Whether terrorists or not they are all common criminals
EVEN in the bright sunshine the scourges of extremism cast their shadow. This week’s lethal anti-Muslim attack in Finsbury Park follows a trio of savage jihadist assaults in recent months, including the bomb massacre at Manchester in May that killed 23 people.
As the catalogue of atrocities mounts the public sense of foreboding is compounded by the inadequate reaction of the political class. The security forces may have done a sterling job but the truth is that they are overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem, with at least 23,000 jihadists in our midst in addition to far-Right extremists.
Even worse the political authorities are hopelessly schizophrenic in their response. On one hand they use ferocious rhetoric about a national emergency, declaring that we are engaged in a “war on terror”. On the other they tell us that life must simply “carry on as normal”, a fatalistic attitude encapsulated by the London Mayor Sadiq Khan when he said that terrorism is just “part and parcel” of urban life.
This duality does nothing to safeguard Britain. If we were really at war the Government would have imposed farreaching defence regulations, taken over civilian life and ordered the mass internment of extremist suspects.
IN May 1940 Churchill presided over the incarceration of all 73,000 German and Italian nationals living in this country, as well as the entire leadership of the British Fascist movement. No one today would dream of such drastic steps, not least because the curtailment of basic British liberties would represent a victory for terrorists.
But it is equally absurd to pretend that what we now face is “normal”. There is nothing “normal” about a society where a teenage concert is bombed by a suicide killer and white vans are used as weapons of mass destruction.
Yet the choice between a phoney war and phoney normality is false. There is a third option. We could stop colluding with the terrorists by pretending that there is any political justification to their actions. Instead we could treat them and their facilitators as nothing more than dangerous criminals who belong behind bars.
At present the habitual impulse of the British state is to look for a social and political rationale behind terrorism. But this has proved disastrously counter-productive. It is a policy that gives a spurious legitimacy to mass murder and promotes a climate of grievance.
It also feeds the guilt-tripping belief in the West that we are somehow to blame for the violence because of our failure to combat global poverty, or provide good housing for all or show sufficient obeisance to Islam. Disgracefully, after the Manchester attack, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn implied that Western foreign policy was one of the culprits for Muslim terrorism.
The same hand-wringing runs through many of the de-radicalisation programmes such as the £40million Prevent initiative. These promote the idea that extremists are not really responsible for their actions but have been infected with an ideological virus which the state must cure. The growing number of hardliners suggests this method is not working.
BUT from 1976 a new policy of “normalisation” was adopted whereby the paramilitaries were treated purely as criminals rather than political fighters. While the British Army was gradually withdrawn, the Royal Ulster Constabulary was given new resources and powers.
The architect of this was Roy Mason, the brave Labour politician and former coal miner who is the unsung hero of the Troubles. When he took over as Northern Ireland secretary in 1976 he declared: “Ulster has had enough of initiatives, White Papers and legislation for the time being and now needs to be governed firmly and fairly.”
His approach was a success. Within two years the annual death toll from terrorism had fallen from 295 to 80. The late IRA commander Martin McGuinness once admitted in a back-handed tribute that: “Mason beat the s*** out of us.” It was the beginning of the end for the IRA as the RUC and British intelligence gained the ascendancy. The peace process in the 1990s was effectively the Republicans’ declaration of surrender.
The same could happen now if the Government focuses on criminalising the hardliners instead of wallowing in sociology and politics. That means beefing up the police, Special Branch and MI5, expanding prison capacity, lengthening jail terms, stopping the abuse of human rights by professional agitators and upholding the law instead of allowing the spread of sharia.
Normality is achievable if our ministers can summon the courage that Roy Mason once showed.
‘Stop looking for social and political rationale’