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As the clock ticked down towards 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March, Liam Bates kept refreshing his browser.

Over the preceding weeks, Marcegaglia, the stainless steel company whose long products division he headed up, had rushed to melt and ship as much metal as it could from its furnaces in Sheffield across to the east coast of America, ahead of the imposition of tariffs.

Stainless steel

UK and US industrially interlocked

Of all the varieties of steel, stainless steel – an alloy of iron and chrome, along with other elements like nickel, molybdenum and carbon – is among the most important. Unlike most other iron alloys, which can rust when they encounter oxygen, stainless steel has a passive film that protects it from corrosion and can even self-heal. That makes it essential not just for use in sinks and cutlery (where most people will encounter it on a daily basis) but, arguably even more essential, in surgical instruments, heavy machinery and the pipes and ducts out of sight but essential to keeping civilisation working.

The trick of how to make stainless steel in large quantities was discovered here in Sheffield by Harry Brearley, and while the laboratories he worked for shut down long ago, the furnace at Marcegaglia, in an industrial park just outside the city, can trace a continuous thread back to him. This furnace used to be owned by British Steel, the nationalised corporation responsible for most of Britain’s steel manufacture until the days of privatisation.

Marcegaglia steel furnace
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Marcegaglia steel furnace in Sheffield

Ever since the invention of stainless steel, Britain has melted, cast and exported vast quantities of the stuff to America. For all that the US has a sizeable stainless steel sector, the two countries’ stainless sectors have nonetheless been industrially interlocked since the days of Henry Ford. You can see it in the way Marcegaglia functions.

It melts down scrap in its electric arc furnace in Sheffield – an enormous cauldron whose electrodes create a storm of lightning that consumes the same power as a sizeable northern city – and adds the relevant alloy ingredients to form a long, heavy metallic bar, a billet as it’s known. That billet is then shipped across the Atlantic to the company’s other site, where the billets are processed into bars that are then sold into the North American market. It is a single economic organism, split only by an ocean.

But today that ocean and that cross-country split have become an enormous problem. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports, back in 2018, so-called “intermediate” products like the billet made by Marcegaglia and then processed in America were excluded from the duties. This time around, the initial tariff rules had no such exemptions. The upshot was that any steel arriving in American ports after 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March – including Marcegaglia’s half-finished stainless billets – would incur hefty 25% tariffs.

A race against time

All of which was why Liam Bates had raced to get as much steel as possible into the US before that deadline. But as he refreshed his browser in the run-up to that deadline, he noticed two straggling shipments, still stuck on the Atlantic. The two ships, the Eva Marie and the Atlantic Star, were, between them, carrying about $12m of steel and they had been due to dock in the US on 10 or 11 March. If so, they would have avoided having to pay those 25% tariffs. But now storms and squalls were spreading across the North Atlantic. Would they stray into the ships’ path, disrupting shipping?

If the cargo arrived late, it would obliterate any margin the company hoped to make on its steel. And since those bars were destined for Marcegaglia’s own plant, the company would have to pay all those costs itself (tariffs are technically paid by the importer). Somehow, Bates had found himself helplessly witnessing an unexpected collision of politics and weather – with profound commercial consequences.

Of all the metal items Britain exports to the US, stainless steel is by far and away the biggest category. And the vast majority of that steel comes from the melt shop at Marcegaglia. But the quandary facing Liam Bates, and those companies he sells to in the US, helps illustrate the difficulties of economic policy-by-tariff.

Americans will see cost of most things go up

The prevailing theory behind the White House measures is that by raising the price of all imported metals, it will encourage domestic producers to build new production. It will help the US to reindustrialise – or so says Donald Trump. And in the long run, that might well prove right. Already, metals producers are raising money, promising to restart old, mothballed smelters. After all, if your main overseas competitors have seen their prices rise by 25%, that’s quite a competitive opportunity.

The problem is: building industrial production takes time. Marcegaglia itself is planning to replace its old furnace with a newer model, but the planning process has already taken years; the construction itself will be measured in months if not years too. In other words, even if everything goes to plan, America is very unlikely to replace imported steel with domestic production within the period of Donald Trump’s term as president.

