In the wake of the hubristic shambles that was UK prime minister Theresa May’s wholly unnecessary and disastrous attempt to win a broader mandate for her government’s impending Brexit negotiations with the European Union, one could almost be forgiven for forgetting that her nation is engaged in a war that is being fought on its streets and which, since 2005, has claimed the lives of 92 civilians.
In time – in a week, perhaps, or a few months – the current political chaos wracking the UK will pass. Some form of government, “strong and stable” or otherwise, will ultimately emerge. But then, of course, all focus will be upon Brexit.
What a tragic distraction from the very real, and very necessary, call to arms against the threat of terrorism, to which the UK has signally failed to respond in any meaningful way despite the raft of anti-terror legislation that has been launched since the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 and the 2005 bombings in London.
As the UK parliament’s Home Affairs Committee concluded in 2001, “this country has more anti-terrorist legislation on its statute books than almost any other developed democracy”. Today, there’s even more. But none of it, as recent events would appear to testify, has been the slightest bit of use.
It’s been largely forgotten in the wake of May’s spectacular humiliation at the ballot box, but on June 4, the day after the London Bridge attack and just four days before the general election, the prime minister stood outside No 10 Downing Street and made the most extraordinary statement, utterly devoid of self-awareness.
There had been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the UK, said the woman who, as home secretary, had spent the six years from 2010 to 2016 responsible for policing and national security.
“Enough is enough,” she added, as though the 7/7 London bombings that killed 56 people in 2005, the decapitation of soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 and the murders of 27 in the attacks in Westminster in March and in Manchester last month were, in some unfathomable way, not already “enough”.
May, apparently insensitive to the fact that most of these killings had been carried out by Islamist terrorists on her watch, spoke unconvincingly of vague measures that might be introduced. “We need,” she said, “to become far more robust” in identifying extremism “and stamping it out”. That, she added (in a statement that could have been uttered only by an English politician) “will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations”.
Embarrassment? Heaven forbid.
It remains to be seen what form these measures will take, but already, the signs are that they will be more of the same.
It fell to Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the Conservative Party, to explain that what “enough is enough” might amount to was little more than a tightening of so-called “TPIMs”, the Terrorism, Prevention and Investigation Measures introduced in 2011 to restrict the activities of people suspected of terrorist activity.
Restrict … no prison, no internment, no repatriation to a country of origin. Subject to a TPIM, a hardened jihadist, hell-bent on murder and self-immolation, would presumably not be quaking much in his boots if slapped with “a requirement to reside at a specified residence” or forced to endure “restrictions on the individual leaving a specified area or travelling outside that area”.
Only a handful of TPIMs have ever been issued, suggesting, in the words of one academic analysis this month, “that the security services do not view their widespread use as valuable”. As suspects can easily abscond from a TPIM, noted professor Helen Fenwick of Durham University’s school of law, “a determined terrorist under one is unlikely to be deterred from carrying out an attack”.
Duncan Smith said both he and May had been concerned that the TPIM powers, introduced during his party’s period of coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, had been “watered down weakened too much” – and herein lies the fatal weakness in any liberal, enlightened society’s response to the fanatical threat of so-called Islamic terrorism.
When the Liberal Democrats tasted temporary power in coalition government with the Conservatives in 2010, they seized their brief moment in the political sun to set about attempting to erode the UK’s anti-terrorism defences.
The previous year, the party had launched its so-called Freedom Bill, detailing “how we intend to roll back the draconian laws” passed by various administrations. The “sacrifices of freedoms” made by successive governments, wrote one of their leading MPs in The Guardian, “often seem small, particularly when they are pushed through at times of panic about terrorism, yet the cumulative effects of this salami-slicing have now become deeply corrosive to the free spirit of a civil society. We are slowly becoming the authoritarian threat that we are fighting.”
Really. So one day Britain is detaining without charge someone suspected of plotting to murder children, the next we’re decapitating or blowing up innocents? Such are the weasel words trotted out by those keen to parade their liberal credentials while remaining comfortably isolated from, and unaffected by, the terrorism that is devastating those in the firing line.
Take Liberty, the UK civil rights group. It concedes that “human rights law requires the State to take steps to protect the right to life – which includes measures to prevent terrorism”, but insists that “all too often, the risk of terrorism has been used as the basis for eroding our human rights and civil liberties”.
Liberty boasts that it has “campaigned tirelessly, both in Parliament and in the courts, against indefinite detention without charge and … TPIM regimes”. Terrific. Well done. But what greater human right is there than the right to life?
Even in the wake of the murders in Manchester and London, the usual spurious cant is still being trotted out. May spoke of fresh efforts afoot to regulate the internet. Cue Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats: “If we turn the internet into a tool for censorship and surveillance”, he bleated, “the terrorists will have won.”
Rubbish. The terrorists “win” when a soft-bellied society shies away in distaste from taking effective measures, leaving the terrorists free to murder that society’s children.
Khuram Butt, the leader of the London Bridge murder squad, had been reported to police as a suspected extremist and had even appeared last year in a TV documentary about UK jihadis, in which he was seen parading with an ISIL flag in a London park. Absolutely nothing was done, and his civil liberties remained unimpaired. Think for a moment how the authorities in the UAE might have reacted to a similar reported sighting in a park in Abu Dhabi or Dubai.
Of course, when the UAE has acted publicly against individuals it perceives as a threat to the country and its people, it comes in for shrill criticism from western liberal groups. When 68 Islamists were jailed in the UAE in 2013 for plotting a coup, the country was condemned by Human Rights Watch and other organisations. In 2014, Abu Dhabi jailed 30 people accused of running a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, proscribed as a terror organisation, earning well-publicised rebukes from Amnesty International and the UK-based Emirates Centre for Human Rights (an organisation exposed by The National the same year as having links to the brotherhood).
Luckily for its citizens, the government of the UAE is impervious to such sniping, as it should be. It is, after all, the first duty of any government to protect its people. In the UK, however, the government continues to balk at doing what needs to be done, leaving its people to pay with their lives for the conceits of liberal hand-wringers.
Jonathan Gornall is a frequent contributor to The National
