The fallout from Monday’s guilty plea by Axel Rudakubana on the first day of his trial for the Southport attacks leads the papers. The Sun reports that Rudakubana was able to buy the knife used in the attack from the online retailer Amazon despite being only 17 at the time. The law prohibits the sale of knives to under-18s.
The Daily Mirror quotes Home Secretary Yvette Cooper calling it a “total disgrace” that Rudakubana was able to buy the weapon.
Rudakubana admitted carrying a knife more than 10 times before he bought the one used in the Southport attack, according to the Times. The paper also reports that a Home Office review of how Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, failed to stop Rudakubana found he was “obsessed with massacre and extreme violence”.
The Daily Express quotes Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who made a statement on the case on Tuesday, saying the UK faces a new terror threat from “loners, misfits, [and] young men in their bedrooms” viewing violent material online and that “fundamental change” is needed to protect children.
Sir Keir is further quoted by the Metro saying that, in the past, the “predominant threat was highly organised political groups with clear political intent” like al-Qaeda and that, while that threat remains, a new one is posed by people “desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake”.
The i says the government has promised tough legislation to protect young people from violent content and pledged to regulate the “nightmares of the online world”.
Sir Keir is quoted by the Guardian saying: “You can’t tell me that the material this individual viewed before committing these murders should be accessible on mainstream social media platforms”. The paper says Sir Keir also pledged changes that would allow perpetrators of terror attacks to be charged under terrorism laws even if they lack a coherent ideology.
The Daily Mail says Chancellor Rachel Reeves has flown to the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos amid “fresh alarm over… gathering economic gloom”. The paper says Britain has just recorded the biggest fall in people in work since November 2020, while the founder of US investment giant Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio, has told the Financial Times that the country is at risk of entering a “debt death spiral”.
A proposed anti-fraud law that would see benefit cheats banned from driving for two years as part of attempts to bring down the welfare bill, the Daily Telegraph reports. It says the new rules would apply to anyone who owes more than £1,000 in wrongly claimed payments and ignores repeated requests to repay it, while other measures would allow investigators to take the money out of people’s bank accounts.
The Financial Times reports that US President Donald Trump has threatened to double tax rates for foreign nationals and companies based in the US in retaliation for what he called “discriminatory” taxes on American multinationals. The paper says Trump has digital services taxes against Big Tech and a global tax pact agreed last year by the OECD in his sights, adding that the move “threatens to trigger a global dispute over tax regimes”.
And the Daily Star says the UK could be hit by 90mph winds from Storm Eowyn later this week. It warns readers to “strap down your bins, your garden gnomes, and your ill-fitting hairpiece”.