In the meantime, American consumers will see the cost of pretty much everything going up. After all, steel – ignored or dismissed as it sometimes is – is the single most important metallic substance in the world. If something isn’t made of steel it’s made in machines made of steel. And lifting some of those steel prices by 25% will travel like an economic tidal wave through US supply chains.

UK flooded with cheap imported steel

The tidal wave is already washing back elsewhere too. With so much steel now unable to get into the US at a decent price, exporters are redeploying shipments elsewhere. All of a sudden countries like the UK are seeing a flood of cheap imported steel – good news in the short run for consumers, but disastrous for what is left of Britain’s domestic industry.

Sheffield Marcegaglia steel furnace

As the deadline approached and Bates nervously refreshed his live vessel tracking map, disaster struck. The squalls across the Atlantic mounted and the Eva Marie and Atlantic Star slowed nearly to a halt. By the time midnight struck and the tariffs came into place, the two vessels were still many miles off the US coast. They had lost the race. The upshot was Marcegaglia would have to pay around $4m in tariffs – about £3m.

That a company was struck with a somewhat arbitrary fee simply to pass goods from one of its factories to another might be among the most egregious examples of the collateral economic damage wrought by trade barriers, but it is likely to be the first of many perverse episodes, with consequences all around the world. For steel is not the only metal to be hit with tariffs. If anything, the drama is even greater for another metal: aluminium.

Aluminium

The world’s biggest factory – hidden in Scotland

Here’s a riddle for you: what is the biggest factory in the world?

You’re probably thinking of vast, cavernous car production lines in Michigan, of shipyards in Korea or steelworks in China. But there’s a strong case to be made that the world’s biggest factory is instead to be found deep in the Highlands of Scotland.

Not that it looks anything like a factory. To the untrained eye, it looks, instead, like heather, forests and bubbling burns of water trickling into lochs. But the 114,000 acres of estates in Lochaber and Badenoch – the third biggest rural estate in Scotland – play a crucial role in helping produce one of the most important substances in the world.

Part of the side of the mountain running into an enormous hydroelectric power station for Fort William aluminium plant
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Part of the side of a mountain running into a hydroelectric power station for Fort William aluminium plant

The Fort William aluminium plant sits under the shadow of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the United Kingdom. Once upon a time, it was just one of a constellation of smelters dotted around Scotland, that made this country, all told, one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers.

For all that it is very prevalent in the earth’s crust, aluminium used to be one of the world’s most precious metals – so much so that no one had even laid eyes on it until the 19th century. When he wanted to impress his guests, Napoleon III served them dinner not on gold plates but on aluminium.

An extraordinary metal

Why? Because aluminium is very difficult – even harder than iron – to convert from the ores you find in the ground into its metallic form. Burn iron ore hot enough, in the right kind of furnace alongside the right kind of charcoal or coal, and you eventually smelt out a form of metal. But aluminium needs a different kind of force to be persuaded to loosen its bonds and form into a pure metal – the force of electricity.

So only when the Hall-Heroult process, which allows you to smelt aluminium via electrolysis of alumina (a processed version of the bauxite you get out of the ground), was invented in 1886 did aluminium become a widely available metal. Few people talk these days about the Hall-Heroult process, but it was a breakthrough of earth-shattering proportions. Aluminium is an extraordinary metal – strong but light. And those qualities make it essential in aeronautic deployments. No aluminium, no planes.

Fort William aluminium plant
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Fort William aluminium plant

It is no coincidence that the Wright Brothers’ plane at Kitty Hawk had an engine made out of aluminium. Steel would have weighed the glider down too much. And it’s no coincidence that powered flight happened shortly after aluminium became widely available. Without the Hall-Heroult process, the world would have been a very different place.

