Prevent has become a well-covered — and, by extension, notorious — brand. But this celebrity leads people to overestimate its power. Prevent, frequently described as a counter-terrorism program but perhaps better understood as a funding stream covering several programs, is small beans compared to the cost of traditional parts of state infrastructure dedicated to counter-terrorism. Because of how Prevent is structured, it is difficult to find overall figures; but its budget for the whole of London is reported to be somewhere in the low millions — a fraction of the £9 million the Mayor of London spent advertising the Ulez expansion.

So, what does it do? Prevent has three objectives: to tackle the causes of radicalization, to safeguard those at risk of radicalization, and to rehabilitate anyone who has been radicalized. Any risk related to non-ideological threats, such as psychological problems and violence obsessions, should — in theory — be picked up by the likes of the NHS and social services. However, many end up with Prevent, while specific and impending threats are handled by the police and security services.

To meet its remit, Prevent trains public-sector workers — especially teachers — to identify signs of vulnerability to extremism. Any risky parties are then referred to the Channel program, where attempts are made to de-radicalize. To identify, triage and interact with those potential threats requires a high degree of cooperation between agencies, such as police, social workers, prisons, schools, local authorities, the NHS, and Government departments. Yet, as can be the case in complex systems, the lines of accountability can be blurred between agencies, and cases can be missed or closed prematurely.

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This was reportedly a factor which led to Ali Harbi Ali leaving Prevent too quickly. Failures were identified in other recent cases, such as Usman Khan (who killed two people near London Bridge in 2019), Khairi Saadallah (who killed three people in Reading in 2020), Ahmed Hassan (the 2017 Parsons Green tube bomber), and Rudakubana. Having observed the process by which people are referred to Channel, I suspect the number of people identified as potentially risky compared with the resources to assess and triage is also a challenge.

But even if the identification and referral process were to work perfectly, what Prevent is trying to achieve is a tall order. Consider for a moment the probable efficacy of an initiative with no ability to compel people to engage, with limited resources and limited opportunities to intervene, in the face of all the factors that might radicalize someone. Imagine a psychologically troubled outcast, for whom hatred dressed up as a moral crusade provides his very existence with meaning, surrounding himself with affirming narratives and dreams of glory, and then pit those against a voluntary initiative which you might have heard about from one of your teachers at the school you hate. It’s hardly an even match.

As a result, Prevent also operates further upstream, developing counter-radicalization narratives and providing grants to grassroots community groups to strengthen social cohesion. This creates opportunities for early intervention which might help to build resilience against radicalizing forces, but the strategy comes with its own challenges. Firstly, Prevent money has found its way to the wrong groups on more than one occasion, funding those who, rather than countering radicalization, were propagating it. Secondly, governments are most effective in shaping perspectives when their messages are ubiquitous and reinforced across all elements of the social and cultural fabric — as with “follow the science”. In practice, many Prevent initiatives will struggle to cut through the noise.

Given the obvious challenges, persistent threat and limited funding, why are policy officials trying to make an already unenviable task even harder by widening Prevent’s targets?

In 2023, William Shawcross’s “Independent Review into Prevent” recommended it refocus on the most acute threats to national security to maximize impact, along with some other sensible proposals which the Government mainly accepted. But, as a report from Policy Exchange last month notes, a leaked Home Office “Rapid Analytical Sprint” on extremism policy has since suggested taking the opposite approach. It proposed broadening the definition of extremism by conflating it with extreme violence and other forms of harm to society, while diluting the focus on the most pressing ideological threats. The same sprint appeared to equate Islamist extremism with more obscure ideologies that do not pose the same level of risk.

Perhaps officials are happy to broaden their definition of extremism because they overestimate the efficacy of their policies to overcome it. In my experience, many of those involved in social programs — and to a lesser extent in Government — assume that their well-intentioned efforts make a meaningful difference. This, however, is rarely the case. Many social programs concerned with influencing behavior, when evaluated robustly, show weak or no positive effects at all. This is because across the domain, there is little tradition of reliably establishing cause and effect. As a result, incorrect assumptions are made about what influences behavior, especially over the longer term. An often-quoted example is the “Scared Straight” intervention, which sought to deter young offenders from crime by exposing them to life inside prison. For many years, this was assumed to reduce offending — until proper assessment concluded it most likely increased it.

One of the few robust evaluations in this particular domain, conducted seven years ago, suggested that only a small handful of civil-society counter-radicalization programs had a positive effect. Given the average effectiveness of social programs and the complexity of countering radicalization, this is not surprising. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Prevent should give up, when it is still capable of playing an important part of our counter-terrorism strategy. But without good evaluation — something, incidentally, that is lacking across Government — there is no accountability, and overreach becomes a tempting way to inflate roles and egos. To systematically measure cause and effect and then adapt or cut programs that do not work demands certain technical skills which are rare in law enforcement and adjacent fields. But more importantly, and perhaps even rarer, this sort of evaluation requires the willingness of policy officials to disappoint the civil-society groups whose programs are failing.

Rigorous evaluation will tell officials if their programs are having the desired effect, but the government should also consider the effect of rhetoric. The fear is that authorities’ overuse of the label “far-Right” is likely to increase rather than reduce support for the actual far-Right. The broadening of the Overton window, and normalization of a term that should be reserved for genuine extremes, risks amplifying radical sentiments and undermining the credibility of the state at a time when trust in Government and national institutions has fallen to historic lows. In his report, Shawcross noted an imbalance between the narrowness with which Islamist extremism was defined by Prevent, and the breadth of definition applied to far-Right extremism, at times including mainstream Right-wing commentary with no connection to radicalization. Officials have even suggested that watching comedy series such as Yes, Minister or The Thick of It could be red flags for far-Right extremism.

