We need more police in the community. (Credit: Scott Barbour/Getty)
When I heard Axel Rudakubana had entered guilty pleas for the Southport stabbings, I imagined a collective sigh of relief in Downing Street. There would be no prolonged trial. No daily reports of Rudakubana’s gruesome crimes. My scepticism was, I suppose, a reflection of how politically-charged extremist crimes have become. Sadly, the Prime Minister’s slightly uncomfortable, hiding-behind-process press conference did little to dampen my cynicism. I suspect the PM’s legal background has become, ironically, an impediment. After all, barristers ask difficult questions, not answer them.
As a young special branch officer, I worked on the Admiral Duncan bombing, a gay pub blown up by the neo-Nazi David Copeland. Towards the end of my service as a counterterrorism investigator, I worked online, tracking offenders and investigating extremist content. I’m painfully aware how the troubled, deranged and just plain dangerous walk among us. Those tasked with intercepting such offenders face possibly one of law enforcement’s most difficult challenges: we can’t predict where and when lone wolf offenders will strike. The challenge is complicated by the politics swirling around violence linked to terrorism, extremism or what’s known as “Individualised Extreme Violence” (IEV) a term you can expect to hear much, much more of.
Loosely translated, IEV means “violent, mentally-ill young men we can’t pin an ideology on”. And, at first glance, Rudakubana is a classic case study. Yet his possession of Al-Qaeda manuals is problematic for the Government. Merseyside police and counterterrorist officers initially chose not to link the killings to terror, allegedly on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. Rudakubana, they said, left no manifesto, made no confession: though they surely wouldn’t have been so nervous about a suspect with Mein Kampf by his bedside.
But if that hints to Britain’s grim squeamishness over the politics of race, the real problem here is with the police itself. Given vast incentives to box-tick, and constrained by unfit laws and a looming army of bureaucrats, officers are increasingly unable to spot the monsters in our midst. Rather than announcing yet another knife ban, then, Labour should instead focus on sending counterextremist police out into the community.
I was only ever interested in politics inasmuch as it related to motive, profiling, identifying and predicting suspect activity. As well as routine public order intelligence, I’ve worked on operations against the IRA, Loyalist paramilitaries, neo-Nazis, the Animal Liberation Front, al-Qaeda, and a dozen other groups you might never have heard of. Ultimately, each posed an actionable threat to the public. Then, after 9/11, everything changed. We entered an era of suicide terrorism, one that made the IRA’s pre-bombing warnings seem quaint.
In response, the Government introduced a strategy called CONTEST. This approach is built on four ‘Ps’: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. It sparked the single most comprehensive restructuring in the history of British internal security. Like most wide-ranging government strategies, it was also extremely complicated, which brings me to Prevent. It’s already being blamed for the Southport stabbings, not least given officers reportedly identified Axel Rudakubana as a person of interest on three separate occasions.
Prevent has a troubled history. Embedding multi-agency working into counterextremism, it was meant to flag people of concern before diverting them from violence. Soon enough though, the usual cultural sensitivities shone through. “Prevent had become a safeguarding crèche for unhappy teenagers who were unlikely ever to take up arms,” Professor Ian Acheson of the Counter Extremism Project has noted. “This distraction and mission creep — fuelled by an unjustifiable focus on far-right extremism — made it more likely highly dangerous people would fall through the cracks.”
The practical workings of Prevent were just as woolly. To some in law enforcement, Prevent became little more than an attempt to turn counterterrorism into an adjunct of social work. I remember colleagues viewing it as a punishment posting, one involving the usual police chicanery around performance figures. Metrics were based on a nebulous concept of “interventions” — with predictably facile results.
Consider, for instance, a meeting between “faith leaders” and police at a place of worship. That counted as an intervention. Taking down a beheading video from YouTube? An intervention. Submitting a report on a child whose teacher thinks they might be a racist? An intervention, one which I imagine would be familiar to any retired Stasi officer. Points mean prizes, and in the difficult-to-quantify world of counterterrorist performance, prizes mean promotion. I think the only prize worth winning is an absence of violence, but that’s probably why I left at the rank I did.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a performance-based system would concentrate on low-level extremists, those presenting a negligible level of risk. Yet if genuine “lone wolf” attackers are notoriously difficult to track, let alone prosecute, they can clearly sow chaos. Consider people such as David Copeland, the Admiral Duncan bomber, or else the self-starting Islamists who committed the Westminster and London Bridge attacks. Did the sheer quantity of Prevent subjects, caught up in the “safeguarding crèche” Acheson describes, create too much extraneous work for investigators? I suspect it did.
