One year ago, three young innocent victims were savagely murdered at a Taylor Swift dance class. We must never forget them: Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar.
These young girls had their whole lives in front of them, which were brutally cut short. Their parents and families will suffer forever from the unimaginable grief caused by their loss.
A year on from the Southport attack, we must do everything in our power to stop something like this from ever happening again. We owe it to their memories to learn lessons from this tragedy and other tragedies to make sure they never happen again.
The evil perpetrator of the Southport murders, Axel Rudakubana, was referred to Prevent three times, but nothing was done to stop him from carrying out these attacks.
A radical overhaul of Prevent is clearly needed to ensure those who pose a danger to the public through radicalisation are de-radicalised and are stopped from launching attacks - which is what Prevent is supposed to do.
Prevent also failed to stop the Islamist murderer of Sir David Amess and the Islamist murderer who killed three men in Reading.
Islamists are responsible for 94 per cent of all deaths caused by terrorism since 1999 and around 88 per cent of injuries caused by terrorism over the same period.
Despite this, only 13 per cent of the Prevent caseload relates to Islamist extremism. Prevent must not lose focus on Islamist extremism whilst it adapts to new and evolving threats like Rudakubana.
We need to be honest about what the border crisis really means for our women and girls - Chris Philp
|Getty Images
There is also more to do to protect women and girls more widely. The Labour Government still has not published their long-promised Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy.
They cannot dither and delay on an issue that is so important any longer. They must act now. If they really cared about this issue, they would have acted after more than a year in power.
Another lesson is the importance of being open with the public. In the aftermath of the Southport murders, basic information about Rudakubana’s identity and the fact that he was found in possession of ricin and an al-Qaeda terrorist manual were not made public.
Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said that this information could and should have been made public.
The information about the ricin and the terror manual was made public a few weeks later in October, well before the Rudakubana trial and without risk of prejudice. Merseyside Police later said that they wanted to release more information but were stopped from doing so.
That created an information vacuum that was filled by untrue rumour, which arguably fuelled the subsequent riots. Keir Starmer and the Labour Government have questions to answer about why they did not make this information public at the time, which could have prevented last summer’s riots.
It seems the Labour Government has still not learnt that when any government hides facts, the public gets angry, as we have seen with the reaction to the cover-up of the rape gang scandal.
For decades, people in positions of power turned a blind eye to the rape of young girls and boys because the perpetrators of these crimes were mainly of Pakistani heritage, and they did not want to “inflame community relations”.
The government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to hold a national inquiry into this scandal - and we still don’t know basic details like the chair or the terms of reference.
When it comes to protecting women and girls, we also need to be honest that some nationalities pose far greater dangers than others. We already know that Afghan males are 20 times more likely to be sex offenders.
Illegal immigrants who came on small boats have been charged and convicted of multiple rapes and sexual assaults of women and girls.
Yet 2025 is the worst year on record so far for illegal boat crossings, with over 23,000 illegal immigrants crossing the Channel – up 52 per cent since last year.
This is a border security crisis and a public safety crisis, especially for women and girls - yet the Government does nothing substantive to stop it.
There is so much more that needs to be done to protect women and girls. Yet the government takes no meaningful action on any of it.