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Since the Shawcross review, these more contentious perspectives may have been reconsidered. But more recently, Home Office officials have proposed that accusations of “two-tier policing” are examples of far-Right narratives. No doubt, malign actors would seek to capitalize on perceived grievances, but two-tier policing is not a myth: a YouGov survey last year showed that large proportions of the public see discrepancy in police treatment of different causes. The details of individual cases make comparisons difficult, but it is legitimate and a necessary component of policing by consent for the public to question inconsistencies in law enforcement decision-making.

This disconnect between officials and the public on two-tier policing is yet another symptom of the groupthink that has permeated much of the arts, academia, media, Government, and social and charitable sectors in recent years. It derives from a culture that has fundamentally degraded some of our most important national institutions.

In Britain, absent any political leadership prioritizing cultural change within the public sector, mandarins may be tempted to wait out the eventual demise of a culture which prioritizes ideological consistency over objective evaluation, intellectual rigor, and the effective function of public service. But the longer it takes, the longer tough policy areas such as counter-terrorism will continue to struggle.

Prevent plays an important role in Britain’s strategy against terrorism. Like in so many other areas of policy, we need to do it better. Understandably, the Government’s focus will be on improving visible outcomes in health, public safety, immigration and the economy. Yet to have any hope of its policies succeeding, it must also focus on that which is less visible: the culture of those institutions tasked with delivering them.

This is where David Amess, the Tory MP, was killed last year at a constituency surgery. Due to this, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are not standing in the by-election today where they might, in other circumstances, have tried to dent the immense Tory majority. (Amess took 60% of the vote in 2019, in a Leave-supporting seat.) It wouldn’t happen though, and perhaps the opposition parties know that, and their politesse is also cynicism. If there is a Boris Johnson land it is here. This is Essex, the land of spurious self-confidence. Why else build a mile long pier into the mud of the Thames estuary, where no one wants to go? Because you can. The men of Essex have not lost their affection for Johnson because they are like him. When Johnson said “voting Tory would cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3” — and it is, in retrospect, a very truthful manifesto, in that it is dreams — he was talking to Essex Man and the things he wanted and understood. And, so, when I ask people in Southend about Johnson and the parties, they either admire him or forgive him.

“I broke the [pandemic] rules,” says one man. “I saw my Mum. I wasn’t going to not see my Mum. The thing before the funeral [of Prince Philip]. That was a bit a naughty. God bless her.” But “Naughty” is an indulgence. It is not a critique. “I didn’t get caught but he did,” he says, “I don’t give a monkey’s.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Boris,” says another man, angry even at the insinuation that there might be. The only critical man is a fishmonger, and he only says, “Better the devil you know.” Fish are swimming in the estuary, he says, and customers are plentiful. Things are looking up.

I am looking for the parties to the right of the Conservatives. With Labour and the Liberal Democrats — and also the Greens and Reform — absent from Southend, they have the field to themselves. (The Conservative candidate, the barrister Anna Firth is, as is usual when defending a constituency in a by-election, so elusive as to effectively be a myth. I only email her campaign to exercise my finger joints.) You can learn a lot about what people think when you talk to what is called the far Right, because almost no one begins their political journey there. Something took them there. And sometimes, if you are unlucky, you can predict the future.

But not always. I meet Jason Pilley, the Psychedelic Movement candidate and party leader in the Utopia Coffee Shop off Southend’s main drag. He is wearing a pin-striped jacket. He was once a Green — “they hate each other,” he says, because he has no filter to speak of — and his candidacy is a piece of performance art, or scream. He speaks fast, like a man who is never listened to enough, and calls Southend, “heaven and hell. You can’t win in this town [as an MP] unless you are a Tory.” He says, “I’ve never gone into an election thinking I can win. There’s a couple I’ve thought: ‘I won’t come last’. I write novels and poetry and I kind of see politics as part of that.” He hands me his manifesto. He is for allotments and renewable energy and martial arts training for children and cannabis and LSD clubs “around Southend”. He would burn incense in all public buildings and would replace the Queen with the Christian stabbed at Speakers’ Corner last summer: Hatun Tash. He wants to make Tommy Robinson a peer. It ends: “RIP David Amess”.

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As I read, he shouts at me because I criticised Tommy Robinson, and I have not read the Koran. Pilley is in politics for personal self-renewal, like the Corbynistas, and I leave wondering whether it is even responsible to interview him. He is very interesting, but he speaks for no one but himself. His policies are a collection of personal dreams, and prejudices, and I think he knows it.

I also speak to the English Democrat candidate Catherine Blaiklock by telephone because she is not in the constituency to campaign. I think she is too frightened. She lives in Norfolk, where she runs a B&B. Blaiklock left Ukip due to its links with Tommy Robinson under its former leader Gerald Batten. She co-founded the Brexit Party with Nigel Farage but left when Hope Not Hate publicised her anti-Muslim tweets. She has landed with the English Democrats. She sounds strained but pleased to be speaking to a journalist.