In the end, though, to blame Prevent for Rudakubana is only half right. The law, after all, has been subsumed by a thoroughgoing counterextremism industry, one supporting a coterie of academics, researchers, think tanks and quangos. That’s turned it into a hydra, too many of its heads consisting of beard-stroking academics, identity-politics experts and serial conference attendees. In a similar vein, Prevent’s approach is overly shaped “by committee” — unduly impacting how officers deal with risky subjects. That is if subjects wish even to cooperate: Prevent referrals are wholly voluntary. I’d argue the programme’s real value lies in intelligence-gathering, but without action, intelligence is meaningless.
It should be clear, in short, that success comes on the ground, with police given the time and incentives to deal with genuine threats. To be fair, the situation isn’t hopeless, even somewhere like Parliament. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is one of the few experienced operators in Keir Starmer’s otherwise dismal cabinet. I remember how, as a young MP, she was entrusted with a place on the prestigious intelligence and security committee. If anyone in the cabinet knows what’s needed, it’s her. At the same time, Cooper could also do worse than listen to Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Well-respected and astute, Hall has a proven record in counterterrorism. He’s already made helpful suggestions around the release of post-attack material to the public and argued officers need extra resources to tackle IEV.
What should the police do? In response to the rape gang scandal, Cooper advocated covert internet operations against suspects. The right answer — but probably the wrong target. Unlike many paedophiles, the modus operandi of Rotherham’s sex offenders didn’t involve the dark web. But what, then, of lone wolves like Axel Rudakubana? They’re often internet-fixated, along with the terminally online edge-lords who inspire them.
I’d therefore say Cooper is onto something, though my solution would involve sending counter-extremism investigators into local police teams, and monitor suspects in the community. When I served in the Met, the officers focused on paedophiles were known as “Jigsaw Teams” — so-named because they used a multidisciplinary approach to piece together solutions and keep the public safe. The Jigsaw officers I met did an impressive but terrifying job, charged with keeping tabs on dangerous sexual predators upon their release from prison. I would add “IEV” to their list of duties, beefing them up with covert online monitoring, intelligence support, surveillance capability and counterterrorism liaison.
I’d also look across the water, to the former Royal Ulster Constabulary. I’m reluctantly coming to the view that an increasingly balkanised Britain would benefit from the model which served the RUC well during the Troubles: keeping an occasionally intrusive eye on subjects of local interest. I’m biased, but we could even call it Special Branch. Rather than squatting in faraway headquarters, small, dedicated teams would work where suspects actually live. Just as important, these groups would be composed of officers who intimately knew their patch: and potential troublemakers like Rudakubana. Their interventions would be operational, designed to disrupt, deter and prosecute would-be lone wolves.
Naturally, such a revolution would involve the devolution of money, resources and personnel to local forces. It would also mean organisational risk, and upset the domestic extremism industry, as Home Office funds were shifted from university lectures to police stations. Yet whenever there’s a government emergency — one where “something must be done” — there are bound to be winners and losers. And political leadership, if it means anything, must involve hammering out these rivalries for the common good.
For the moment, at least, progress looks unlikely, with the Government soothing itself with working groups and committees. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: troubled individuals like Axel Rudakubana require intrusive policing. That means accepting trade-offs between individual rights and collective safety, exercised by experienced, well-resourced officers capable of demonstrating moral courage in the face of politically motivated criticism. Until then, where are we? Too scared of political shibboleths. Too worried by legal challenges. All the while, people organising dance classes for schoolgirls wonder if they should book stab-vested bouncers. You know, to stand outside. Just in case. It’s not like the police can protect them, can they?
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SubscribeThe writer completely ignores changes in the Muslim World . The creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s was rejection of the emancipation of women in the Western World. The right of a woman to chose the father of her children is an anathema to the collective tribal mentality and Islam.The right of any Muslim to leave Islam and say for the oldest son to marry a Hindu or Jewish women and leave Islam.
Madaudi writing in the 1940s, Qutb in 1964 ( Milestones ) and Khomeini from the 1960s
Abul A’la Maududi – Wikipedia
argue that the use of violence in the furthering the aims of Islam is justifiable. Bin Laden was influenced by Wahabi whom was influenced by Ibn Taymiyyah. Groups such as Hiz ut Tahrir and Tablighi Jamaat reject Western culture and most fundamentally the right of women to chose the father of their children: all are equal in the eyes of the law including Hindu women and Muslim men and freedom of expression.
