Just one year after the appalling Southport slaughter - that's what it was - so much still doesn't make any sense.
How could this one young man with a troubled mentality commit so much carnage? How was he not identified as a threat before the gruesome attack? Was he motivated by extremist ideology? Or merely obsessed by violence?
Perhaps there was an element of both. It is possible to be motivated by an extremist ideology and by a fascination with violence at the same time.
There are still so many questions. How did we get here as a society? How can we prevent these acts of bloody violence? What can we do more to protect our children from such heinous evil?
Yet, beyond the questions, there are certain facts which stand out. The crime was almost unprecedented in its savagery and targeting of young girls. Clearly, there was an attempt on the part of the authorities to suppress key information about the killer.
They believed that, by suppressing the information, they would ease "community tensions". They were anxious to prevent what they no doubt would have called a "racist" backlash.
Yes, it is true that there are some racists in our society. Many of these people have, no doubt, abhorrent views. They would have sought to exploit the ethnicity or religion of the killer.
If the Southport killer were white, the truth would not have been suppressed – Kwasi Kwarteng
|PA
The overwhelming majority of British people, however, simply want to be told the truth. They have no axes to grind. They are fair-minded folk who merely want to get on with their lives in peace.
The government, at the very least, owes them the truth. The fact that the authorities, including government officials and the police, thought they could suppress key information about this atrocity is a matter of concern.
Treating the British public as though they were naughty children, not to be trusted, is deeply patronising and wrong.
The attempt to suppress this information backfired spectacularly. The lack of information simply created a vacuum in which all kinds of general speculation took place.
The suppression of detail led to an even more febrile, more tense atmosphere of disinformation and uncertainty. Those in charge would have been better off just telling people the truth. They should have been clear and plain-spoken in their dealing with the public.
Then they could have allowed the public to make up their own minds with the facts, like you would expect any adult to do. The public should not have been kept in the dark like small children being protected from nasty facts by their parents.
Such an approach is wrong, but more worryingly, the suspicion is that such behaviour on the part of officialdom is motivated by muddled, woke ideas of political correctness.
It shouldn't matter where the killer comes from or what he looks like. His evil deeds spoke for themselves. He should be punished for his crimes. The public can handle this information and make of it what it wants.
Only an elite completely afraid of its own shadow, obsessed with an outdated woke agenda, would want to keep people unaware of basic facts, particularly about evil criminals who have wrought such devastation in our communities.