Sir Keir Starmer's Pre-Crime Clarion Call

After nationalist riots in Southport, Britain's new Prime Minister announces plans for a "coordinated effort" to arrest wrongdoers "before they can even board a train"

Early Monday morning in Southport, England, three young girls were killed and eight more were injured in a knife attack at a “Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event.” Rumors circulated that the minor attacker was foreign, triggering anti-Muslim riots Tuesday evening that left 50 police officers injured, with officials blaming “thugs” who traveled from out of town “for their political purposes.”

This succession of awful events led Britain’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to deliver a press conference yesterday that was shocking even by current neo-Orwellian standards. Calling the riots an “assault on the rule of law,” he laid out as aggressive a vision of pre-crime enforcement as we’ve heard from a prominent Western politician. Starmer wrote a textbook on human rights law earlier in his career, but came out yesterday sounding like a starched cross of Dick Cheney and Justin Trudeau, pledging to use “shared intelligence” and “facial recognition technology” to capture wrongdoers “before they even board a train”: