused of racially profiling “a black boy with a knife” by an unnamed health worker. The accusation silenced Hodson. This amoral refusal to see Rudakubana as anything other than a victim is not only axiomatic of the liberal-Left’s warped vision of criminal justice; it is also the reason why three little girls were butchered. Radical progressivism kills.

It also maims. Last year Rudakubana allegedly threw boiling water over a prison officer – I suspect because, as the President of the Prison Governors’ Association admitted, prisoners are allowed to boil water in their cells. Bless them. Let’s not worry about the safety of the wardens, eh, as long as the prisoners, even the violent animals guilty of the most unspeakable crimes, get to make a brew. They’ve been let down by society, after all. They at least deserve a mug of Tetley’s.

And then we come to the biggest state failure of all: the fact that he was in the country in the first place. How and why were his Rwandan parents, not long after the brutalising experience of the 1994 genocide, allowed to come here, set up home – no doubt supported by the welfare state – and raise a child to become a mass murderer? And why are they now living in anonymity at great expense to the taxpayers traumatised and endangered by their feckless parenting? These questions have yet to be asked, let alone answered, by the political class. The truth is inconvenient. Suicidal empathy invited them here and suicidal empathy continues to indulge them, mixed with a large dollop of national self-loathing. They are the victims; we the oppressors.

Axel Rudakubana’s story reveals a disturbing reality. The British state has been captured wholesale by the radical Left. His parents were admitted by an immigration system that fetishises the migrant and demonises the native. The school, healthcare and criminal justice systems, moreover, indulged him at every turn, treating him as a victim to be coddled and pampered rather than a disturbed young man needing punishment and isolation for the safety of the wider community. The state has blood on its hands.

This piece first appeared on Joe Baron’s Substack, which you can subscribe to here.