While the process wasn’t dreamt up in the UK, British industrialists rapidly embraced it, building smelters all over the country. But the catch with aluminium is that you can’t smelt it without a big and (this is important) very reliable supply of power. Turn off the power to those enormous carbon electrodes inside an aluminium smelter and in a matter of hours the metal at its base will solidify, effectively destroying it. More than nearly any other industrial process, this is not something you can just switch off willy-nilly, which helps explain why smelters aren’t typically dependent on variable power sources like wind and solar.

It also explains why, throughout history, these plants have been seen as some of the most important industrial locations throughout the world. The Fort William plant provided most of the aluminium used in Spitfires during WWII. It was repeatedly targeted by the Luftwaffe – indeed there is an old German bomb kept as a memento just near the turbines that power the cells here.

Fort William aluminium dam
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Fort William aluminium dam

Some of the world’s earliest smelters were powered by hydroelectricity – most notably the ones which drew their power from the Niagara Falls plants near Buffalo, New York. But the Fort William plant was subtly but importantly different. Those other hydro plants would typically piggyback off a big dam generating power from a big river – such as the ones you find in the US or Canada, or the fjords of Norway. But none of Britain’s rivers is quite powerful enough or with a reliable enough flow to provide that kind of uninterrupted power.

Radical design

So the designers of the Fort William plant did something radical. They bought up vast stretches of the countryside around Ben Nevis (including Ben Nevis itself). And within that estate, they built a series of dams to collect the rainwater trickling down from local watersheds. Those dams weren’t there to generate power for homes – they were there to collect the water and channel it through a series of tunnels, running 16 miles through the hills and through the flanks of Ben Nevis. Then the water, collected from those 114,000 acres, feeds five pipes running down the side of the mountain which run into an enormous hydroelectric power station.

Fort William aluminium dam

There are many aluminium smelters around the world and many hydroelectric dams. But none are quite like this one. The point being that without the estate, without all those trickling streams and heather-covered watersheds, the plant here simply wouldn’t function. It is all part of a single ecosystem.

These days the plant is connected to the national grid, meaning it also serves another function: balancing. This comes back to one of the dysfunctions of the grid: it doesn’t have enough high-voltage lines connecting Scotland, with all its wind farms, and the south. So on windy days, when there’s too much power in Scotland, instead of curtailing those farms and wasting the electricity, the plant can suck in extra power from the Scottish section of the grid and leave its water where it is as a sort of battery.

Competition from China

The problem the plant has faced is that these days aluminium is a commodity metal. And it’s becoming harder and harder to compete with the cheap metal being exported from China. China dominates the global supply of the metal, in large part because its suppliers benefit from cheap energy and generous government subsidies – neither of which are available in the UK. As the years have gone by, the workers at Fort William have watched as, one by one, every other plant in Britain was shuttered. Rumours still abound that they may eventually be next.

Fort William aluminium plant
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Fort William aluminium plant

And, much as for Marcegaglia down in Sheffield, the tariffs on aluminium will only make life tougher for Alvance, the unit of Liberty House – part of Indian-born Sanjeev Gupta’s business empire – that now owns the Fort William plant. Arguably, the impact could be even greater. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on aluminium back in 2018, the rate he chose was 10%. The difference with the steel tariff level (which was 25% then and now) reflected the fact that the US imported far more aluminium than steel. Imposing severe extra costs on it would, the White House worried, cripple the American aerospace and car businesses dependent on the metal. No such concern this time around. The tariff is 25%.

Quite how that will affect the plant here in the Scottish Highlands remains to be seen. After all, Alvance itself doesn’t sell anything directly to the US, sending its large slabs of metal to other firms in England which process and roll them into sheets and specialised components, some of which end up in the US. Perhaps, as the defence industry ratchets up in the coming years, more of that aluminium will be used by domestic industry. But what’s to stop UK manufacturers doing what they’ve been doing for years, and simply opting for the cheapest metal available, which usually comes from China? Either way, life for the last remaining aluminium plant in the UK is about to get harder, not easier.

But while the main upshot of the trade war building across the Atlantic and the Pacific will be to make both sides worse off – that, at least, is the prediction from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – that doesn’t mean there won’t be some beneficiaries in this country. For a small but important example, let’s travel from the far north of Britain to its far south.

