A drastic change is needed in dealing with Islamist murderers

For the second time in less than a fortnight, the nation has woken to a story of carnage, horror and heroism that has taken place overnight. Two weeks after the suicide bomb atrocity in Manchester killed 22 people, it was London’s turn to be targeted by the terrorists, this time resulting in the deaths of seven innocent revellers and the three rampaging murderers. More than 40 were injured, many seriously.

The Prime Minister, Theresa May, spoke for the country when she said that “enough is enough”. We cannot live in a country where attacks happen every few weeks, and an iron fist must now be used against the Islamist cancer in our society.

These attacks have coincided with the general election campaign, although is hard to know whether that is deliberate since the culprits have all been killed. They may be responding to the calls from beleaguered jihadist leaders for an onslaught to coincide with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on May 26. It is testament to the way the extremists have perverted their religion that they seek to mark its most solemn occasions with murder.

One thing they must not be allowed to do is to knock the democratic process off course. For all the fear it induced among people on a Saturday night out, our lives must continue as normally as possible, despite them. To that end, the efforts on social media to crank up a campaign to get Thursday’s election postponed are misguided and craven.

The vote must go ahead not because it is too late to stop it or because the process cannot legally be reversed, but because to do anything else would be to give the terrorists precisely what they seek.

These people and others who are even now planning further atrocities are beneath contempt and need to be treated as such. They must not be given the benefit of any justification born of phoney grievances. Yet this event is likely to follow a familiar pattern.

The killers will probably have come to the attention of the police and MI5 at some point and there will be complaints that the security agencies should have done more to prevent the attack. Blame will switch from the perpetrators to those who are trying to stop them. Or it will be the fault of society as a whole, or of past British military interventions, as the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has suggested recently.

These are diversions from the real motivator: the virulent hatred of the West and its values that has infected a group of young Muslim men, many of whom have been born here or were given asylum. They attack pop concerts, pubs and clubs because these are places where people enjoy themselves – something that is anathema to these fanatics.

Most people are sick to the stomach of their activities, which are justified by nothing that this country has done to them, their families or their faith. Egged on by the death cultists of Isil, they embrace an empty nihilism that has no obvious rationale. They cannot possibly expect the Western nations they target to adopt their religion. And if that is not their purpose, what is?

The Prime Minister said there would be a review of counter-terror laws; but we have been here before, after the attacks on London in July 2005, which killed 52 innocent people and four bombers.

She is right to warn that parts of British society may have become too tolerant of extremist views and that swathes of the public sector have not done enough to tackle the lethal threat in our midst.

Questions need to be asked about the extent to which these people are known not just to the authorities but to the communities in which they live. Are their families, friends and acquaintances doing enough to identify them and alert the police to the dangers they pose?

After Manchester, several people said they had rung the counter-terrorism hotline to warn of the behaviour of the bomber Salman Abedi, yet Scotland Yard says it has no record of any calls.

Without such information the agencies will struggle to keep track of the people who pose a real danger to everyone in society, since Muslims are just as likely to be the victims as anyone else. If they suspect they are harbouring such people in their midst, they must point them out.

Good intelligence and public vigilance are what are needed most – but so is a step-change in dealing with Islamist extremism, a task that Mrs May has been accused of failing to get to grips with when she was home secretary.

Even now there is talk of a new focus on “all forms of extremism”, rather than on the deadly variety that needs to be confronted here and now, especially in universities and schools where the “Trojan Horse” infiltration identified several years ago has never been dealt with properly. It’s time that it was. As Mrs May said, enough is enough.

Mrs May is right to warn that parts of British society may have become too tolerant of extremist views

Are the extremists’ families, friends and acquaintances doing enough to identify them and alert the police?