Prime Minister warns UK has ‘cohort of loners who are extreme and need to be factored in’ to security plans
Sir Keir Starmer has warned the UK has a “cohort of loners who are extreme and need to be factored in” as a leaked Home Office review said the UK should deal with extremism by focusing on concerning behaviours and activity rather than ideologies.
The prime minister said his government is “looking carefully where the key challenges” on extremism are, adding it is “very important” to focus on threats “so we can deploy our resource properly”.
“Obviously, that’s now informed with what I said last week in the aftermath of the Southport murders, where we’ve got the additional challenge, I think, of a cohort of loners who are extreme and they need to be factored in,” he said.
“So that’s the focus. In the end, what this comes down to is the safety and security of people across the United Kingdom, that’s my number one focus.”
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Sir Keir was speaking after a leaked Home Office extremism review suggested the UK should be focusing on behaviours and activities such as spreading conspiracy theories, misogyny, influencing racism and involvement in “an online subculture called the manosphere”.
The Home Office said Islamism and extreme right-wing ideologies are the “most prominent” issues they are tackling today.
In August, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the Home Office was conducting a “rapid analytical spring on extremism” to map and monitor trends and inform the government’s approach to extremism.
Last week, Sir Keir Starmer said he would change the law if needed to recognise the new threat posed by extremists without specific ideologies ahead of the jailing of Axel Rudakubana for the stabbing to death of three young girls in Southport last summer.
The 18-year-old had been referred to the anti-terror Prevent programme three times but was not deemed as an extremist under the scheme’s criteria. And, although he pleaded guilty to murder, police were unable to identify Rudakubana’s motive, so his crimes fell outside the definition of terrorism.
Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King were murdered by Axel Rudakubana
Recommendations could be breach of freedom of speech
The leaked review, obtained ahead of its publication by the Policy Exchange thinktank, recommends reversing the guidance, introduced by then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, for police to reduce dealing with non-hate crime incidents.
It says a new crime, making “harmful communications” online illegal, should be introduced instead. The Conservative government rejected this on freedom of speech grounds.
Policy Exchange’s Paul Stott and Andrew Gilligan said recommendations to class claims of two-tier policing as a “right-wing extremist narrative” will also raise concerns over freedom of speech.
Dangerous individuals could be missed
They said including “behaviours” such as violence against women and girls, spreading misinformation and an interest in gore or extreme violence in the definition of extremism could “swamp already stretched counter-extremism staff and counter-terror police with thousands of new cases”.
This could increase the risk “that genuinely dangerous individuals are missed – it risks addressing symptoms, not causes”, Policy Exchange said.
The review itself admits many who display such behaviours are not extremists.
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Could the Southport killings have been prevented?
Review ‘downplays Islamism’
Following Rudakubana’s guilty plea last week, Sir Keir said the UK “faces a new threat” and the teenager represented a new kind of threat with “acts of extreme violence perpetrated by loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety”.
He said he would change the law, if needed, “to recognise this new and dangerous threat” and said a review of “our entire counter-extremism system” would take place “to make sure we have what we need to defeat it”.
The review also “de-centres and downplays Islamism, by far the greatest threat to national security”, Policy Exchange said.
It said environmental extremism and Hindu extremism should be tackled, as well as “left-wing, anarchist and single issue extremism”.
And Policy Exchange said it has “ignored, even repudiated” recommendations by previous Prevent reviewer William Shawcross that the programme is the wrong place for dealing with the psychologically unstable.
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Government focused on Islamism and right-wing ideologies
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The counter-extremism sprint sought to comprehensively assess the challenge facing our country and lay the foundations for a new approach to tackling extremism – so we can stop people being drawn towards hateful ideologies.
“This includes tackling Islamism and extreme right-wing ideologies, which are the most prominent today.
“The findings from the sprint have not been formally agreed by ministers and we are considering a wide range of potential next steps arising from that work.”
Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said: “By extending the definition of extremism so widely, the government risks losing focus on ideologically motivated terrorists who pose the most risk to life.
“In fact, the Shawcross Review of Prevent made clear that counter-extremism and the counterterrorism strategy should be more focused on terrorist ideology, not less.
“Prevent must be equipped to deal with the terrorist threats in our society, and we should not be dialling back efforts to confront this.
“What the government seems to be planning is a backwards step in the interests of the political correctness we know Keir Starmer loves.