Tungsten

UK has one of its biggest resources in world

Drive across Dartmoor, the windswept national park in the heart of Devon, and every so often you come across the remains of an old tin mine. At Fox Tor you find the remains of alluvial mining; there is Golden Dagger Mine, which ran all the way to the 1930s, as well as the hollow stone chimney of the pumping house at Wheal Betsy.

Hemerdon tungsten mine
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Hemerdon tungsten mine

For much of the ancient era, tin – which when mixed with copper creates the alloy bronze – was what we would today call a “critical mineral”, essential for the production of the strong tools and weapons of the Bronze Age. And for centuries, the majority of Europe’s tin came from Cornwall and Devon.

That, of course, is long in the past. But just on the outskirts of Dartmoor is a site that could – just could – make this an important site for critical minerals once again. For here, beneath the soil of southwest England, is one of the world’s biggest resources of tungsten.

Tungsten among few substances on everyone’s list

Tungsten is among the 21st century’s most important critical minerals. Nearly every country has a list of these materials – the kinds of things they need to make their most important products – and the members of those lists vary by region. But tungsten is one of the few substances that feature in everyone’s list. The hardest metal in existence, with the highest melting point, it is essential in the production of hard steel tools, weapons, armour and as the electrodes inside semiconductor circuits. If you are making electronics you need tungsten. If you are going to war you need tungsten.

Hemerdon tungsten mine

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the main heyday for this mine, which contains plenty of tin as well as tungsten, was in the First and Second World Wars. Much as the Fort William plant provided aluminium for British Spitfires, Hemerdon provided the tungsten and tin needed for the weapons Britain used to fight the Nazis. But ever since then, its history has been chequered, to say the least.

It went into hibernation for decades, a sleep broken for only a single day during the Korean War. Then, a few years ago, investors tried to get it up and running again. They built a vast processing plant and began to mine the metal. But by 2019 the operation had run out of money and imploded. All that was left was an even bigger hole in the ground, a large tailings dam for waste and a hangar filled with processing equipment.

In part, the reason Hemerdon went belly-up that time was because the company made the mistake miners often make: they misjudged the type of ore they were expecting to grind through, meaning their processing plant was far less efficient than it could have been. But an even bigger challenge came back to something that will sound familiar: they were trying to compete with China.

China dominates world tungsten production – even more so than for aluminium and steel. It essentially controls the global market and, just as importantly, the tungsten price. Anyone trying to sell tungsten is contending with Chinese prices which can yo-yo for reasons no one can entirely explain. That makes it fiendishly difficult to compete.

But in recent years, new investors have begun to put fresh funds into the Hemerdon mine, hoping history will not repeat itself and this time around it can exploit that enormous ore resource. And there are at least a couple of reasons to believe (famous last words in finance) that “this time might be different”.

The first is that, in retaliation against Donald Trump’s latest metal tariffs, China has begun to put export limits on tungsten. How this will work in practice remains unclear (remember that like most markets China controls, the way tungsten sales function is almost completely opaque) but if it encourages domestic buyers to look for local suppliers, that could help the mine to find buyers. After all, in theory, it could produce a few thousand tonnes of the metal each year, which would instantly leapfrog Britain to become the world’s second or third-biggest producer (albeit a long way down from China).

Supplies matter more than ever

The second big shift comes back to defence. With the world remilitarising, all of a sudden tungsten supplies matter more than ever. And since defence suppliers pay outsized attention to where metals come from, again, that might allow a British tungsten mine to succeed where predecessors have failed.

Add to this the fact that the mine itself is nearly ready to be exploited and that the new owners reckon they’ve ironed out the problems that beset their predecessors, and it’s a compelling case. They think they could be getting metal out of the ground as soon as next year.

But those overarching challenges haven’t gone away. And nor has another, bigger problem facing the entire industry, not just in the UK but – perhaps even more so – in the US. How can you plan in a world where you just don’t know what’s coming out of the White House in the next few days, let alone the next few years?

