Just over three years ago, I was honoured to win the seat of Southend West in the 2022 by-election triggered by the heinous murder of Sir David Amess. It was a devastating by-election characterised by levels of emotion and grief on the doorsteps that I have never experienced before.
I vowed to work as hard as I could to enhance Sir David's great legacy and, to do my level best, to support the wonderful family he left behind.
That is why I am proud to stand with Katie and Lady Amess in their fight for a public inquiry into Sir David's death, and why I was so disgusted that both the Prime Minister and Home Secretary rejected their request when we met them in Downing Street last week.
Despite Starmer telling a packed House of Commons only a few hours before we met him that he was committed to getting the family answers, he then refused to change his position rejecting their request for a full inquiry. The only glimmer of hope being a promise to look again at the issue at some indeterminate point in the future, once two further, costly, impotent, paper reviews have taken place. Kicking the can down the road does not even begin to cover it.
The Prime Minister's decision was totally wrong and is a betrayal of Sir David's memory and the trust our country has placed in the Government to leave no stone unturned in keeping us safe. The brutal murder of any MP by a terrorist is obviously of huge public concern, but where it involves clear, stark and very basic failures of a government body, namely, the Prevent programme, the public - not just the family - need the Government to establish responsibility and learn lessons in the relentless pursuit of keeping us all safe.
The Prime Minister has betrayed the memory of Sir David Amess - Anna Firth
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That the Government has already ordered an inquiry into the appalling Southport murders and the related Prevent failures. In the face of identical systemic Prevent failures in Sir David’s case, it is deeply wounding and unfair for the Amess family not to be treated in the same way as the Southport families. It is also irrational and wrong.
The Prevent programme clearly has systemic flaws that must be addressed as laid out in the Prevent Learning Review into Sir David’s murder completed in February 2022 but only published a few weeks ago. The independent reviewer’s conclusion that lessons would be learned so that the same mistakes would not happen again, proved to be wrong as the appalling murders in Southport demonstrated.
Furthermore, these are not isolated “lone wolf killings” as the Prime Minister suggested last summer. Recent research from the Nottingham Trent University suggests that there have been 44 lone wolf attacks in recent years including no less then 10 terror incidents in which members of the public have been maimed, injured or killed by lone wolf killers in the last 8 years: Manchester Arena (2017), Parsons Green (2017), Fishmongers’ Hall (2019), London Bridge (2019), Streatham (2020), Reading park (2020), Sir David Amess/Southend (2021), Liverpool (2021), Texas Synagogue (January 2022) and Southport (2024). All of the perpetrators in these cases were known to the Prevent programme.
Very few people have heard of the Prevent or Channel programmes let alone understand what they are or how they are supposed to work. Prevent is designed to identify extremists and to attempt to prevent them from becoming terrorists. Yet as is so plainly obvious from Amess, Southport and all the other cases, the focus is on protecting vulnerable people from becoming radicalised, not protecting the public. Consequently, it is all too easy to fool and hoodwink the authorities into thinking there is no problem leaving the terrorist free to carry on totally unsupervised, unmonitored and un-followed up. Diligent head-teachers and other public sector workers are doing their bit in spotting potentially dangerous students including a staggering number of children. In the year to March 2024, of the nearly 7,000 people referred to the Prevent programme, nearly 3,000 of them were children aged 11 to 15! The public would be horrified if they knew that a programme which costs them over £200 million pounds between 2016 and 2021, is so inept at preventing children from becoming mindless murderers, and that known terrorists are allowed to walk our streets every single day.
The family of Sir David Amess deserve answers.
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It makes no sense, for a Judge-led, tax-payer funded public inquiry into Southport not to look across the piste at all the other multiple Prevent-related terrorist attacks, both to look for trends in lone wolf terrorism, but also to forge better strategies for prevention. Not only would this strengthen the Southport findings, without it the inquiry will be fatally flawed.
The inquiry must also ask the hard questions. Why are young people allowed to leave the programme early without any meaningful assessment as to whether they are still harbouring dangerous ideologies, not to mention weapons in their bedrooms. Why is there no meaningful engagement with the families or with the referring schools? Why are such dangerous young people not referred immediately to a young offenders institution, especially when they come before the courts, whilst still on the Prevent and Channel programmes? Why are so many recent lone-wolf terrorist attacks, the result of Islamic extremism? What greater powers do our Police and counter-terrorism services need to better deter such monsters and keep our children and our Members of Parliament safe?
Lady Julia, Katie Amess and the general public deserve answers. I will continue to do everything I can to press for a statutory, judge-led public inquiry to get to the truth and establish accountability. At the very least the Southport enquiry must be extended to also cover the murder of Sir David. We owe it to Sir David's memory and public service.
