“Rest in peace, little angels,” read the card on the sunflowers left in Southport on Tuesday morning in tribute to the pre-teen Taylor Swift fans who became the latest victims of Britain’s wave of knife crime.

Just 24 hours after the attack by an unnamed 17 year old, the lump-in-throat horror was swiftly hardening into local anger. As the flowers wither in Lancashire’s hot summer sun, the political questions began.

Can Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, in her post for only three weeks, be the politician to get knives off the streets?

No one yet knows what motivated the suspect to strike out at the children’s dance class. But we do know more about the profile of young people who engage in knife crime, with statistics giving key indicators.

An individual is more likely to commit an offence if young, male and poor. Exposure to violence, being a victim themselves, alongside mental illness and drug addiction, add to the picture. Low educational attainment and exclusion from mainstream education are also risk factors.

But in grim economic times, campaigners argue, investment hasn’t been sufficient to tackle the root causes of the problem: poverty and inequality. A higher burden on society makes this approach appear shortsighted.

Crime and underfunding of youth services go hand in hand, according to Bruce Houlder, a retired criminal lawyer and judge, who runs the group Fighting Knife Crime London. He told i that the budget for youth services was cut by 75 per cent from 2010 to 2019, and in that........

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