There’s one thing that may stop these ‘terror’ attacks – but no one wants to know

THE more we boast about how calm, tough and united we are, the more we prove it is not so. The official response to Wednesday’s events looked like panic and over-reaction to me. Just as in the days after Diana died, we have become a nation of unreasoning weepers, laying flowers, lowering flags and lighting candles, and congratulating ourselves on how wonderful we are, while not thinking at all.

The only thing missing so far is the Blair creature trying to hijack other people’s tears. Thank Heaven for small mercies.

I suspect there is a large minority, perhaps a majority, gritting its teeth and stifling dissent – for fear that a temporary dictatorship of grief will punish them for failing to show the required emotions. Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, here goes.

First, I am as grieved by the deaths of a police officer and several other innocents as anyone else. I hope what I write here will persuade people to take actions which will make such things less likely in future.

What should we do? Well, it might be wise to tell the truth. First, we have absolutely no evidence that the Westminster murders originated with Islamic State. They claim responsibility for every horror, but on this occasion they were as wrong about the name of the culprit as Channel 4 News.

Surely, if they’d ordered it, they would have known who had done it?

As I have pointed out so many times before, many of these actions are committed by criminal misfits with long histories of theft, petty violence and drug abuse.

The Nice killer, a drunkard and drug-abuser who never went near a mosque, was one such. The Berlin truck-driver was an arsonist, thief and bar-brawler. The Westminster killer was another lowlife jailbird, who had been i n prison three times for ( among other things) stabbing a man in the face. He had several other convictions, but Scotland Yard inexplicably refuses to tell me what they were.

A former school friend says he began to go downhill after he started smoking cannabis in his teens. Even if he gave up later, cannabis is linked to long- term, lingering mental illness.

He is also said by some who knew him to have been a bodybuilder, so he may have been taking steroids – these powerful mood-influencing drugs were also used by the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, the rampage killer Raoul Moat, and the Orlando mass-killer Omar Mateen. I doubt we’ll ever know, since the authorities, obsessed with finding links to a bearded supremo in an eastern cave, are almost totally uninterested in the amazingly strong correlation between mind- altering drugs and crazed violence, and so don’t find out.

Why is this? Partly it’s because dogmatic neo-conservatives and ‘security’ lobbyists make a good living out of exaggerating the genuine but limited Islamist threat. Partly it’s because our elite is full (for some reason) of sympathisers with drug legalisation, who are on the edge of success – and really don’t want the world to realise just how dangerous these drugs really are.

Whatever the reason, those who don’t take the trouble to study such events with an open mind are doomed to undergo them again.