The rise of the influence of the Muslim brotherhood occurs post 1973 Yom Kippur War in whiuch Israel won. Carter touching Sadat’s wife was taken as an insult by many Muslims not just the MB. Mb murder Sadat in 1981.
Very few Muslims are prepared to support emancipation of women, that all are equal under the law and reject the use of violence to promote Islam. Proof will occur when MB, HT and TJ have no members.
The pre 1973 Levantine culture which produced Omar Sharif and cosmopolitan cities such as Alexandria and Beirut where Sunni Muslims spoke English and French, were happy to live in Britain and France, attend universities and the women wear French fashion, is long. If one looks at newsreels from the late 1960s Muslim women go unveiled, some even wear mini skirts. Fourty years ago Malay women were unveiled.
Wahabism has forced out the far more tolerant Sufism from the Pushtuns.
The influence of Madaudi, Qutb, Khomeini, MB,HT and Wahabi money has resulted in the rejection of Western Culture. Increasingly Muslims are loyal with their stomachs but not their hearts.
Perhaps this is the greatest test of tolerance: a son or a daughter to marry someone of a faith detested by their parents and convert.
The Police can do nothing about the above. The fault lies in all those too lazy and arrogant to understand the changes in Islam since the 1920s.
I’ll summarise for you. A crap Prime Miniister, a crap Prevent, a crap balkanised country.
And more spin from the crap Appeaser-Unherd. Rudakubana is a “troubled individual.”.
That’s ir. Don’t bother reading this.
Don’t bother reading this if you’re too stupid to understand nuance and complicated concepts you mean?
Don’t waste your time reading this if you expect something different than the official Starmer-Unherd narrative.
Then kindly f**k off to another site that’s more suited to your tastes and leave the rest of us in peace
And UnHerders are the proponents of free speech. ‘Quel Joke’ as Delboy might say.
We’re interested in intelligent analysis and debate across a wide spectrum of issues, not mindless sloganeering on a single issue, by someone whose motivation i strongly suspect to be to close down debate on this platform, aided and abetted by the naive.
An agent provocateur.
I’ll happily debate people with differing views, and do so many times on here. However simply copy and pasting the same whining bo***cks onto every article becomes rather tiresome, especially when in 90% of cases it isn’t even related to subject of the article
Well I certainly am, and I suspect you are also old enough to recall those halcyon days of ‘Free Speech’?
We had quite adequate Libels Laws to restrain those bent on slander.
What is the method of Islamic terrorism?
Find something so gruesome that it will terrorise and frighten and incapacitate the enemy. Stab and maim and cut the throats of their children. Preferably girls. That will really achieve the terror effect.
What should a country’s response be? Acknowledge what is happening and fight back. Protect the children. Call a referendum to ban Islam from UK and close every mosque. Reassert, every day, that we are a Christian country. We refuse to accept this. The Prime Minister to swear this will never ever happen again in UK.
Whst is UK’s actual response? Pretend it’s not happening. Spin the terror attacks away. It’s not terrorism. It’s troubled individuals.
What is the result? Everyone is terrified. Cowering. Shaking. Numb. Incapacitated. Just don’t think about the future. Don’t think at all.
And the Islamic terrorism? Job done.
Rather surprisingly I have no time for Islam. Not only is it the most juvenile of the three monotheistic Abrahamic faiths but also far and away the most primitive.
However we have rather brought this on ourselves by making simply pathetic military interventions, where none were required.
We should NOT have joined the last three Crusades* for example. The US was quite capable of producing the required ‘firepower’ without our feeble military help. All that was necessary was strong moral support.
The days of Pax Britannica are long over, we do not “punch above our weight” to use that ludicrous Foreign Office euphemism, nor do we speak with “The Voice of Authority”, as we once did. Surely we have enough internal problems to keep us busy without making fools of ourselves on the Word stage?
*Twice in Iraq, and once in Afghanistan.
And Egypt.
Agree with much of that, though i’d argue the initial Iraq war was based upon an “international coalition” anyway (even if the vast majority of firepower came from the US), whilst the decision to stop short of Baghdad when we had the Saddam regime and his laughable “Republican Guards” on the run was disastrous, and patently so at the time.