“Standing on an anti-immigration, anti-terrorism, anti-crime, Right-wing platform is a very unpleasant and nasty experience in Britain,” she says. “Anyone who has spoken out about illegal immigration has had to have protection and anyone who has spoken out illegal immigration and mass immigration has had their characters thrown through the mud”. She doxed herself, she says, by putting her address on public record and TripAdvisor customers posted fake reviews of her B&B. “Some of them were funny.” But it was hard to get them taken down, she says, which, when you consider the misery some migrants suffer, sounds slightly self-obsessed. Even so, “This should be a referendum about mass migration per se. Nobody has ever never had a vote on it. People are frightened and people are frightened to talk about it”. In her guesthouse, Blaiklock sounds as isolated as a woman can be.

I go to the Daddy Dragon rally, which is filled with people on mobility scooters wearing the bright yellow sweatshirts of the English Constitution Party and listening to a history of England, courtesy of Daddy at the microphone and the enormous copies of Magna Carta which travel with him. Some people are here merely because their friends are here. They sit calmly at the café drinking beer. There is even a 75^th birthday party for an ex-soldier called Nobby bolted on to the rally. The groups combine, fall apart, combine again. Nobby shows me photographs of his father, who was also a soldier, and I see a vaccine appointment card gleaming in his wallet. Splitter.

But there are true believers too. “Even though you are English, living in England, you are not actually English living in England,” a man tells me. They are all hungry to be listened to, and courteous, because they are used to be being despised. “You are just a British citizen living in Britain which actually makes no sense because there are four countries in the United Kingdom,” he says. His eyes widen, as if in pain. “I’m not Scottish and I’m not from Wales and I’m not from Northern Ireland. Everyone else has their culture pushed to the front and we’re not even allowed to talk about it in case you offend someone who’s just come over.”

I also meet a man with two greyhounds who runs a group called Mad Mick’s Conspiracies — alongside his own splinter group Mad Mick’s Resistance — who calls Covid, “the PLANdemic. None of it is real.” Why does he feel failed by conventional politics?” It’s in the words,” he says, as if giving me the key to a great secret, “they tell you themselves. The Left-wing and the Right-wing are two wings of the same bird. So, it doesn’t matter which one you vote for. You’re still getting the same bird in power. I don’t vote. I will never vote again.”

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“We’re the last indigenous group that doesn’t have a parliament,” says the next from his mobility scooter. “We just need to get England recognised as a country, to get us sorted out so we can get some stalwarts of the community in parliament: every day working people like Graham, myself, yourself, anybody.” What he says is not extraordinary. This is the common disconnect between those who have power, and those who feel they have none. But that he weeps continually as he says it is extraordinary. “The politicians are there for themselves,” he says through his tears. “You pull my strings. I’ll pull your strings. You just can’t warrant it. We need to get in, take our parliament back, get our people right and look after ourselves. And get rid of the mainstream politicians, the judges and get them starting thinking English again. Because there’s a lot of people who believe in England.” I don’t know if he is aware that he is calling for an end to parliamentary democracy, and it will not be as sunny as he thinks. If he is, he does it weeping.

At the end of the rally, Kay Shemirani, a former nurse, now struck off, speaks her combination of conspiracy theory and health advice. “They think you’re stupid,” she says. “We are the slaves, the slaves in debt. A whistle-blower right from the very top [of the NHS] told me, ‘They are doing black magic, they refer to us as toilet rolls’”. I have been here an hour, and it doesn’t even sound strange anymore. This is a parallel universe, though it shares some elements with mine. I believe in their powerlessness, and their grief. I just don’t think it was immigration that brought them here.

I also meet the remnants of Ukip, sullen and dispirited. They have erected a gazebo in a park and have placed Ukip mugs and Ukip badges on a table. Vote Leave says one badge. Take Back Control says another. This is a campaign from 2015, when they came third in the general election by percentage points with 12.6%, and they know it. Some of them are self-aware and ask me, privately, how the respectable element of Ukip can divorce itself from the racism I hear that day.

The Ukip candidate, Steve Laws, is slender and pitted. He was politicised by illegal immigration. He likes to stand at the edge of Channel in Folkestone, where he lives, making notes of the number of migrant boats in the English Channel: “8,500 in the year 2020; in the year 2021 it was 28,500. This year I am predicting at least 50-60,000 will arrive, all at the taxpayers’ expense and all placed into hotels and then into social housing”.

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Laws is a painter and decorator. “I believe immigration should be controlled because otherwise it affects the working class and ultimately housing becomes an issue,” he says, “jobs become an issue, wages remain low.”

I have followed Ukip for years and I have never seen them so bereft. It is, among other things, an education in getting your heart’s desire. When I find Laws at the end of the day, and ask him how it went, he says, “Nobody had much to say, not the people we met today anyway. A lot of people I don’t think are going to vote. But we don’t know until the ballot day.” Even so, “I haven’t been shouted at or abused which I kind of expected if I’m honest, being Ukip.”

Laws is an aggrieved man spending his life staring at the Channel when the true cause of his misery is behind him. I think that about all of them except Pilley, who speaks only for himself. The issues Laws grapples with — failing public services, housing, wages, the gap between rich and poor, the sheer disconnect — are not invented or untrue. They are real and they will get worse. Laws is right about everything, it seems to me, except the solution. That is, he sees the crime scene clearly, but he has no idea who the murderer is.

