The public hearings at the Southport Inquiry began on July 8. Even before the first witness statements were heard, a striking tension emerged between the inquiry’s declared purpose and its carefully managed staging. One of the first gestures of this statutory investigation, ostensibly into how state agencies failed to see an adolescent with a fascination for extreme violence and al-Qaeda training manuals who stood in plain sight, was a formal request that the media refrain from showing him to the public.
That adolescent was Axel Rudakubana, or “AR”, as the inquiry now insists on calling him. In January, he was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 52 years. During an attack which took place at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on 29 July last year, he murdered three little girls and attempted to kill eight more children, along with two adults.
The inquiry, established under the Inquiries Act 2005 and held at Liverpool Town Hall, is examining whether the attack could have been prevented. Over the coming months, it will consider how agencies, including the police, courts, the youth justice system, the UK counter-terrorism program Prevent, social services, and mental health services responded to a pattern of increasingly alarming behaviour by Rudakubana. As the Chair, retired Lord Justice of Appeal Sir Adrian Fulford, acknowledged in his opening remarks, this included: Rudakubana’s researching school shootings and terrorist attacks, so as to prompt three separate referrals to Prevent; repeated instances of carrying knives; explicit statements of intent to kill; and the acquisition of a 20cm chef’s knife using a VPN to obscure his identity.
Following the attack, police discovered at Rudakubana’s home a cache of weapons including machetes, a bow and arrow, a sledgehammer, and materials for Molotov cocktails, alongside manuals on explosives, poisons, and an Al-Qaeda training guide. Phase One of the inquiry is tasked with determining what the authorities knew, how information was shared, whether risks were properly assessed, and whether any opportunities to intervene were missed.
Sir Adrian insists the Inquiry will “not turn into an exercise of papering over the cracks”, and that all relevant failings will be identified “without fear or favour”. Those with long memories will also recall that, shortly after the inquiry was announced, the Prime Minister pledged “a fundamental change in how Britain protects its citizens and its children” and insisted that “nothing will be off the table”. Difficult questions, he said, must be asked and answered, “unburdened by cultural or institutional sensitivities and driven only by the pursuit of justice”. Yet already, cultural sensitivities are being invoked, emotional vulnerability is being cited as a reason for withholding certain details, and some matters are quietly being taken off the table.
Already, cultural sensitivities are being invoked, emotional vulnerability is being cited as a reason for withholding certain details, and some matters are quietly being taken off the table.
In his opening statement, Sir Adrian said that Rudakubana’s name should not be used “for reasons of sensitivity”. That decision alone raises questions. But what followed was even more revealing. Something not picked up in the media coverage was that the inquiry chair also urged the press not to publish Rudakubana’s widely circulated mugshot, describing it as a “terrifying and singularly distressing image” for victims’ families. The image, he claimed, has “no credible journalistic purpose” and “only causes harm”.
Harm for whom, one wonders? The families of the victims, or the reputation of the institutions that failed them?
And is it really true to say that the mugshot has “no credible journalistic purpose”? A simple retort might be that such judgments belong to editors, not judges. More fundamentally, the Chair’s view reveals a deeper misunderstanding of how images function. In urging the media to find something “less traumatic,” the chair seems to imagine that a neutral image—something apolitical, emotionally inert—can be found and offered to the public. But no such image exists. As Erving Goffman observed in Frame Analysis, a photograph is a device that helps us “locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of occurrences defined in its terms”. In other words, rather than simply depicting reality, photographs organize it. Whether we like it or not, images carry cultural and political meaning, and we interpret them —often instantly and unconsciously—through familiar social categories: child/adult; innocent/culpable; vulnerable/malevolent; normal/pathological.
Consider the moment when media outlets published school photos of Rudakubana in the hours after the attack—smiling, uniformed, appearing youthful and harmless. These images activated a frame that deflected suspicion and softened judgment. They encouraged the public to see not a calculating perpetrator of mass violence, but a confused boy, possibly a victim himself. How could someone like that have done something so brutal? And if that’s how he appeared, then small wonder, we tell ourselves, that the authorities failed to spot the danger.
The mugshot, by contrast, demands a different response. It disturbs, not simply because it is visually arresting, but because it breaks the illusion, confronting us with the possibility that someone identifiably capable of such cruelty could pass through schools, police stations, social services, and counter-extremism programmes without being stopped. We are shown not just who he is, but what others failed to see. In that sense, the mugshot becomes a portrait of a system asleep at the wheel.
Now, with the media having taken their cue from the inquiry chair, we see only the faces of the children who died, smiling out at us in pre-approved images of innocence and loss. No doubt these are more palatable, and less distressing to the families. But we should ask whether this visual imbalance, repeated across our newspapers and broadcasts, is not itself a quiet act of political evasion—one that spares the state from a reckoning with its own failures as much as it protects the feelings of the bereaved, the maimed, and the traumatized.
Not that we should be too surprised. Modern societies have long treated inner emotional states as resources to be managed. As the sociologist Arlie Hochschild has shown, since at least the 1980s, employers in the service economy have been as concerned with displays of warmth and enthusiasm as with competence, in the hope of maximizing profits (“Have a nice day!”). A similar logic now governs the public sphere, where citizens are encouraged to adopt the “appropriate” emotional posture to contain conflict in complex, increasingly global societies.
Once the authorities have settled on the “correct” response to a given issue—typically quiet, tremulous empathy—all other reactions are judged not by their validity, but their affect. Empathy, compassion and concern are encouraged as mature and civic-minded; anger, alarm, or skepticism as evidence of infantile prejudice. In this way, the dissenter is subtly repositioned, not as someone offering a reasoned intervention, but as someone overwhelmed by irrational feeling.
This tendency becomes especially pronounced in response to events that threaten the cultural legitimacy of the governing class: Islamist terrorism, nihilistic youth violence, and the slow, ineluctable unravelling of Britain’s multicultural ideal. Such irruptions are no longer treated as crises to be explained, but as affective risks to be managed and smoothed over. Be kind. All you need is love. Don’t give in to hate. We saw this logic clearly after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, when Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger” was adopted and promoted by political leaders as a kind of national anthem of grief; a gesture that demanded calm while pre-emptively delegitimizing certain critical responses to an Islamist suicide attack.
We now appear to be in the foothills of the same phenomenon, with the Southport Inquiry already working to pre-empt and suppress any emotional response that even approximates anger. Hence the choreography: Don’t name the killer. Don’t show his mugshot. Don’t ask awkward questions. “Don’t look back in anger”.
And is there not a deeper irony still? After all, the inquiry exists precisely because Rudakubana slipped through the net—a refrain repeated throughout the Chair’s opening remarks. Yet through these early restrictions on naming and image use he appears to be slipping away once again. Not through the failures of the police, schools, or Prevent, but through the bureaucratic decorum of a public process that prefers emotional hygiene to difficult truth-telling.
None of this is to deny the unspeakable trauma suffered by the victims’ families. But if public inquiries are meant to illuminate what went wrong, and to do so in full view, then the tools of public understanding must not be selectively blunted.
None of this is to deny the unspeakable trauma suffered by the victims’ families. But if public inquiries are meant to illuminate what went wrong, and to do so in full view, then the tools of public understanding must not be selectively blunted.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. It is surely no coincidence that in Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner’s meditation on guilt, justice, and the (im)possibility of redemption, it is an attorney—speaking within the law’s domain—who delivers this oft-quoted line. One might have hoped that a judge, presiding over a real inquiry into institutional failure, would have understood the same.
