Police failure to enforce public order laws is allowing sectarian calls for violence to become “normalised” on British streets, the UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has warned.
Jonathan Hall said there is a “palpable” national security risk when police prioritise maintaining public order over applying the law.
Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in London on Tuesday, Mr Hall said inaction in such cases was dangerous.
“Doing nothing is not an option, especially when hate becomes normalised,” he said, adding that the “enforcement of laws is more important than the laws themselves”.
He said: “If sectarian calls to violence are normalised, then the risk to national security is too great.”
Mr Hall said new legislation is not required as Britain already has the Public Order Act 1986, which prohibits stirring up racial hatred, but added: “I do not believe the law is being enforced as it should be.”
Britain’s history has demonstrated how “domestic and international terrorism have been inspired by mere words”, he said.
He suggested recent attackers, including those in Bondi Beach, Australia, who murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration, and at Heaton Park in Manchester, where two Jewish worshippers were killed, had been radicalised by violent propaganda.
“Terrorists have a whole apparatus dedicated to propaganda. They believe that propaganda works,” he said. “The Bondi Beach killers must have encountered Islamic State propaganda and decided they were soldiers called to carry out violence in support of their hateful agenda.”
Mr Hall criticised repeated failures by police to use the Public Order Act and said he had “lost count” of the number of occasions when hatred against Israelis had been incited on British streets without legal consequences. He warned that the demonisation of Israelis often acted as “a vehicle for hatred of Jews”.
He also condemned policing decisions around the ban on a planned Maccabi Tel Aviv football match in Birmingham. Intelligence suggesting that locals were “arming themselves” to attack Israeli fans, Mr Hall said, should have triggered criminal investigations rather than a cancellation.
The barrister added that extremist groups such as ISIS “must be rubbing their hands with glee” when chants calling for death to Israelis go unchecked at protests on Britain’s streets.
He also criticised pro-Palestinian demonstrations held in central London just hours after the Manchester synagogue attack in October last year, calling them a “slur to the long-cherished understanding that we stand together as a nation after a terrorist attack”.
