MAY: TRUST ME TO KEEP YOU SAFE
PM insists she is best leader to fight terror as Corbyn flounders
THERESA May yesterday urged voters to back her to ensure Britain is kept safe from terror.
As the General Election battle resumed following the London Bridge attack, the Prime Minister insisted polling day had come down to a stark choice about leadership.
She said voters had to decide on Thursday between her record of backing the police and security services or the “abdication of leadership” offered by Jeremy Corbyn and his hard-Left Labour allies.
She said: “It’s about which leader and which team people trust to keep Britain safe.”
Mr Corbyn called for Mrs May to quit following the atrocity but then appeared to backtrack on his comments yesterday. In a near-hysterical intervention, Labour’s leader
claimed Mrs May should stand down just three days before the election because she had “presided over these cuts in the numbers” of police during her time as Home Secretary.
But Mrs May dismissed his calls for her resignation.
She spoke as it emerged last night that Khuram Butt – one of the three jihadists who butchered seven people at London Bridge – was under active police investigation as a suspected terrorist when he carried out Saturday’s attack.
Inquiries were launched in 2015 and information from a concerned member of the public who rang the antiterrorist hotline became part of the probe.
But there was “no evidence or intelligence of attack planning” and the investigation was downgraded to low priority, Scotland Yard revealed yesterday.
security
Following a brief pause after the attack, election campaigning resumed. Mrs May sought to contrast her record on security with Mr Corbyn’s decades of peacenik posturing, backing for nuclear disarmament and links with extremist groups.
“Keeping our country safe should be the number one priority for any prime minister and any government,” Mrs May said in a speech in London yesterday.
“Yet in this election there is one leader who has made it his life’s ambition to get rid of Trident, and one who is committed to keeping it.
“One leader who has boasted about opposing every single counter-terror law, and one who has been responsible for passing them; one leader who has opposed the use of shoot to kill and given cover to the IRA when they bombed and shot our citizens – and who now, in the midst of an election campaign, wants to do all he can to hide or deny those views.
“That’s not leadership – it’s an abdication of leadership.”
Asked later to clarify his call for Mrs May’s resignation, Mr Corbyn stressed that voters have a chance to remove her from office in Thursday’s election. He denied he was rowing back on his earlier comments.
Mrs May pointed out that the Government under the Tories had increased the number of armed police officers, improved cooperation between the police and specialist military units and provided funding for an additional 1,900 officers at MI5, MI6 and the security monitoring service at GCHQ. She accepted the Government “must do more” to respond to the changing terrorist threat. “We cannot deny that the threat from Islamist extremism is one of the gravest we face. I believe it is right that the UK is engaged in taking on and defeating groups like Isis and their like around the world. It is in our own national interest to do so.” She added the extremists are increasingly seeking “to spread their poisonous ideology and to prey on the weak and vulnerable in our own countries, inspiring them to commit acts of terror here at home”.
Mrs May vowed to step up her fight against terrorist propaganda on the internet and the spread of Islamist extremism throughout British society. “We cannot go on as we are. Enough is enough,” she said. “We will do more to deny this ideology the physical space to breed here at home,” she added.
Mrs May said Britain was facing huge challenges over security, the economy and the Brexit negotiations.
courageous
“We need that strong leadership now more than ever,” Mrs May said. “The question of leadership has always been at the heart of this campaign – and it is absolutely crucial we get the answer right. The ability to say the courageous thing and do the difficult thing; to face up to and address great challenges, not to pretend they don’t exist or seek to wish them away; the strength to be straight with people and not just tell them what they want to hear; the ability to get the job done – that is what leadership means to me.”
Mrs May also warned that whoever is prime minister on Friday must be ready for Brexit talks just 11 days later. “Jeremy Corbyn seems to think that any deal – no matter what the price, no matter what the terms – is better than no deal.
“That’s not leadership. That’s an abdication of leadership. The bureaucrats in Brussels would think Christmas had come early if the British government adopted such an approach. Yet that is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn is proposing.”