Reform was banned from discussing Southport ‘attacker’ in Parliament, Nigel Farage reveals

MP for Clacton accuses Sir Keir Starmer of using fear to ‘shut down public debate he considers inconvenient’

Reform MPs have been banned from asking questions about the teenager accused of the Southport stabbings in Parliament, Nigel Farage has revealed, warning it will “shred” trust in democracy.
Mr Farage has accused Sir Keir Starmer of using fear “to shut down public debate that he considers inconvenient”, after Axel Rudakubana was charged with a terror offence.
Writing for The Telegraph, the Reform UK leader describes how MPs were silenced when they wanted to raise the matter in the Commons, including “panicked emails” and phone calls telling them not to ask questions about the case.
He said: “It is impossible to infer anything other than that the apparatus of state are being used to manage this situation.”
The announcement that Mr Rudakubana, 18, was being charged with possessing a military study of an Al-Qaeda training manual and producing the poison ricin has prompted a debate about the public’s right to know following the killing of three young girls at a dance class in July.
The attack triggered riots which Mr Farage and others blamed, in part, on a vacuum of information from the authorities about the identity and background of the suspect which allowed a false narrative to take hold.
The police said at the time that the deaths of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alicia da Silva Aguiar, and the stabbings of eight other children and two adults, were not being treated as a terrorist incident. Police and prosecutors have not said whether or not the accused was ever referred to the anti-terrorism Prevent initiative – one of the speculative questions Mr Farage has been asking since July.
Mr Farage writes in The Telegraph: “The day after the three Southport killings, I could see that certain key facts about this atrocity had fallen into a vacuum. This had led to unhelpful online speculation. It struck me as vital for the public to know more…
“I understand the importance of not prejudicing a future trial, but in the current climate there appears to be no room to separate the ongoing legal process from the questions that I posed over the summer. This is deeply troubling.”
Mr Farage says he submitted a written question to Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, asking if the accused had ever been referred to the counter-terrorism Prevent initiative, but was told by the Commons authorities that he could not ask about the matter because of the ongoing court case.
After the new charges were brought against the accused, police and prosecutors made clear the stabbings are not being treated as an act of terrorism.
Sir Keir, a former director of public prosecutions, has not revealed when he and other ministers first knew of the discovery of terror material and ricin said to have been in Mr Rudakubana’s possession.
Mr Farage said that on Wednesday his Reform UK colleague Richard Tice was selected to ask a question of Sir Keir at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons.
He writes: “That morning, he received three panicked emails from the Commons authorities asking what the content of his question might be. Then, an hour before PMQs began, he received a telephone call in which he was told not to ask anything about the man accused of the Southport attacks. This point was reinforced strenuously by the Speaker in the Commons just before PMQs began. Parliamentary Privilege was effectively withdrawn.
“For now, therefore, it seems that nobody is allowed to ask in the proper forum when the government first knew that the accused was to face the ricin and terror material charges.
“Likewise, nobody can know whether this man was known to the authorities in any way. Do we really want to live in a society where such crucial information is kept from the public? Who decided these details should remain secret?
“I believe this apparent suppression damages democracy. It certainly shreds public trust, leading me to ask myself: what is the point of being a public representative if even we are not allowed to ask what would previously have been considered reasonable questions? It is impossible to infer anything other than that the apparatus of state are being used to manage this situation.”
The Government’s terrorism tsar, Jonathan Hall KC, has said that “more information could have been put out safely without comprising potential criminal proceedings”.
Lord Carlile, a crossbench peer and former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has said that in circumstances such as those surrounding the Southport stabbings, “the police probably need to tell the media who has been arrested and what their background is”.
Restricted in the scope of his questioning, Mr Tice asked the Prime Minister on Wednesday whether he agreed that “it is important in incidents of terrorism that the authorities put out more information sooner in order to prevent an information gap”.
Sir Keir replied that MPs “can either support the police in their difficult task or they can undermine the police in their difficult task. I know which side I am on”.
Mr Farage says that Sir Keir’s Government “has been very effective in using fear to shut down public debate that it considers inconvenient” but that he cannot permanently dodge the questions that have arisen about the handling of the Southport attack.