The second Iraq war and its aftermath was a consequence of that decision; possibly also the Afghan mess which followed upon 9/11.
The initial Iraq war happened around the same time as the “end of history” narrative which led to such complacency and hugely weakened the West. Thus, we have reaped the terrorist whirlwind.
It’s articles such as this which excoriate the failed strategies of the last 30 years and those like Starmer who’ve built careers upon them that need to start the change of narrative here in the UK.
Charles has perhaps forgotten that Gulf War I was fought to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, a completely justifiable action with full UN support. Kuwait was a long-standing ally in the Gulf with whom we had a defence agreement.
No I hadn’t forgotten Gulf War I it’s just that that is a little more complicated than it appears at first sight.
For example 1961 were managed to deter Iraq from repossessing Kuwait just by threatening to send in the Paras. Why did that not work second time around?
Our military contingent comprised a British Army Training at best, perhaps four to eight soldiers.
The Army Still employed officers of the calibre of Col Mad Mike Mitchell in 1961. The Scots have a rapport with the Arabs, they understand clan warfare and the use bayonets.
Colin Mitchell – Wikipedia
Battle of Danny Boy – Wikipedia
Not participating in the US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan would not have insulated us from Islamic terrorism. France, Germany, Belgium, that haven of neutrality Austria, all sat those wars out but have been attacked by the terrorists. They just hate the West.
Yes ‘they’ certainly hate us.
However by allowing them to enter this country in large numbers and then breed prodigiously, we have created a modern Trojan Horse, yet appear to have NO ‘Achilles’ to deal with it.
Rather than indulging in foreign adventures against Islam, which only seems to stir them up, I would prefer a policy of controlling the ones we already have in our midst. Is that asking too much of HMG?
Yes. The FCO refuses to understand the changes in the Muslim world since the formation of the MB in the 1920s and post 1973 Israeli victory in Yom Kippur War. They think the highly westernised cosmopolitan wealthy still run the Muslim World; they do not.
Think of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. The generals and aristocracy such as Hindenburg thought they ran the country. The centre of power was not Berlin but the beer cellars of Munich where former NCOs and junior officers with combat experience met and joined the Nazi Party, forming the SA and then the SS.
Qutb’s Milestone is to jihadis what Mein Kampf is to the Nazi Party.
Sayyid Qutb – Wikipedia
Power in the Muslim World is held by the mosques in the back streets frequented by the lower middle class who reject the Western culture which comprises emancipation of women; not The Bhuttos.
Compare Imran Khan now to when he played cricket for Sussex. He has had to defer to Islamicists to keep any support.
How many times do the Islamic ideologues have to tell you ‘we don’t hate you for what you do, we hate you for what you are’, ie not Muslim or the right kind of Muslim. The religious leaders in Iran aren’t killing the members of minor Islamic sects because of those sects’ foreign policy but because they don’t submit to the ‘correct’ ideology. It’s the same in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and every other Muslim dominated state or area. Our interventions are rallying points, but not the underlying motivation.
Officially, since the Equality Act 2010, the UK is no longer a Christian country.
Sixty years of the cultural revolution has wiped away any understanding of and practice of the Christian virtues. And – pace Mr Hitchens in Unherd‘s debate – it’s unlikely that anyone could reverse it or understand why they should.
Additionally, the problems of the past where religions were not tolerated should be something to tremble at.
Is it really surprising that in a permissive society, stripped of Christian virtues, connected to the internet, that individual men should become fascinated with weapons (as some always have been) and, especially when taking a cocktail of mind-altering drugs, commit violent acts against strangers?
But if there’s a piece of advice from the Good Book, Psalmist 39 observes, For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.
Christianity could be restored very easily. Stop teaching comparative religion in schools and only teach Christianity.
Isn’t that called brainwashing?
No.
So, replace islamofascism with christeofascism? No thank you.
Yes
Thank you for this article Unherd.
While it’s great to hear a University professor’s take on events, the thoughts of those who actually have to engage directly with these issues is enlightening.
I would also add that policing more broadly needs to pull its head out of its backside. I don’t want rainbow coloured police cars. Dancing at Pride. Sitting alongside community leaders condemning the scuffing of religious books. I want actual policing.
The police obsession with the internet is troubling.The internet is not where violent crime takes place. No one died directly of a comment on the internet. Death is not digital. It’s analog. Ugly and very often bloody. And you don’t get to reboot.
