UK cannot hide from terrorism — Cameron
IN WAKE OF DEADLY ATTACKS ON CITIZENS, PRIME MINISTER PROMISES WIDE, LONG-TERM RESPONSE TO VIOLENT EXTREMISTS British Home Secretary Theresa May and Foreign Office Minister Tobias Ellwood travelled to Tunisia yesterday for meetings with the government to
Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday pledged a wide response to extremism, describing Britain as being united in grief over the beach massacre in Tunisia.
Fifteen Britons have been confirmed dead, but officials have warned that could rise as high as 30, making it the worst terror attack on UK citizens since the July 7, 2005, London transport attacks that killed 52 commuters. Cameron insisted the nation would not be cowed.
“To our shock and grief we must add another word: resolve. Unshakeable resolve. We will stand up for our way of life,” Cameron wrote. “So ours must be a full-spectrum response — a response at home and abroad, in the immediate aftermath and far into the future.”
Investigation
Some 600 British counterterrorism police — one of the force’s largest such deployments in recent years — have been deployed as part of the investigation into Friday’s attack at the Imperial Marhaba Hotel in the beach resort of Sousse. Officers have also been deployed at airports to meet and support travellers and to help identify witnesses.
Home Secretary Theresa May is travelling to the North African nation for talks on the extremist threat and to offer condolences for the slain tourists. A Royal Air Force transport plane is also being deployed to bring stranded families home. Cameron told the BBC that the government is working as fast as possible to give families information.
Cameron described the Daesh group as using ancient barbarism and combining it with propaganda — using social media as its primary weapon.
“We must look at how we can work with countries like Tunisia to counter this online propaganda,” he wrote. “We must also deal with it at its source, in places like Syria, Iraq and Libya, from where Isil [Daesh] is peddling and plotting its death cult.”
Cameron said the UK can’t hide from terrorists after the deadliest attack against Britons since 2005.
“They have declared war on us and they are attacking our people at home and overseas whether we like it or not,” the prime minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “I don’t think you can hide from this.”
The Foreign Office in London said 15 British nationals were among those killed on June 26 in the Tunisian beach resort of Sousse and that number is likely to rise. A militant group claimed responsibility for the beach shooting, using Twitter to identify the gunman as Abu Yahya Al Qayrawani.
Home Secretary Theresa May and Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood travelled to Tunisia yesterday for meetings with the government to discuss the attack and the response.
In his interview, Cameron repeated his view, made in a speech earlier in June, that Muslims in Britain must no longer “quietly condone” views that lend credibility to extremists.
“There are some organisations and some people who buy not the terrorism, but they buy a lot of the extremist narra- tive,” he said. “To those people we have got to say that is not an acceptable view. We are not going to engage with people who believe there ought to be a caliphate and women should be subjugated.”
‘Significant’ powers
He said he had a “serious problem” with groups that back extremist preachers or believe that it’s all right to be a suicide bomber in Israel. “It’s just not all right to commit terrorist acts elsewhere,” he said.
While the UK is set to debate new antiterrorism legislation, the home secretary said proposals won’t be rushed. Previous attempts to give security services more access faced opposition from those wanting to safeguard personal information.
“This is about some powers that are very significant,” May said in a BBC interview. “We want to make sure that we are going to get the regulatory framework right for the future.”
The nature of attacks and the challenges facing security services is changing, she said.
“We must recognise that this is the most significant loss of British life in a terrorist attack” since bombings targeting the London subway system killed 52 civilians in 2005, May said. “Over the last 10 years, it is estimated that something like 40 plots have been disrupted here in the UK.”
Her Labour Party predecessor, Alan Johnson, said the Tunisia attack showed the need for stronger powers.
“We have to give the security services the tools to do the job,” he said in a separate BBC interview. “We have to move ahead and press on with that as quickly as possible.”
In July 2014, the government pushed emergency legislation through Parliament to ensure companies keep email, text and phone-call data for a year to help law-enforcement agencies.