Cameron’s anti-terror laws have not been used ONCE

A MAJOR anti-terror power introduced by David Cameron to prevent British jihadis from returning to the country after fighting with Islamic State has never been used.

Mr Cameron announced Temporary Exclusion Orders (TEOs) two years ago amid mounting concerns about the number of UK extremists coming back from the Syrian war zone.

But the measures – dismissed at the time as a Downing Street ‘PR stunt’ by experts – have not been used once.

Mr Cameron acted amid fears that battle-hardened terrorists with British passports were heading home intending to bring bloodshed to the streets. Initially, the then Prime Minister wanted to ban them from returning. But the plan was watered down after being savaged by MPs and legal experts for being unlawful, as it would effectively leave British citizens stateless. Instead, he introduced the exclusion orders, which last a maximum of two years.

A TEO, which is approved by a judge before being issued by the Home Secretary, makes it illegal for a fanatic to return to the UK without informing the authorities and agreeing to be monitored. It is supported by cancelling their passport and adding their names to terrorist and criminal watchlists against which every person arriving in Britain is checked.

Introduced in February 2015, it addressed a gap in the powers which meant British jihadis could not be prevented from coming home under international law after fighting overseas.

There were already measures to block foreign or dual nationals from travelling to the UK after joining terror groups.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chairman of the Commons’ home affairs select committee in the last Parliament, said: ‘The first priority right now is to back the police and Gov- ernment in the immediate action to stop this evil terror network and keep people safe.

‘Once the urgent action to catch these dangerous extremists is complete, there will be practical questions to answer about why none of the exclusion orders that ministers said were so crucial have been used in practice.’

Shashank Joshi, senior research fellow at security think-tank the Royal United Services Institute, said: ‘It may have been easier to rely on existing mechanisms to monitor and influence returnees.

‘Indeed, the threat of applying a TEO may have helped to influence potential returnees, along the lines of “co-operate with us, or we will impose a TEO”.’

After Mr Cameron announced the policy, the then independent reviewer of terror laws, David Anderson, condemned TEOs as ‘not well thought through, well worked out or well prepared.’

Professor Emeritus Clive Walker QC, an adviser to Mr Anderson when he was the laws watchdog, said in a report this year: ‘The main policy objection to TEOs is that they represent a disincentive to return and thereby encourage the adoption of terrorism as a way of life.’

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘It is right that use of this power is considered on a case-by-case basis. The power continues to be one of a number of tools available to law enforcement and security agencies to manage the threat posed by individuals suspected of terrorismrelated activities overseas, and we remain ready to use it.’

‘They encourage terrorism’

FOR two or three evenings in the early 1960s many Scots went to bed not sure if they were going to wake up in the morning. My parents were among them.

Their survival, and that of much of the planet’s population, appeared to rest on President John F Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s progress in talking each other down from neighbouring high-rise window ledges while mutually saving face.

But people went to bed anyway. If nuclear winter had not descended on the nation by 9am there were jobs to go to, bills to pay, lives to lead.

For a generation after the Cuban Missile Crisis, many continued to entertain the possibility that the Bomb would be their cause of death – that some celestial siren might sound and there would be but four minutes to settle our affairs before departing the stage en masse.

There was comfort at least in knowing we would all exit together. And there was a rich vein of gallows humour in the idea that the defining achievement of the most highly evolved life form on the planet would be blowing itself to kingdom come.

Today, in a week of desperate bleakness, I feel almost nostalgic for the days when mutually assured destruction was the worst thing that could happen. Perhaps it’s because the nihilistic senselessness of this outcome acted as its own safety switch. Possibly trust in our own humanity kept the holocaust angst at bay. But neither consideration brings any assurance in a land where a suicide bomber may turn out to be our neighbour or, worse, the person standing next to us at a pop concert or on a crowded train.

It makes no difference to the outcome that almost everyone in the world sees nothing but evil in the mass murder of blameless youngsters enjoying a night out in Manchester. No amount of faith in the conviction that people are essentially good overcomes the reality that a few are wicked enough to give their wretched lives to take others and maximise suffering.

Hatred

In the present age of terror, we congregate in subway stations, pubs, supermarkets, theatres and sporting arenas with no sense of confidence that no one would try to hurt us there because we know by now that, given the chance, some would.

A jihadi consumed with such hatred that he is prepared to take the lives of children at a pop concert communicates the clearest of messages when he blows himself up in a crowded foyer: I am beyond reason or moral persuasion, he says. I just want you dead.

Given that committing suicide in order to kill others remains dismally in vogue in radicalised circles and that only tiny numbers of monstrous humans are required to keep the thing going, it is beginning to appear that the rest of our lives may be spent in the age of terror.

That being the case, at some stage some honesty with ourselves will prove instructive.

For all that it might add steel to a political soundbite, we do not in truth carry on with our Western lives ‘in defiance’ of those who despise us and our values.

We do so because these are our lives, this is what they look like and there is no alternative but to live them.

The notion that somehow the key driver for our leisure activities has changed, that in the aftermath of atrocities we go to pop concerts and football matches to prove that terrorism will never win, is ridiculous.

Suicide bombers do not give their lives for mass murder in the belief that, if enough of them do it, the West will mend its ways and outlaw everything Islamic State considers blasphemy. They do it because they want to kill us.

There really is no two fingers up to the enemy in surviving and carrying on as we did before. The fact is any other reaction is inconceivable.

Elements of our lifestyle as fundamental as this do not change. Doubtless many parents will think twice in the coming months about letting teenagers go to pop concerts at Glasgow’s Hydro or the Barrowlands.

In Edinburgh, the prospect of crushing in with the crowds in the dank bowels of ancient buildings may give festival goers greater pause.

But the shows will still sell out and, whatever any virtuesignaller on stage tells you, defiance will not have sold a single ticket.

Horrors

An element of risk is unavoidable in all our lives. For most of us, for all the horrors witnessed at home and abroad in the past decade, going to a gig or standing in the departures queue at Glasgow Airport or lying on a Mediterranean beach or dining in a Parisian restaurant remain acceptable risks. If we did not believe it we wouldn’t do it, whatever lesson we were hoping to teach terrorists.

We should be honest about something else if we are to spend the rest of our lives in the shadow of sporadic terror. Social media does not define our grief, fear or outrage.

Our feelings are no more real because we have expressed them on Facebook or Twitter and, in the case of certain celebrities, they may be less real.

‘Thank Goodness my friend is OK,’ tweeted Madonna after the Manchester attack, along with a shot of her and Ariana Grande.

I’ll thank goodness if the instinct to self-promote in response to terror remains the preserve of the crass few.