Max Hastings

YESTERDAY’S revelation that a jihadi convicted of promoting terrorism has been granted £250,000 from the taxpayer in legal aid, some of which he’s using to fight deportation, is not merely an insult to victims of terror. It makes Britain appear ridiculous.

There is little purpose in reinforcing the intelligence services, intensifying the surveillance efforts of GCHQ or even arming the police if we persist in adopting a foolishly indulgent attitude to the terrorists already identified in our midst.

One of the London Bridge killers, Moroccan Rachid Redouane, was a failed asylumseeker who slipped back into Britain after marrying a London woman in Dublin.

Menace

An ISIS suicide bomber who blew himself up in Iraq five months ago had previously received £1 million of Britain’s money, as compensation for his detention at Guantanamo Bay, after being captured by the Americans in Afghanistan.

The deportation of extremist cleric Abu Hamza cost taxpayers £25 million.

The courts repeatedly refuse the Government consent to deport known Islamist fanatics, on the grounds that in their home countries, they might be exposed to ‘ inhumane or degrading treatment’. Scores of known or potential foreign terrorists have been permitted to stay in Britain by citing this clause in human rights law.

This would be comical if it were not grotesque.

Labour’s Brexit spokesman, Sir Keir Starmer, continues to oppose any modification of British law. He said last week: ‘ The human rights of the Human Rights Act are international norms that the world has signed up to.

‘If we start throwing away our adherence . . . in response to what has happened in the past three months, we are throwing away the very values we say are the heart of our democracy.’ Sir Keir’s remarks deserve attention, because many British liberals — with a small or big ‘l’ — endorse them. So, too, do many lawyers and judges: our Government has faced more legal impediments in fighting terrorism than almost any other democracy.

Terrorism is constantly evolving: a few years ago, people were frightened of Iranian- sponsored attackers, who might unleash a ‘dirty’ viral bomb or even a nuclear device. Today, amateur jihadis using primitive weapons have wreaked mayhem three times in as many months.

There are many more like them in our cities — the intelligence services offer a guesstimate of 20,000 young men with a mindset to make them capable of committing terrorist acts.

I recently sought to console a friend by reminding her that this menace is still slight compared with the horrors inflicted on our forebears in two World Wars. She responded: ‘Yes, but in those days, they knew who the enemy was — they wore German uniforms. These people live among us. They could be anyone.’

Millions of British people share her view, and her fear.

In response to a threat that seems certain to persist, we should change the way we do some things, though preserving the principle of proportionality. We do not, thank heaven, need barbed wire on our beaches, but are grimly resigned to vehicle- proof barriers outside Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

Internment of suspects without trial seems a mistake at this stage, because there are so many of them. The creation of what the world would dub ‘concentration camps’ would be a propaganda gift to our enemies: it would radicalise even more young Muslims, and it was a failure in Ulster.

Nor can we evict our own Islamist citizens who seek to do us harm. Instead, we can only seek antidotes for the poison drip-fed to them by radical preachers, the net and social media. But we can and should adopt more stringent measures to stop alien extremists getting into Britain and to get rid of them once identified.

The Government has allowed itself to be hamstrung by the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which was written for an utterly different world.

Many judges make matters worse, declining to recognise any responsibility for the security of British society, in a myopic preoccupation with the small print of the law at the expense of common sense.

The judiciary prides itself on being indifferent to the baying multitude and, sometimes, its members are right to do so. But today, some of their decisions advance the interests of Muslim radicals — sometimes even paid-up terrorists — at the expense of their victims.

This is shameful. It is time the judges were shaken out of their complacency about their decisions on issues of life-and-death importance.

In the wake of terrorist atrocities in France, hundreds of radicals have been placed under house arrest. Few critics have claimed that democracy has thus been betrayed.

Abused

The French government has merely taken the harsh, but almost certainly wise, view that the interests of prospective victims — their own citizens — must be given priority over those of known extremists.

A powerful driving force behind the Brexit movement was people’s belief that leaving the EU would enable us better to protect our own borders from terrorists and criminals.

I fear this is not so: the difficulties involved in keeping bad people out will persist until we take some decisive step towards escaping from the European Convention on Human Rights — which has nothing to do with the EU — and awaken our own judiciary to its responsibilities. The old world, in which we were either at peace or war, is gone almost certainly for ever.

I am cautiously optimistic about avoiding a big conflict, but we shall have to contend with a stream of cyber and terrorist attacks, some emanating from Russia or China, others from Muslim extremists, others again from new enemies, as yet unrevealed.

No generation gets a completely free pass from harm: we must merely learn new ways of protecting ourselves.

The law should rightfully be a tool for the defence of millions of our own citizens, rather than a weapon to be abused by those who wish us harm — as is certainly the case when a convicted jihadi obtains a quarter of a million pounds in legal aid to fight deportation.

Lunacy

It must be wrong for the law to prevent a known bad man being expelled merely because he may face unpleasantness back in his own country.

Every visitor to whom we grant the privilege of sanctuary has a duty in exchange to behave as a good guest.

If he fails to do this, the consequences belong on his own head, not ours. Yet the law as it stands, and as interpreted by our judges, is blind to this.

Why should the British public not be angry?

Back in 1955, former U.S. President Harry Truman was chatting to Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson. Truman got up, looked out of his window and pointed into the street: ‘The issue at every election is the same,’ he said. ‘It is that guy walking past who is asking: “What are you people in Washington going to do for me?” ’

The foremost duty of all governments is to make sure ‘that guy’ — which means all of us — is safe from harm.

This is hard in the age of the Islamist death cult. But to command the confidence of the British electorate, this Government must be seen to act effectively to rid this country of visiting murderers, even if we have to live with home-grown ones.

Asylum is abused by fanatics and their lawyers. We must stop compounding the lunacy by paying for it.