Consider: imagine you’re a stainless steel producer or an aluminium smelter in the US. Those 25% tariffs mean all of a sudden in theory you have a competitive advantage over anyone shipping metal into the country. All of a sudden, there’s a strong case to build a smelter or a stainless steel melting shop. So you get to work looking for backers.

Uncertainty creates challenges

But building a plant like this takes time. You need to find a site, connect it to high-voltage power, and build the facilities and all the necessary infrastructure. Best case scenario: it might take a couple of years, but even that is ambitious. And as you contemplate this and map out your plans, those backers will ask you the same nagging question you’ve been asking yourself: sure, the economics of an aluminium smelter might add up today; but what if the president changes his mind tomorrow, or next year? What if those tariffs are pulled by the next president? Then, all of a sudden, the sums very much don’t add up.

All of which is to say, uncertainty around tariffs is a challenge not just for those companies hoping to ship products to America, but for American firms hoping to benefit from this trade war. And bear in mind metals are only the first chapter of what could be a long saga, which ends up engulfing all corners of American trade. These are unpredictable times, however you look at it.

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At least 13 people may have taken their own lives linked to Post Office scandal, public inquiry finds

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At least 13 people may have taken their own lives linked to Post Office scandal, public inquiry finds

At least 13 people may have taken their own lives after being accused of wrongdoing based on evidence from the Horizon IT system that the Post Office and developers Fujitsu knew could be false, the public inquiry has found.

A further 59 people told the inquiry they considered ending their lives, 10 of whom tried on at least one occasion, while other postmasters and family members recount suffering from alcoholism and mental health disorders including anorexia and depression, family breakup, divorce, bankruptcy and personal abuse.

Follow latest on public inquiry into Post Office scandal

Writing in the first volume of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry report, chairman Sir Wyn Williams concludes that this enormous personal toll came despite senior employees at the Post Office knowing the Horizon IT system could produce accounts “which were illusory rather than real” even before it was rolled out to branches.

Sir Wyn said: “I am satisfied from the evidence that I have heard that a number of senior, and not so senior, employees of the Post Office knew or, at the very least, should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error… Yet, for all practical purposes, throughout the lifetime of Legacy Horizon, the Post Office maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate.”

Referring to the updated version of Horizon, known as Horizon Online, which also had “bugs errors and defects” that could create illusory accounts, he said: “I am satisfied that a number of employees of Fujitsu and the Post Office knew that this was so.”

The first volume of the report focuses on what Sir Wyn calls the “disastrous” impact of false accusations made against at least 1,000 postmasters, and the various redress schemes the Post Office and government has established since miscarriages of justice were identified and proven.

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‘It stole a lot from me’

Recommendations regarding the conduct of senior management of the Post Office, Fujitsu and ministers will come in a subsequent report, but Sir Wyn is clear that unjust and flawed prosecutions were knowingly pursued.

“All of these people are properly to be regarded as victims of wholly unacceptable behaviour perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu from time to time and by the Post Office and Fujitsu as institutions,” he says.

What are the inquiry’s recommendations?

Calling for urgent action from government and the Post Office to ensure “full and fair compensation”, he makes 19 recommendations including:

• Government and the Post Office to agree a definition of “full and fair” compensation to be used when agreeing payouts
• Ending “unnecessarily adversarial attitude” to initial offers that have depressed the value of payouts, ⁠and ensuring consistency across all four compensation schemes
• The creation of a standing body to administer financial redress to people wronged by public bodies
• Compensation to be extended to close family members of those affected who have suffered “serious negative consequences”
• The Post Office, Fujitsu and government agreeing a programme for “restorative justice”, a process that brings together those that have suffered harm with those that have caused it

Regarding the human impact of the Post Office’s pursuit of postmasters, including its use of unique powers of prosecution, Sir Wyn writes: “I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the trauma which persons are likely to suffer when they are the subject of criminal investigation, prosecution, conviction and sentence.”

He says that even the process of being interviewed under caution by Post Office investigators “will have been troubling at best and harrowing at worst”.