The police obsession with the internet is because they are graduates who have spent their lives looking at a computer. They believe that the computer is the answer to everything. Without that computer, they barely know what to do. Nothing about practical experience of life. Hardly surprising that they want to spend their working life looking at a screen.
And the police officers would like to work from home, like most other employees of the state.
I think the obsession of the internet comes from its relative low risk. No chance of bad optics (the recent head stamp incident is a good example).
So we now have a neutered police. One that takes the knee. Runs away. Dances at carnivals. When what we actually need is a police that keeps its citizens safe. And ultimately arrests people regardless of their hierarchy in the pyramid of diversity politics.
Very well said but how to get there from where we currently are? That is the question. Unceremoniously sack all the graduate knee-takers and replace them with young male school leaver recruits who know how to handle themselves in a fight maybe? When I was young in the 60s, police were often derided by Lefties as ‘thugs in uniform’. I would guess that many people these days are thinking….’if only’.
And we’re not just talking about counter-terrorism are we. “The summer of 2020 (following the George Floyd riots) became an orgy of moral cowardice across all public institutions…. including police forces. Amongst the kind more interested in getting a good grade on their Human Rights degree-module than on nabbing rioters, the self-flagellation reached its apogee in the embarrassing spectacle of officers ‘taking the knee’ to unruly and threatening (and racist) ‘anti-racist’ mobs.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/back-in-the-summer-of-2020
“condemning the scuffing of religious books”, yes but only if those books belong to a certain religion. Then it is okay for the supposedly offended to round on the dastardly perpetrator, no matter how young, and publicly shame them.
The poor lad was lucky to get away with his life. This is not a joke.
The Batley school teacher and his family are still in hiding and no arrests were made of those threatening to murder him, or this schoolboy
“I don’t want rainbow coloured police cars. Dancing at Pride. Sitting alongside community leaders condemning the scuffing of religious books. I want actual policing.”
I cannot recall the last time I saw a bobby walking on the beat in my home town or anywhere in my locality, including a major tourist destination in the North West of England. You are lucky to catch a faint glimpse of something vaguely human behind the tinted windows of their police cars with their rainbow motifs as they accelerate by. The police have become faceless operators against citizens, spying on our social media in remote offices, knocking on our doors to arrest us for hate crime or the awful Non Crime Hate Incidents [NCHIs], imposed upon us by the Tory Party. If you’re unfortunate to suffer a burglary be grateful if the only response you get from the police is to be given a crime number so you can process an insurance claim. I remember, during the Black Lives Matter riots in the UK ‘protesting’ against the treatment of the criminal George Floyd, viewing YouTube videos of females defecating on the shoes of police officers holding the line. That says it all. These revolting females were not arrested – which says even more.
“Merseyside police and counterterrorist officers initially chose not to link the killings to terror, allegedly on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service.”
The Chief Constable of the Merseyside Police should be sacked for colluding with Starmer’s government and the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] (of which he was formerly head!!) to withhold information about these monstrous slayings from the public. It’s no good for her to say that she was ordered to remain quiet. She is a very highly paid public official who had a duty to do the right thing; but instead went with the directive from the former head of the CPS (i.e. Starmer) and its current head and used that as an excuse to disclaim organisational and personal responsibility. She, along with all the politicians and public officials involved in this gross cover-up examplify everything that is utterly rotten and stinking in Britain’s governance today and over the past 25 years. When a Prime Minister lies to the public and to Parliament, and then accuses a prominent parliamentarian (Nigel Farage MP) of fomenting riots when that MP asked questions in Parliament is beyond reprehensible – and then the Speaker banned MPs from asking any questions at all about the slaughter. How can anyone have trust in the Woking Class elite Establishment?
‘Little People’ (thanks, Call-Me-Dave Cameron, for the label) like me are powerless in the face of the powerful in that elite. But we are disillusioned, increasingly sceptical of anything we are fed and, above all … angry!
The sheer number of horrific attacks on the general public from perpetrators who’d been involved with Prevent had already made the public cynical about it.
Programs like this seem destined to fall to O’Sullivan’s (or Robert Conquest’s second) First Law sooner rather than later.
Good article and an apparently v knowledgeable Author understanding the nuances in how we have to identify and track such lone-wolves’. But the bit that seems to be missing is how do we then lift the likes of Rudakubana off the street before he commits the horror if he hasn’t directly prefaced it somewhere?
