FORMER HOME SECRETARY SAYS GOVERNMENT HAS ‘QUESTIONS TO ANSWER’ OVER SOUTHPORT KILLER

FORMER Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said the government has “serious questions to answer” over the Southport killer.

The Conservative MP also said she was “concerned” about the UK government’s relationship with President Trump.

Speaking on GB News, Braverman said: “I was very grateful to have been formally invited by Speaker Johnson to the inauguration ceremony but the logistics changed at the last minute, and they had to dramatically reduce the numbers.

“We need America back on the world stage. Frankly, for four years now, America has been absent. We’ve had a weak America, and as a result, there have been countless conflicts breaking out around the world, many of which would have been avoidable had President Trump been President.

“So, I think that from a global security point of view, this heralds a new chapter of robust approach to foreign policy, something we desperately need, and which benefits those of us in the UK.

“I’m looking forward to attending the Liberty Ball, and I think President Trump will be there as well for some time. I’ve been really blown away by the atmosphere of optimism and positivity here in DC.

“I was at the victory rally yesterday to hear President Trump and Elon Musk and members of the administration, and it has just been a fantastic atmosphere of positivity and can-do attitude.

“The things that President Trump talked about today, a national emergency being declared on the southern border, ‘drill, baby drill’ to deal with the energy emergency, a merit-based society and a formal policy that there are only two genders, male and female. Goodness, it’s what we need in the United Kingdom.

“I’m very disappointed and concerned that our Labour government has such a bad relationship with this administration. Not only have we got our Foreign Secretary who’s on the record for making ridiculous and vicious personal attacks directed at the President himself, but pretty much half the cabinet voted against a state visit by President Trump last time round.

“And now we’ve got a lot of backtracking and we’ve got a lot of appeasing. But frankly Peter Mandelson becoming the ambassador here in DC will make no difference whatsoever.

“The acts of this Labour government have actually harmed the UK national interest. It is very, very concerning, and it’s been left to those of us on the right of British politics to salvage what’s left of this relationship.”

Discussing the Southport murders, Suella Braverman said: “It’s right there’s a public inquiry because we need to ask questions, but I think we should also be asking questions of the members of this government.

“It does seem that there are serious questions as to whether there has been some kind of attempt by ministers who are in situ now to conceal information that the public should have justifiably known after the incident. I think those questions need to be explored.

“But this also raises a more profound question about how we deal with radicalisation and extremism in the UK. The Shawcross Report was published on our watch. We commissioned that to review the Prevent scheme.

“I inherited that and I started a lot of the work to improve Prevent. We needed to have a more robust approach to rooting out radicalisation and remedying it.

“There’s been far too much institutional cowardice within our law enforcement and on our front lines to deal robustly with the threats posed by Islamism in our communities, and we need to fix that.

“When I was Home Secretary, I received the report, the concluded report by Sir William Shawcross, and I grabbed it by the horns, really, and we started implementing a lot of the changes that he recommended.

“These things obviously take time. I wasn’t in office for enough time to see those changes through, but we did start to turn the tanker around, to inject much more rigour and transparency into our prevent system.

“One of the things that William Shawcross talked about was this institutional cowardice, this institutional fear to deal with Islamism out of a fear of racism, something that we’ve been talking about now in another context for several weeks.

“It’s been a real problem here, which can have devastating effects. And so we need to have more rigour. We need to not equate what politicians often do, they equate the scale and the impact of Islamist terrorism with far-right extremism.

“Both are abhorrent, and we must tackle them. But if you look at the caseload of MI5 the vast majority of the work of our security services is focused on dealing with Islamist terrorism.

“By no means can you equate the two in terms of the scale of their prevalence.

“So we mustn’t keep equating, falsely equating different types of extremism as a fig leaf to hide behind. We need to be really honest, brutally honest, about what’s happening in our country and whether our law enforcement services are fit for purpose in dealing with those threats.”