Read more:
Post Office inquiry lays bare heart-breaking legacy – analysis

‘Hostile and abusive behaviour’

The report finds that those wrongfully convicted were “subject to hostile and abusive behaviour” in their local communities, felt shame and embarrassment, with some feeling forced to move.

Detailing the impact on close family members of those prosecuted, Sir Wyn writes: “Wives, husbands, children and parents endured very significant suffering in the form of distress, worry and disruption to home life, in employment and education.

“In a number of cases, relationships with spouses broke down and ended in divorce or separation.

“In the most egregious cases, family members themselves suffered psychiatric illnesses or psychological problems and very significant financial losses… their suffering has been acute.”

The report includes 17 case studies of those affected by the scandal including some who have never spoken publicly before. They include Millie Castleton, daughter of Lee Castleton, one of the first postmasters prosecuted.

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Three things you need to know about Post Office report

She told the inquiry how her family being “branded thieves and liars” affected her mental health, and contributed to a diagnosis of anorexia that forced her to drop out of university.

Her account concludes: “Even now as I go into my career, I still find it so incredibly hard to trust anyone, even subconsciously. I sabotage myself by not asking for help with anything.

“I’m trying hard to break this cycle but I’m 26 and am very conscious that I may never be able to fully commit to natural trust. But my family is still fighting. I’m still fighting, as are many hundreds involved in the Post Office trial.”

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the inquiry’s report “marks an important milestone for sub-postmasters and their families”.

He added that he was “committed to ensuring wronged sub-postmasters are given full, fair, and prompt redress”.

“The recommendations contained in Sir Wyn’s report require careful reflection, including on further action to complete the redress schemes,” Mr Reynolds said.

“Government will promptly respond to the recommendations in full in parliament.”

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Post Office scandal inquiry lays bare a second injustice

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Post Office scandal inquiry lays bare a second injustice

The long-awaited first report from the Post Office Horizon scandal inquiry lays bare not just the devastating personal toll of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, but also the slow-motion failure of the government and the Post Office to deliver meaningful redress.

Sir Wyn Williams’s first report documents with stark clarity how hundreds of sub-postmasters, wrongly accused of theft and fraud due to the faulty Horizon IT system, lost their livelihoods, homes, reputations – and in some cases, their lives.

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Thirteen people are believed to have taken their lives as a result of the scandal.

Fifty-nine contemplated it.

It talks of alcohol addiction, serious mental illness, and bankruptcy – all tearing families apart and leaving behind a heartbreaking legacy.

But if the scandal was a failure of justice, the response to it has become a second injustice.

More on Post Office Scandal

Critical on a technical level

The report is critical, on a fairly technical level, about the complexity, delays, and bureaucracy of redress schemes that have left victims still waiting years for full compensation.

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‘It stole a lot from me’

Hundreds of whom have died before seeing “full and fair redress”.

While Sir Wyn is fair to the government and the Post Office in stating that he believes their commitment to delivering the above has been in “good faith”, he concludes this has not been achieved for every victim, describing “formidable” difficulties.

There are 19 recommendations – including a push to ensure consistency across all four redress schemes, with an agreed and public definition of “full and fair redress”.

Compensation

Among them, that family members of victims should be compensated, and a permanent public body established to manage future redress schemes in future.

Additionally, Fujitsu, the Post Office, and the government should engage in formal restorative justice programmes.

There was also a flavour of what is to come in the final report later this year or next.

The report has found that both Fujitsu and Post Office staff knew Horizon could produce false data but concealed this, maintaining a false narrative of accuracy.

One of the most important things now, though, is how and when the government, Post Office, and Fujitsu respond officially.

Sir Wyn has also set a deadline of 10 October 2025 for that.

The victims of this scandal have waited long enough.

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‘Wholesale failure’ to address risks posed by Southport attacker before murders, says public inquiry chairman

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'Wholesale failure' to address risks posed by Southport attacker before murders, says public inquiry chairman

There was a “wholesale and general failure” to address the risks posed by Axel Rudakubana before the Southport attack, the chairman of the public inquiry into the murders has said.

