Today marks one year since the Southport attack - the brutal mass stabbing that killed three young girls and injured ten others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class and changed a community forever.
Instantly and instinctively, the British public knew there was something unusual about this attack. They knew they weren’t being told the full story.
It took three days to name the suspect, whom we were initially told was a Welsh choirboy.
It then took until October, three months, until the additional charges including possession of a terror manual and possession of a biological weapon, were revealed to the public.
GB NEWS
|Jacob Rees-Mogg says Britons knew they were not being told the full story
In the protests and eventual riots that followed, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer decided to crack down firmly on them.
People such as Lucy Connolly were put in prison for years for things they said online.
Offenders were rushed through the judicial system while rapists remained untried.
By the end of it, society’s trust in the government had collapsed.
There is no doubt the tragedy was handled badly, but has Sir Keir Starmer learned from his mistakes?
Well, the lesson of Southport, above all, is that leaving an information vacuum will always be filled by something else. In order to maintain trust in our institutions, the institutions themselves must trust the British public.
But when the Prime Minister and others hid behind sub judice laws to withhold the additional charges, this effectively sent a message to the public that they were not to be trusted with the truth.
Anyone watching television over the past few weeks will be able to tell you that, as one of my viewers wrote last night, the “atmosphere is thick with a seething tension that spells trouble for the summer”.
Last week, concerns were raised surrounding the use of the four-star Britannia hotel for migrants in Canary Wharf. The Home Office first tried to suggest this was nonsense. But that later turned out not to be true.
The British public has had enough of being misled and the head of the Police Federation has said the police are not ready for a summer of discontent.
We cannot have another Southport again and if the Prime Minister wants to avoid one, he must be honest with the British public.