It feels like the coming Review needs to look at a gap in our legislation or where the application of the Mental Capacity Act could kick in. There is obviously a balance. We can’t easily apprehend and incarcerate every on-line nut-job but it does seem this perpetrator had other flags that might have been used if the Law was made a little clearer. Maybe AI can help with more rapid filtering too? Prevent clearly only gets us so far.
One also hopes that the lessons from the Jay Report, where the incumbent Govt largely parked the recommendations (yep done by Home Sec Braverman), means crucial independent advice will not be so easily pushed into the long grass again.
I’m not an expert on the Mental Capacity Act but it shouldn’t be too difficult to lock up someone who habitually turns up to school with a knife.
The Jay IICSA report has almost nothing to say about rape gangs, so stop pretending it does. More to the point, the Government should be implementing the recommendations of the Shawcross report on Prevent, but that would require it to admit the far-right extremism is not the main problem.
You’ve clearly not read the Jay Report and probably aren’t that focused on Child sexual abuse from wherever it comes. Jay report made clear such abuse much more widespread than some just some high publicity cases too which has probably irritated the heck out of those only wishing to weaponise the Grooming Gangs element.
On the taking a knife to school, yes and he was c12 and claimed, allegedly, being racially bullied. So immediately incarcerating probably quite difficult although decision warrants review – what else could they have done and perhaps should have then? However there is certainly a crucial discussion here and then as he entered later teenage years and triggers continued what Law could have been used to pull him off the Street? Something they must now recognise probably lacking.
It discussed 2 towns, there are at least 50
We have a problem of society. The police have to follow rules but the bad guys don’t. So, we need better policing but we sack police inspectors for calling Just Stop Oil ‘nutters’.
The criminals, the drug pushers, the murderers, the young men who carry knives… know that there will be no real punishment, so they play the system. The policemen (or security guard) can’t touch the shoplifters because they – the police – will then become the bad guys.
From this, it is not surprising that people in control of important things in life – key civil servants, local councillors, social services, etc, will be attracted by the possibility of earning money to ‘look the other way’. We need to decide whether we want a lawless country or one which works properly. But I think that we will always give the bad guy the benefit of the doubt because we are so nice. Wait for the first to say, “It is better that 100 criminals should go free than for one good man to be falsely accused.” That will show the level of our decadence.
“Britain’s grim squeamishness over the politics of race”.
How wonderfully put and it perfectly encapsulates what is wrong with this once splendid, sceptered,little Isle of ours.
I was brought up to believe in the ‘Immensa Britanniae Pacis Maiestas*, since then sadly it has been all been downhill.
*The boundless majesty of Britannia’s Peace.
We had peace because the Royal Navy was the best war machine in the World from 1720s to 1945. The wooden walls.
Charles Northcote Parkinson’s History of RN 1793 to 1815 shows how good it was- ” Britannia Rules “. His book East West describes how empire collapse because too many on government pay roll means too high taxation level.
Yet whenever there’s a government emergency — one where “something must be done” — there are bound to be winners and losers.
Yes, but unfortunately in the U.K. the winners are always the lefty ‘progressives’ already on top, and the losers are all of us who live under their tyranny.
My comment has not appeared, why?
The British state would probably have achieved more with Hope Not Hate running counter-terror operations (exclusively against the Far Right). That’s how stringently Prevent was aligned AGAINST racial profiling.
In Northern Ireland there were only two communities for the police to ‘keep an eye on’ during the Troubles.
In ‘balkanised’ Britain – a ‘community of communities’ – how many are there? Is a ‘patch’ a piece of territory anymore?
Just how many communities there are can be gauged from the fact that there are over 90 different languages and dialects spoken in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Would the police have to negotiate with all the various community leaders to gain approval for the necessary intrusive surveillance in just this one ‘patch’?
Again, in Northern Ireland there were only two causes to give energy to dangerous individuals. How many are there now in a ‘community of communities’? Communities that have not lost contact or sympathy with their places of origin and the quarrels there.
I suppose IEV was what the Home Office came up with after half a decade of trying to extract a list of terrorist-spotting criteria out of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
The RCPsych is pretty witless for the most part, but even they pushed back on that lunacy.
First, it is impossible to say what is being prevented and second, the Western legal system does not yet have a pre-crime division. Though harboring certain thoughts is becoming criminal in the UK, it’s also obvious that only one line of thinking is being scrutinized. The far more obvious people are concerned because it would be impolite to think badly of foreigners tied to a religion with a long and bloody history of killing innocents.