It is easy to laugh at Laws and Daddy Dragon and Mad Mick. I have laughed. I went to Ukip conference in 2004 and laughed. All the correspondents did. We laughed at their clothing and their speech and their manners. We laughed at their earnestness. We laughed at their class. We laughed at how they didn’t know how to conceal themselves for us, and how they always got everything wrong. We printed the laughter in newspapers, and we congratulated ourselves on the quality of our satire, and assumed they existed for nothing other than our satire. You know, of course, what happened next.

Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.

Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.

Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.

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Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.

What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.

But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.

As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.

The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”

Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.

To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.

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But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.

There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.

I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.

It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.

The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.

Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.

Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.

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This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.

Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.

It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.

What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.

The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

And yet somehow — despite all the vigils, all the pledges, all the policy announcements — Islamism remains as potent as ever.

It is two weeks to the day since Sir David Amess was stabbed to death — and already it seems like it’s old news, discarded from the national conversation. This is partly due to the reporting restrictions put in place after a suspect was charged; Ali Harbi Ali is not a murderer until proven as such.

But that should not prevent us from having a broader discussion, on a societal level, about the way we respond — or, more important, do not respond — to acts of terrorism. For it seems to me that there is an implicit message in our reluctance to dwell on Amess’s death: we are content to accept that, despite the horror that follows every attack, Islamist terrorism, if indeed that is what it is, is a fact of life.

We will grieve for individuals such as David Amess, and for other innocent victims whose names and faces we don’t know or remember. But terror is no longer seen as something that will go away; it is something we just need to get used to.

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Part of this defeatism has been dominant since I fled Somalia as a teenager. Islamism, in essence, is a political philosophy, one that is rooted in jihad but seeks to describe how society should be run. It is more than an irrational and violent ideology: it is an attack on liberalism itself.

But for the past three decades, the West’s response has been one of cowardice masked by arrogance. We needn’t fight back; it’s much better, we’re told, to stay quiet in the hope that, one day, those who hold competing ideologies will come through and see things from our side. Evidently, it is not working.

More concerning, though, is the rise of a new type of defeatism — this time disguised as a progressive form of self-flagellation. Imagine you are a young British Muslim. At school and university, you’re repeatedly warned about Britain’s colonial roots; that the country your parents fled to, in the hope of escaping persecution and anarchy, is the cause of it all. And then you’re told: don’t worry, it’s not your fault. You are merely a victim; evil white people are all to blame.

This dispiriting approach to education, which has taken hold on both sides of the Atlantic, is often justified using the rhetoric of “equality” and “diversity”. In practice, however, I suspect it is more helpful to view it in the context of something called “dawa”. In Arabic, the term simply denotes a centuries-old, non-violent call to Islam — though in practice, it has become a tool used by Islamists to encourage Muslims to embrace their extreme ideology and disavow the West. More often than not, this is achieved by branding Western society as ungodly and sinful, as something that needs to be either reformed or destroyed. In other words, you have two choices: either come and join us, or we’ll need to wage a holy war.

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Whether they realise it or not, progressives are saying something strikingly similar. In their eyes, too, the West is evil, home to foundational structures that serve only the white, heterosexual, male oppressor. So when the Islamists come along and say that Allah has given you a higher purpose, one that will culminate with ending the wickedness of the West, young British Muslims are already half-way there. Hatred for their country is all they know.

That’s how a 22-year-old man can be driven to carry out a suicide bomb attack at a concert largely attended by children. Or how two men in their twenties can become inspired to behead an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight. Or how three teenage girls from East London can be coaxed into joining Isis.

Of course, none of this to say that identity politics or other forms of progressivism are solely to blame for the rise of Islamism. The influence of dawa across Europe and America is deeply concerning. And, as I have written before for UnHerd, Muslim communities need to do more to stop their young from being drawn into extremism.

But the difference with our insistence on demonising the West is that it’s a problem of our own making — and it’s something that we can fix. The most obvious way to start would be by devising a curriculum that doesn’t seek to portray Britain and America as evil at every turn.

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More urgently, though, liberalism needs to shake off its defeatist malaise and learn to compete with those ideologies that would see it destroyed. To new immigrants, as well as to our own schoolchildren, we need to teach the incredible success story of our way of life. We need to remind our younger generations why it’s better to live in Britain than, say, Somalia. The answer isn’t mysterious. I certainly feel no shame in saying it: there, women are treated as second-class citizens, and barbarity seeps into every aspect of your life. There, you have no liberty or rule of law.

In the West, on the other hand, we have all this and more. Perhaps above all else, we have the opportunity to die peacefully in our bed, of old age, surrounded by our family. That isn’t something that should be taken for granted; I should know. And yet we seem to have forgotten this, distracted by waging a toxic forever war which prioritises division over community.

But this is not a fight we can afford to sit out. Until we decide that the West is worth defending, Islamism will not be defeated — and innocent people will continue to be killed.

For many, the ethnicity and heritage of the only person facing charges in this case, Ali Harbi Ali, were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.

As someone who was born in Somalia, I find this absurd. Of course a suspect is not a murderer because he has a Somali background — and Ali is not a murderer until proven as such. But denouncing facts as racist — especially when the person in question was referred to Prevent, and police and security services believe he may have been inspired by al-Shabaab in Somalia — forces a dangerous ignorance on the public.

Yet it is just one of a number of fallacies that continue to dominate almost every discussion about Islamist-driven terrorism — fallacies that are promoted by both the media and British authorities. Indeed, it strikes me that our efforts to counter Islamist attacks are hindered by at least three other misconceptions: our insistence on describing a perpetrator as a “lone wolf”, our obsession with online self-radicalisation, and the idea that “all extremisms are created equal”.

