OPINION They want to divide us. Instead, we stand united

The horror and sadness has been detailed too often, from the beaches of Tunisia and the nightclubs of Florida to the bus lanes of London and now, terribly, the Riviera.

Our hearts once again go out to strangers caught in the carnage, their lives, families and futures torn apart in a few terrible moments.

But, each time, as we watch the pictures of the body bags, some heartbreakingly small, the police tape, the flowers, the lit candles, the grim-faced official statements, our shock and horror inches towards resignation and despair.

Because, really, what can we do to protect ourselves from the kind of barbarity that visited Nice on Thursday night?

Lone wolves, we call them now. Men not on any of our intelligence services’ long lists of terrorist suspects or sympathisers.

Men capable of committing mass murder without warning or any obvious help from a support cell of like-minded associates.

They are terrorists because they create terror but, more often it seems, it is arguable if they are at all driven by any creed or warped religion. Certainly, pork- eating, drinking, dope- smoking, petty criminal Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was no obvious jihadi.

And neither was the sexual ly conf l icted gunman Omar Mateen who killed 49 victims in a gay club in Orlando.

Alarmingly, there must be a growing fear that a desire to claim a page in Islamic State’s short but awful history, to give their lives of no consequence a greater signif icance in death, is helping drive some psychologically damaged, inadequate men to commit ever-greater atrocities stoked by the awful, malevolent propaganda of jihad.

Of course, intelligence is key to stopping these acts and, we must suspect, our secret services have stopped far more than we may ever know.

And, of course, Western governments must continue to invest in the agents and sources, the social media monitors and web-crawlers, who might spot the smallest sign, the merest hint, that a human bomb is about to explode.

But sometimes the fuse will be too short and we will, again, be watching the horror and sadness with despair and resignation.

The men of hate want us to turn on each other, want to stoke suspicion and division. We should not give them that victory.

We must trust our intelligence services to find and stop these men and they must be encouraged to refine the response to the ever-changing threats we face.

We should live our lives as if they do not exist. That is how we will beat them