In his opening statement at Liverpool Town Hall, Sir Adrian Fulford said the teenager’s “known predilection for knife crime” suggests it was “far from an unforeseeable catastrophic event”.

The former vice president of the Court of Appeal said Rudakubana’s actions “impose the heaviest of burdens” to investigate how it was possible for him to cause “such devastation”.

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‘We need to understand what went wrong’

The 18-year-old murdered Elsie Dot Stancomb, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, at a Taylor Swift-themed class on 29 July last year.

He also injured eight other children and two adults at the Hart Space in the Merseyside seaside town, with Sir Adrian describing the attack as “one of the most egregious crimes in our country’s history”.

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‘We don’t want Elsie forgotten’

The public inquiry, announced by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in January, will look into whether the attack could or should have been prevented, given what was known about the killer.

Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff, had been referred to the government’s anti-extremism Prevent scheme three times before the murders, including over research into school shootings and the London Bridge terror attack.

He had also accessed online material about explosives, warfare, knives, assassination and an al Qaeda training manual.

A rapid review into his contact with Prevent found his case should have been kept open and that he should have been referred to Channel, another anti-terror scheme.

Read more:
‘She had a wonderful impact – we don’t want her to be forgotten’

What is the anti-terrorism programme Prevent?

Rudakubana was twice caught with a knife and managed to hoard other blades, as well as a bow and arrow, machetes, a sledgehammer and the deadly toxin ricin at his home.

He bought the 20cm chef’s knife used to carry out the attack using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Sir Adrian said he did not want to pre-judge the outcome of the inquiry.

But he added: “These factors, if correct and when taken together, tend to suggest that far from being an unforeseeable catastrophic event, the perpetrator posed a very serious and significant risk of violent harm, over a number of years, with a particular and known predilection for knife crime.

“Furthermore, his ability, unhindered, to access gravely violent material on the internet, to order knives online when underage, and then to leave home unsupervised to commit the present attack, speaks to a wholesale and general failure to intervene effectively, or indeed at all, to address the risks that he posed.”

Sir Adrian said the inquiry will examine decisions taken in light of Rudakubana’s “deteriorating and deeply troubling behaviour” to identify “without fear or favour” all of the relevant failings.

He said he aims to make recommendations to ensure the best chance of stopping others “who may be drawn to treating their fellow human beings in such a cruel and inhuman way”.

Rudakubana, 18, was jailed for a minimum of 52 years in January and is being investigated over an alleged attack on a prison officer at Belmarsh prison in May.

Sir Adrian said he would be referred to by his initials or as “the perpetrator” during the inquiry and asked the media not to show his “terrifying and singularly distressing” police mugshot to avoid causing distress to the survivors and their families, who have been granted anonymity.

The surviving children, many whom were under the age of 10, are “bravely trying to cope with school life in the face of what they have suffered,” he added.

Sir Adrian asked those in the room to stand for a minute’s silence for the victims.

Some of those whose children were injured will speak at a hearing on Wednesday before the inquiry is adjourned to 8 September, with the first phase expected to last until November.

It will then move on to a second phase next year to “consider the wider issues of children and young people being drawn into extreme violence”.

Rachael Wong, director at law firm Bond Turner, representing the three bereaved families, said: “We know that nothing the inquiry reveals or subsequently recommends will change the unimaginable loss felt by the families of Elsie, Alice and Bebe, but we all now have a responsibility to ensure that something like this never happens again.

“We will be doing all we can to assist the chair through the inquiry and uncover the truth.

“It is only through intense public scrutiny that real change can be effected.”

Sefton Council is asking people not to leave flowers near schools or the scene of the attack to mark the anniversary later this month, but to donate to local charitable causes instead.

There will be a three-minute silence and flags will be lowered to half-mast on public buildings around the Liverpool city region.

“We fully understand that many of us still need to grieve and to mark the day,” the council said in an open letter.

“Our colleagues have been working with faith and community leaders to identify local spaces where you can go, within your neighbourhood, to pay tribute, whether this be to say a prayer, light a candle, speak to someone or quietly reflect in a way that feels right for you.”

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