Take that first fallacy. As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, I suspect numerous victims of Islamist extremism might be alive today, if those in charge of preventing terrorism recognised that Islamist extremists are anything but lone wolves.

In a liberal society, it is appealing to think of suspects of Islamist terror as solitary actors. As a matter of principle, we uphold the importance of individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, while our judicial system assumes that individuals are responsible for their actions. We also recognise the importance of not maligning an entire community because of the extremist views of a few of their fellow believers. This is particularly crucial when the historical relationship between a particular minority and their new country is fraught with memories of colonialism.

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But while individuals responsible for terrorist attacks may conduct their attacks alone, they still emerge out of communities or networks of like-minded individuals, whether in-person or online. They learn from teachers, imams or instructors the radical ideas that inspire their violence. This is not to say that their entire family or community is extremist — only that these individuals find and are exposed to people who are. Little is known about the background of the murder suspect, Ali, but we can be certain that if found guilty, he would not have plunged a knife into a total stranger, possibly picked at random, wholly of his own accord. Someone or some group would have inspired these actions.

Since last Friday, we’ve heard from a number of people who reportedly knew Ali, all of whom have expressed shock at his alleged crime. Yet it seems hugely unlikely that no one in his immediate circle would have picked up on any extremist tendencies. After all, the Somalian communities are very social. Unlike in traditional Western families, where individuals live an atomised life within an atomised society, a Somali family typically lives together in one household, where everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.

Gossip is a way of life. Solitude is not an option, even more so during the pandemic when families not only lived together but were home more often. It is likely, therefore, that key signs of radicalisation — a shift in language, withdrawal from society, increased frequency of praying and attending mosque — would be noticed by various family members.

When that does happen, you might expect a person’s family to become more involved, to pull them back into their community. But that isn’t always the case. Imagine, for example, that you are a family member of a potentially radicalised individual from a highly tight-knit community. You notice something of concern — but might it be best to keep quiet? Are you a sinner if you report your brother to a programme led by non-Muslims? What does it mean for your relationship with God and the afterlife? What kind of traitor would report their own blood to the authorities?

Or perhaps you are just a non-Muslim colleague or friend of the individual. You may notice a change in behaviour, but are you really going to go forward and report them, with the possibility of being labelled a racist or an Islamophobe? Who would report a potentially innocent person, just for observing their religion?

Lone wolves, then, do not come out of nowhere. They are inspired by other radicals and they are noticed by their community. The problem is that the community then keeps quiet.

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A similar fallacy looms over our understanding of online radicalisation, which does not occur in a silo, between the individual and their computer screen. The individual has to be susceptible, in a place of vulnerability, where Islamic radicalism can easily set in.

Though there is much about Ali that we are yet to learn, we do know that his father was Harbi Ali Kullane, a former government official in Somalia. Since the attack, reports have presented Kullane’s Twitter profile as a testament to assimilation, displaying his support for Captain Tom and the England football team. It has also been reported that, while working in Somalia, he faced threats from al-Shabaab.

And yet I suspect his attitude to his new country is more nuanced than has been presented. It is striking, for example, that not a single news outlet has flagged a tweet by Kullane from 2017, in which he suggests: “the 5-pointed star [on the Somali flag] represents the aspiration of a nation and the misery inflicted by British colonialism. Let’s not sugar coat this #Somalia.” Given that Kullane moved to the UK in the Nineties, his comment suggests an antipathy to Britain that has so far been ignored.

The last fallacy that must be confronted is the belief that all forms of extremism are created equal and should be treated as such. Under the British counter-terrorism Prevent programme, Islamism is lumped together with other forms of extremism, such as far-Right extremism, and handled with a similar approach. But while Right-wing extremism is a threat that should not be downplayed, its causes and motivations are totally unrelated to radical Islamists. They should be distinct and handled separately.

The only way to prevent Islamist terrorist attacks is to understand the lexicon of the Islamists. It is vital to understand the historic heroes that inspire them, the hadiths that speak to them, the myths and legends that motivate them, and the materials that are put into their hands. It is important to know not just the history of Islam, but also the history of the nation that is connected to the radicalised individual.

This kind of specialisation is not possible when so many in the UK cry Islamophobia at every turn. The only way to ask family and community members to come forward and report potentially radicalised individuals is to win their confidence. Individuals have to feel that they can safely approach the authorities without repercussion. They also deserve to know that the situation will be handled by someone who deeply understands the issues at hand. As Nik Adams, a counter-terrorism police officer, explained brilliantly, we need people who can recognise “how significant the seemingly insignificant might be”.

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Given the ineffectiveness of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, and the blinkered approach to reporting since Sir David’s murder, that will be an uphill struggle. But it is not impossible: Prevent is undergoing an independent review, led by the capable William Shawcross, that will report in December and produce suggestions on how it can be improved.

More importantly, I believe that, by and large, the Islamic terrorist narrative is waning. al-Qaeda is a skeleton of what it was two decades ago, while the spectre of ISIS continues to serve as a real-life deterrent to what living under a caliphate requires. Even the Muslim Brotherhood narrative is stale and petering out. Yes, the Taliban may have taken control of Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamism in Africa remains deeply concerning and often ignored. But taken in its entirety, radical Islam does not have the same potency it once did.