It’s the same with mass shootings in the US. Every shooter was “known” to law enforcement, school officials, and others in a position to act. But none could take action because the person had not yet violated any laws. At some point, people might take notice that ‘intrusive policing’ is made necessary only by certain people. Being squeamish is counter-productive and dangerous to public safety.
I personally think we are living within social environmental conditions which is normalising extreme violence from neighbourhood knife gangs, school based killing spees, acts of extreme violence in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, acts of extreme violence in the name of far right ethnic fundamentalism and of course individualised acts of extreme violence which seek to emulate varying aspects of the above.
When normalised extreme violence intersects with hate arising from low self esteem, bullying, discrimination, extreme isolation, jealousy, envy and a whole host of psychiatric conditions then this conjures up in the imagination wanton acts of extreme violence.
The question then is when will these imagined acts of extreme violence be realised. What is the tipping point between imagining acts of extreme violence and realising them?
Within this social mental landscape which has similarities to Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
searching on the web to either justify or facilitate imagined acts of extreme violence is probably just part of the process of realising them as the hate triggers compound over time.
This in my mind requires community policing and a wider societal moral framework that facilitates this community policing with the community being able to raise concerns about potentially dangerous individuals. Clearly the idealism of wokeism and the embedded victimology that tends to safeguard perpetrators of extreme violence rather than the victims especially if they are nonWhite is not a sufficient societal moral framework.
In this respect, we probably need a conception of Society positive rights (alongside State positive rights) especially in terms of safety, which builds on the Councillor Ward system so that the realisation of Society positive rights at the community level becomes more accountable.
I think part of the problem is that existing political systems like Wards and Constituencies are being underutilized because of an increasing sense of disenfranchisement within communities which had been made progressively worse by ideological dogma which turns concerned community spirited citizens into oppressors and racists which has warped our sense of justice, balance and goodness into fears of being smeared racists.
This fear of being smeared as racists and being reported for a hate crime is the perfect window by which imagined acts of extreme violence can become realised acts of extreme violence.
So whilst to some degree I agree there needs to be some level of discretion by intelligence agencies regarding publishing day to day threats in case this leads to a generalised sense of fear, racial profiling and stereotyping there needs to be much more of a role for community level intelligence gathering and reporting even if that upsets local cultural sensitivities.
Reopen the asylums
The Problem is not with state agencies. How can you lock up someone before they commit a crime ? Until everyone grows up and tells the truth- that all these attacks have the same Islamic link- nothing can be done.
The IRA was the same- so govt unhesitatingly banned that organisation . Being associated with it became an offence. It is irrational to tolerate an organisation preaching murder – then blame the state when its unhinged believers kill people. Yes I know not all Islamists are not mad, crazy and dangerous – but the trouble is the common link to the attacks cannot keep being tip toed round.
We need to state that certain aspects of Western democracies cannot accept the views of MB, HT, TJ, Qutb, Madaudi and Khomeini as they reject Western Society.
‘That’s turned it into a hydra, too many of its heads consisting of beard-stroking academics, identity-politics experts and serial conference attendees.’
Brilliant!
Whenever I see “not fit for purpose” or “tackle” I know that we are entering the No Man’s Land of government bureaucracy, where nobody is responsible and nothing gets done, and Two Tier Keir reigns forever.
The fact is that dangerous males are a social problem — that is, a problem for society — not a government problem for committees and box-checkers to solve.
Government never solved anything! But we, social animals that we are, can solve it, by socializing young males into paths that convert their toxic masculinity into heroic masculinity. First thing: every boy must have a father in the house.
This is not rocket science!
The Islamist attacks (which the are the most frequent type of terrorist attacks) have a father in the house.
it could simply be that the government is importing people who simply hate the west, and white people in general
Dear Mr. Rudakubana:
HM government has determined that you and your family are not a good fit for inclusion into a modern secular liberal democracy. Please remove yourself back to Rwanda or some other country within 90 days. If you are still here after that time, we will take care of it for you.
Thank you for your interest in the UK,
Sincerely,
John Q. Bureaucrat.
Immigration needs to focus on people coming from countries with somewhat aligned values, and the list does not include Arab countries.
All I can say is that it’s just as well the teacher at that dance class didn’t have a gun, or else someone might have got hurt.