“Starmer wants the thought police to stop anyone telling uncomfortable truths that he and his left-wing lawyer friends don’t like.”
A judo Olympian has said her family is “devastated” after the discovery of body in the search for her missing brother.
Lubjana Piovesana, 28, appealed for help to find her younger sibling, Luis, 26, on Saturday. He had not been seen since the early hours of Friday morning.
A body was found in the River Frome near Napier Road in Eastville, Bristol, at around 6pm today, Avon and Somerset Police said.
Formal identification is yet to take place, the force added.
In a post on Instagram, Ms Piovesana wrote: “Hello everyone, Luis has been found.
“We are completely devastated but he has passed away.
“I am grateful for everyone’s support. And I am so sorry this happened.
“Luis was my little brother and loved by everyone. I wish he could have seen the love from everyone. He will be remembered by us all.”
The post was signed off with a dove emoji.
Luis Piovesana did not have any money or his mobile phone with him when he went missing, police said. Pics: Avon & Somerset Police
Mr Piovesana was last seen at around 3am on Friday at the Eastgate retail park, which is less than a 10-minute walk away from where the body was found.
He had travelled there by taxi from a venue in Little Ann Street, St Jude’s, a 10-minute drive away.
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The 26-year-old’s family spent the weekend searching for him, and asked people to check their sheds and gardens.
His partner, Laurin Bohler, said loved ones had travelled from Birmingham to help.
Mounted officers and police drones were also involved in the investigation.
Ms Piovesana competed for Team GB before switching to the Austrian team, and defeated British competitor Lucy Renshall in the women’s -63kg judo event at the Paris Olympics last year.
A man has been jailed for life for murdering his son’s girlfriend after she returned home from the school run.
Officers from Dyfed-Powys Police were called to an address on Bigyn Road in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, on 5 July last year.
Sophie Evans, 30, had sustained 72 separate injuries on the outside of the body, “all but three of them new injuries”.
Richard Jones, who is now 50, believed he was “being taken advantage of financially” by Ms Evans and his son, with whom she was in a relationship.
While the purpose of Jones’s visit was “purely normal”, he confronted her on that morning about his suspicions and Ms Evans’s reaction was such that Jones “lost [his] temper”.
He subjected Ms Evans to “gross violence” before ultimately strangling her and leaving the property to run errands, including ordering a new bank card and buying pastries from a bakery.
Richard Jones. Pic: Dyfed-Powys Police
‘Last time on their school run’
During sentencing on Monday, the defendant kept his head bowed for most of the hearing.
He will have to serve at least 20 years behind bars before he can be considered for release by the parole board.
Swansea Crown Court heard Ms Evans was the mother of two young children.
Passing his sentence, Judge Geraint Walters said Ms Evans “had just taken her two children for the last time on their school run” prior to the attack.
“She wasn’t to know that when she parted company with them that morning,” he added.
The court heard the Jones believed he was being defrauded by Ms Evans and his son.
“There is clear evidence, that in the days leading up to this, that you had begun harbouring thoughts that Sophie Evans and your own son were in fact financially scamming you,” he said.
“What precisely brought about that view is difficult to determine.”
Judge Walters said Jones “lost [his] temper when [he] didn’t get the answer that [he] thought [he] deserved”.
He added that, having lost his temper, the defendant “subjected [Ms Evans] to gross violence over a period of time, before you ultimately extinguished her life by strangulation”.
The court was told in evidence that at the time of the attack, Ms Evans was wearing only a bath towel.
‘The rock of our family’
In a victim personal statement, Ms Evans’s sister Kerry Quinlan told the court she was “the rock of our family”.
She said Ms Evans was taken from them in a “senseless and cruel act”.
“Words cannot express fully how much of a loss this has been to her children,” she added.
“When they cry themselves to sleep wanting their mum, she isn’t there and never will be.”
Ms Quinlan added that Jones had “taken everything from us, all in the most despicable way possible”.
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Ms Evans’s partner at the time, and the defendant’s son, Jamie Davies, said in a victim personal statement, read on his behalf, that they had both “trusted” Jones, and that Ms Evans had even been planning the defendant’s 50th birthday.
“The thought of having to live my life without Sophie causes me extreme pain and heartache,” he added.
Prosecuting, Michael Jones KC said the offence was aggravated by the defendant’s previous convictions and the fact Ms Evans was murdered in her home.
In mitigation, David Elias KC said there was a “lack of premeditation”.
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