So even if Sir David’s death is proven to be a terrorist incident, the defeat of radical Islam in Britain is still attainable. But achieving that requires us to bin the fallacies regurgitated after every attack. If we don’t, the pattern of seemingly random terrorist violence will persist.

Prevent is a much-mocked government counter-terrorism strategy, which looks out for warning signs that someone is at risk of being radicalised into some form of violent extremism. About 6,000 people are referred to it each year. 

Every high-profile murder or act of terrorism appears to be followed by a story like this. The Manchester Arena suicide bomber was known to the security services. Lee Rigby’s killers were known to the security services. At least one of the London Bridge attackers was known to the security services. It’s not just in cases of terrorism: the murderer of Alice Gross had a criminal record for sexual assault. Sarah Everard’s killer had a history of indecent exposure.

There is a further sense of inevitability over the fact that, three days after Sir David’s murder, Priti Patel, the home secretary, declared that Prevent is “under review” to ensure that it is “fit for purpose”. This is, in fact, an ongoing review that was launched in 2019 and due to report in December, rather than a response to the atrocity. Yet the announcement was clearly intended to suggest that the murder represented a failure on the part of the surveillance and deradicalisation system.

But is it? The sense of inevitability is real: these stories crop up a lot. But the truth is they will continue to keep cropping up, almost every time there is a terror attack, and almost no matter what we do with Prevent or whatever its successor is. Prevent may be failing — though I’ll happily defer judgment until the publication of the review — but even if it were successful, when terrorist attacks happen, it is likely that the perpetrators would be on its books, or known to the security services.

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And more than that: as callous as it sounds, that may be for the best. To give a sense of why that is, it’s helpful to look at another system for spotting future risks: cancer screening.

You screen for prostate cancer with a blood test, which looks for levels of something called “prostate-specific antigen”, or PSA. If you’re between 50 and 69 years old, the “normal” level of PSA is given as below three nanograms per millilitre (ng/ml). If your test comes back higher than that, you are flagged as at risk of having prostate cancer.

But according to the NHS, about 15% of men who do have prostate cancer actually have “normal” levels of PSA: that is, below 3ng/ml. If you run a screening test like this, you’ll falsely reassure about one cancer sufferer in six that they are cancer-free.

There’s a straightforward solution to that, of course. Instead of putting your cut-off at 3ng/ml, you could make it 2.5ng/ml. Then you’d miss fewer cancers.

You can probably guess the outcome, though. If you move the cut-off lower, you’ll miss fewer real cancers, but you’ll scare more men unnecessarily. If you move the cut-off higher, you’ll get fewer false positives — you won’t tell as many men that they have cancer when they don’t — but you’ll get more false negatives: you’ll miss more real cancers.

You might think that it’s a pretty straightforward decision. Telling people that they have cancer when they don’t is inconvenient and alarming; telling people that they don’t have cancer when they do might kill them. So you err on the side of caution.

But that’s not how it works. False positives on cancer screenings can literally kill. People can end up having unnecessary surgeries, X-rays, chemo or radiotherapy. Complications are sufficiently common that the NHS says that the benefits of prostate cancer screening do not outweigh the risks.

The cost of getting it wrong is real with terrorism, too. The process is somewhat different, though. When it comes to the risk of someone being radicalised, unlike a blood test, there isn’t a number that you can read off. That doesn’t mean there can’t be one: it could be that the people who are passed on to Prevent are given a quasi-objective score. We do exactly that for, say, suicidality risk or autism or happiness, or any one of a thousand psychological functions. You tick boxes on a questionnaire about someone’s isolation, their anger, their ideologies, and if the score on the questionnaire adds up to more than 40 or whatever you declare them a terrorism risk. That is precisely what goes on, in a less obvious and open way, with things like AI parole decisions. 

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But as it happens, there isn’t an explicit number. The Prevent guidance says: “There is no fixed profile of a terrorist, so there is no defined threshold to determine whether an individual is at risk of being drawn into terrorism.” So there’s no nice straightforward “Terrorism risk: 13.6” readout.

Nonetheless, the same process is going on. A person comes into contact with the counterterrorism services. Of the 6,000 or so who are referred to Prevent each year, about 500 or so are deemed “vulnerable” to radicalisation and are passed on to a subgroup called “Channel”. 

Since referral to Channel is not based on an objective score, it’s based on a subjective feeling (or “expert judgment”): people will be flagged up if the panel judging them feels sufficiently strongly that they’re a risk. They might not explicitly say “Terrorism risk: 13.6”, but still, there is a threshold of risk, over which someone is considered a threat.

And just like the PSA levels in the blood, that assessment will be imperfect. If you read some young man saying something disturbing online, is it harmless anger and braggadocio, or are they a terrorist? You can raise your implicit threshold and avoid harassing innocent people, at the cost of an increased risk of missing a genuine terrorist, or you can lower it and correctly identify more terrorists, but at the cost of labelling a lot of harmless people as potential terrorists.

It might seem, like the cancer test in reverse, that there’s an asymmetry here: a false positive annoys people; a false negative kills people. But also like the cancer test, it’s not as simple as that. The false positives will be a lot more common than the false negatives — simply put, there are more mouthy non-terrorists than actual terrorists in the world. As I said before, there were 6,000 people referred to Prevent every year, and 500 or so were judged to be of sufficiently high risk to be passed on to Channel. But there have been only four actual terror attacks in the last two years. 

