Knife crime in the United Kingdom is surging. According to the Ben Kinsella Trust, a knife crime prevention organisation named in honour of the teenager horrifically stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack, there has been an 87 per cent increase in police-recorded offences involving a sharp instrument in the decade up to December 2024.
In the year ending March 2024, 262 people were murdered in England and Wales by being stabbed with a knife or other sharp instrument. Of these incidents, the murder weapon in 109 cases was a kitchen knife.
The most horrific attack of this kind in recent years was the murder of three young girls in Southport by Axel Rudakubana, a teenager who had previously been referred to Prevent, the UK’s terrorism prevention programme, on several occasions, and had closed Rudakubana’s case by this point. In light of their dreadful failure to carry out their duty, Prevent’s director Michael Stewart resigned from his role.
Rudakubana carried out the attack, which killed three and injured ten others, with a kitchen knife he had ordered from Amazon. In a highly politicised society where the governing party refuses to seek to resolve the root causes of issues, this has led to many people calling for an overhaul in home kitchens nationwide to replace ordinary kitchen knives with blunt-tipped equivalents.
One such campaigner is Leanne Lucas, a yoga instructor who survived being stabbed several times during the atrocious Southport attack, and who has been featured in a recent BBC article on the topic. Ms Lucas told the BBC that cooking had become a “trigger” for her, and that seeing sharp kitchen knives appeared to recall the horrors of the attack.
Ms Lucas has since created a campaign named Let’s Be Blunt, which aims to “end knife crime through practical, everyday actions that can make a real difference in our homes and communities.” Their mission is simply to get rid of sharp kitchen knives and replace them with blunt alternatives, as “tackling knife crime starts at home”. The BBC appeared to agree with these aims, stating that “Blunt-tip knives are considered to be just as effective for everyday cooking purposes as traditional ones with pointed tips”.
I’m not convinced that this makes sense, either from a law and order perspective, or from a home cooking perspective. Without detracting from the heroism that Ms Lucas has shown through surviving such an appalling encounter while saving several children from being attacked by the perpetrator, the solution to this problem is not rounding the tip of kitchen knives.
As the former prisoner David Shipley points out, there are plenty of stabbings in prisons that have happened as a result of improvised sharp instruments; having little access to sharp knives hardly hinders offenders with a tendency towards violence, as “dangerous men will always find a way to improvise weapons”.
Legislation and casual advocacy for changes in behaviour do little to prevent crime from happening. Shoplifting is at its highest level ever recorded; people are allowed to smoke crack cocaine on public transport without fear of repercussions; more than three quarters of Londoners have seen people avoid paying their transport fares in the past year, with half of people saying employers don’t challenge fare evaders. Without adequate punishment, rules will continue to be broken. Making kitchen knives less pointy won’t change a thing.
What of the BBC’s statement that blunt-tipped knives are just as good as sharp knives for the average home cook? Utter nonsense. Having written a book on how to improve one’s home cooking, including entire chapters on different kinds of knives and how to improve techniques for using them, I believe I am somewhat well placed to say that a sharp knife is better than a blunt one. If all you are doing is chopping vegetables or meat, you could possibly get away with it, but anything else would be much more difficult.
Rather than fall foul to any potential bias, however, I sought input on the topic from others who know a thing or two about home cooking on whether blunt-tipped knives really are just as good.
Sebastian Skillings, fishmonger at George’s Fish Shop in Dublin and the recent author of seafood cookbook The Hungry Fishmonger, thinks that making delicious seafood at home would be next to impossible without a sharp-pointed knife. “Depending on the task or what you are cutting, you would generally start cutting from the tip down,” he explained. “Especially with fish prep, I use the tip to carefully remove and break the flesh from the bones. Having a blunt tip would be useless in filleting fish.”
Skillings also pointed out that oyster knives would be especially pointless with a blunt tip, as it wouldn’t be possible to break into the shell with one. In my naivety, I was amused at the possibility of a terror attack being perpetrated by an extremist with an oyster knife, however I was to be surprised; it was the weapon of choice for Mickael Harpon, an Islamic extremist who stabbed four police officers to death in Paris in 2019.
I also spoke to Cherie Denham, a cook, baker, and author of the multiple award winning cookbook The Irish Bakery. Echoing other comments, Denham stated that “the most important thing to me is that the knife is sharp, that’s essential.” While a blunt-tipped knife would be manageable for chopping things, “for deboning or filleting I’m afraid for me the knife would have to be pointed.”
It is clear that knives are intended to be sharp and pointed; that is precisely why they look as they do
These points are supported by Charlotte Pike, a food and drink expert who was awarded an MBE for services to food writing and food education in 2024. Pike notes that “there are many applications where a pointed tip is useful in the kitchen and I feel it has been an important part of knife design”. Though the campaign has a positive thought behind it in the eradication of knife crime, Pike believes that it is misguided, stating that while she is “appalled by the heinous crimes that have prompted this suggested change … I personally wouldn’t want to be without a sharp tipped knife or two in the kitchen”.
It is clear that knives are intended to be sharp and pointed; that is precisely why they look as they do. Any legislation or campaign stating otherwise will do little other than make life worse for everyone who dares to make a meal at home. These kinds of work-shy box-ticking fake solutions never get to the heart of the issues; rather, they allow legislators to claim to be doing something and working towards protecting people, all the while taking the easiest possible option.
As Sebastian Skillings also points out, blunt-tipped knives are unlikely to do anything to quell a violent person’s desire to cause harm: “just because you can’t essentially stab someone [with a blunt-tipped knife] you can still slash somebody”.
Indeed, and he’s not the only one who has picked up on this. Alex Ferentinos, a head chef formerly of the highly rated Queens Pizzeria in Belfast, notes that while there are certainly some food preparation applications for knives with blunt tips, “the blade is still sharp so it’s a bit of a paper straw in a plastic lid scenario”. Michael Deane, the Northern Irish chef and restauranteur who has held a Michelin star for almost thirty years, got in touch to point out how ridiculous the whole argument is, rhetorically asking “what’s worse … getting stabbed with a thin sharp blade of [sic] slashed with a sharp cleaver type knife?”
The Ben Kinsella Trust’s own statistics show that 22 homicides in the year up to March 2024 were caused by attacks using either machetes or zombie knives. These are slashing knives, not stabbing knives. A kitchen knife with a blunt tip yet sharp edge is just as dangerous as the alternative for those with the intent to use it to cause harm.
Rather than legislating away the freedoms of ordinary people, those who care about the plight of knife crime facing our country should seek to focus their efforts on the real issue: reducing the number of violent young men in the country who seek to do harm to others. Until those in power begin to see sense rather than headlines, our collective future remains on a knife edge.