If you lower your threshold, raise the alarm on more borderline cases, then you will waste more police time, put more innocent people under needless scrutiny and stigmatise more communities. (It seems inevitable that a lowered threshold will mean more young Muslim men, in particular, being picked up by the security services.) That may be a price worth paying — but, let’s be clear, it will be a price that you pay. If you take in everybody suspicious for questioning — every misogynist loser on incel subreddits, every angry racist or radical Islamist on dark-web chatrooms — you may prevent one or two more attacks, but you will undoubtedly fill up your jails and enrage the populace.

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This doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Moving your threshold is zero-sum. But you can change your test: if instead of testing for PSA you looked for some other marker, you might be able to tell whether someone had cancer with more accuracy. In the case of counter-terrorism, you could do things like increasing police funding for surveillance, rather than simply being more strict about your criteria — although of course that would mean less money elsewhere.

An alternative suggestion might be to abandon “expert judgment” and introduce something like I talked about above, an explicit algorithm: human judgment is famously terrible at predicting complex things like the likelihood of a criminal to reoffend, and algorithms consistently outperform us, as the psychologist Paul Meehl demonstrated way back in 1954. They beat humans at predicting the price of wine, how long a cancer patient will live, who will win a football match, how likely a business is to succeed and dozens of other subjects. It is likely that some fairly simple algorithm could do significantly better than the best experts at predicting who is a terror risk, as well.

But it could only ever be a partial improvement. Humans are stubbornly hard to predict. Part of the reason why algorithms can outperform human judgment in those fields is because human judgment is consistently terrible: we are very often wrong about who will reoffend, who will live and die, who will win a football match. It is not that algorithmic prediction is great; the future is still hard to know. However good we make our systems for detecting terrorists, they will never be very good. So terrible things will always happen, and when they do, we will assume our systems are too lax and need to be tightened.

It is tempting to think like that in the wake of an atrocity such as David Amess’s murder: to think that we ought to lower our thresholds of what counts as a risk. Perhaps it’s even true. But just as it is an unavoidable fact of reality that reducing false alarms means missing more real ones, a world in which Sir David’s murderer was caught ahead of time could be grimly authoritarian.

But I detect that, deeper in the bowels of political activism, matters aren’t quite so categorical. There hasn’t, it seems to me, been the same kind of grassroots unity of purpose and solidarity accompanying Sir David’s murder as that which we saw in the wake of the dreadful assassination of Jo Cox. Fewer candles and words of unconditional condemnation, no Twitter hashtag, a little more reticence among those who were not of Sir David’s political hue.

The contrasting reactions are certainly instructive. Some have said the difference might be explained by the fact that Cox was murdered by a far-Right fanatic (very easy for progressives to condemn), whereas Sir David was killed allegedly in the name of Islam (politically more problematic). I think it runs deeper than that.

Sir David was a pro-Brexit Thatcherite Tory. A committed Catholic, he opposed abortion. Those things are enough to persuade some on the progressive side of politics that, while his killing was indefensible, his politics were rooted in a lack of compassion for others; ergo he does not warrant much more than the obligatory statements of regret and condemnation. That he voted against military action in Syria in 2013, that he had raised the alarm about fuel poverty, and that he opposed fox-hunting and had, more than any other parliamentarian, fought the wider campaign for animal welfare – all causes close to the hearts of many on the Left – seems immaterial.

This attitude is symptomatic of the tendency of many on the Left to see those on the other side of the political debate as inherently bad people — even sometimes as something a bit less than human. It is a dispiriting and destructive approach. It is also, quite simply, wrong.

Don’t misunderstand me. I have spent most of my adult life opposing the Tories from my place in the labour movement. There is much that has gone wrong in Britain over the years – particularly during the Thatcher era — for which I would lay the blame squarely at the Tories’ door: wealth and income inequality, creaking public services, the housing crisis, austerity, unemployment, low wages, boardroom excesses, chronic industrial decline, and so on. But that doesn’t lead me to believe that people only ever join the Conservative Party to screw the working-class or that Rik Mayall’s Alan B’stard is something more than crude caricature.

While I believe their prescriptions for the economy and society are often profoundly mistaken, I find it hard — unlike many of my colleagues on the Left — to conclude that most Conservatives are driven by something other than a genuine desire to make the country a better place. One can dislike the medicine — and even find it highly distasteful — while believing the person administering it to be acting with the best intentions.

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Having spent most of my years living in a Labour heartland, I reside these days in a true blue Tory constituency. I’m quite certain that most of my neighbours vote Conservative. But they are often the most selfless people, doing good works locally, raising money for charity, coming to the aid of fellow citizens in need (such as during the covid pandemic), and throwing themselves into community-centred clubs and societies. I could debate and disagree with them all day on questions of the economy, the best model for public services, the value of trade unions, the role of the welfare system, or whatever; but I don’t have the feeling they are instinctively avaricious or lacking in compassion when they put a different view. I just think they are wrong.

Sir David Amess himself was the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on fire safety and rescue. In that role, he worked collaboratively over many years with my own union — the Fire Brigades Union — in an effort to bring about policy changes to better protect the public from harm. Presciently, two and a half years before the Grenfell Tower fire, he was ruffling the feathers of his own government in warning of the risks of fire in residential tower blocks, and he championed the campaign to have sprinkler systems installed in all schools. Though these types of crusades rarely hit the headlines, he remained a diligent advocate for them — as, so we have learned in recent days, he did for so many other unglamourous causes. That the leadership of my union — not exactly given to speaking warmly of Tory MPs — issued a heartfelt tribute to Sir David in the wake of his murder says much.

It is plain, then, that this was not some pinstriped-suited, bowler-hatted Tory out to feather his own nest; this was an industrious and conscientious member of parliament doing the hard yards of law-making in a way he believed would improve the lives of the public. And that’s the point: most MPs do the same thing every day, despite the perception to the contrary.

In my past life as a senior union official, I had cause to interact with MPs from across the political spectrum. The vast majority, even when we disagreed, were, in my experience, entirely human, attentive and respectful. Many were trying to juggle their public role with a busy family life, frequently travelling long distances between their constituency and Westminster, earning a salary that was arguably less than they might have been able to secure elsewhere. It doesn’t hurt for the public to be reminded of these things.

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The great Tony Benn always said politics was about “issues, not personalities”. He was right. It is, of course, unbecoming for MPs to describe their opponents as “scum”, and I don’t hold with the argument, advanced by some, that parliamentary rules should be relaxed so as to allow politicians to brand each other “liar”. These things merely serve to reinforce the mistaken impression that MPs see parliament as their own private battlefield and have little interest in focusing on the things that matter to the electorate.

Ultimately, too, there is a real danger in fomenting the false belief that our political institutions are filled with self-regarding and venal politicians interested only in their own advancement. Democracy itself is damaged when the governed have such a low opinion of the governors. All parliaments have their rotten apples, of course. But unless we have good cause to do otherwise, we should make the battle about ideas and policies, not motives.

I certainly don’t argue that we should give MPs a free ride. On the contrary, robust debate and scrutiny – even a bit of gentle mockery – are to be welcomed. Democracy demands that we hold our law-makers to the highest standards and call them to account when they fall short. There is certainly no harm in MPs from time to time experiencing the raw anger of the electorate – such as when many of them tried to block the implementation of Brexit — and I would be deeply uncomfortable, too, if, as a response to recent tragic events, attempts were made to cocoon MPs from their constituents. Indeed, the chasm that has opened up between the political class and millions of ordinary voters in provincial Britain over recent years is attributable in no small part to the fact that the former simply didn’t understand the lives of the latter, and that situation would not be improved by any plan designed to increase the distance between the groups.

But it is certainly time that we – and by “we”, I really mean the Left – moved away from seeing people on the other side of the debate as enemies rather than opponents. As Sir David showed us, strong views, independently held and passionately articulated, need not be a barrier to building bridges, forging alliances or earning the respect of those on the other side of the divide. Sometimes they might even be conducive to these things.

The parliamentary seat of Southend West had only three MPs in 86 years, which itself reflects the sense of cultural and community continuity in the area. Channon was succeeded at Westminster by his son Paul, who after almost 40 years himself was succeeded by David Amess, who was murdered doing his job as an MP last Friday. Sir David’s atrocious killing appeared random: we may never know why his murderer settled upon him, and upon committing an act that astonished and horrified quiet, ordinary Southend, which had until then remained in its own distinct corner of Essex, harmlessly going its own way – exactly like its late Member of Parliament. The murder of Jo Cox in 2016 was a comparable atrocity: but insofar as these acts of wickedness can ever have a rationale, her murder was committed by a constituent with a neo-Nazi obsession, who is now serving a whole life sentence, rather than by an outsider who seems to have settled on the MP for Southend West for reasons yet to be determined.

Leigh-on-Sea, the part of the Southend conurbation where Sir David was holding the surgery where he was murdered, still has evocations of this part of the Essex coast from the age before it became suburbanised. Leigh is a place with one of the best qualities of life in the country. The housing stock is mainly of high specification, though not extortionately expensive, and the marine views come with easy proximity to London. Crime is not considered a problem: all of this underlines why the shock of Sir David’s murder has hit the community so hard. It is not merely because of his well-attested popularity, but because this relatively sedate and unpretentious part of Essex is not remotely used to experiencing shocking events of this nature. In a different age, Channon made frequent visits to his constituency — more so than most MPs of the era — and found his constituents diverting. From his occasional descriptions of them — mayors who would like a knighthood and the odd internal wrangling in the Conservative Association — not a lot has changed in that respect either.

Historically, on the main shipping route from the northern continent into London, Leigh was once a prosperous port. These days, quite a few of the local residents have little boats of various descriptions that they play about in on the water. One can see them grounded on the vast mud flats offshore when the tide is out. The North Sea is but a few miles away to the east, and quite a few locals take their craft off past Shoeburyness and Foulness Island, and fish for a hobby. Leigh started off as a fishing village, and what remains of that enterprise notably harvests the cockles that still give visitors the definitive Southend experience.

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But, then, in the 18^th century, the channels that led to Leigh silted up and the marine trade dried up; while at the same time, tiny Southend, to its east, was becoming a popular resort. Much of old Leigh — vestiges of which still exist in a few wood-framed buildings and in the medieval church — was demolished in the 19^th century when one of Southend’s two railways was constructed. It starts at Fenchurch Street and leads through the mainly charmless flatlands of south Essex, calling for the last few decades at the new town of Basildon, which Sir David represented from 1983 until moving on to Southend in 1997. A second railway, from Liverpool Street, takes a more northerly route, through a Brentwood now made famous by the delights of The Only Way Is Essex, and comes into Southend from the north. Their arrival, 140 or so years ago, marked the transformation of the area into part of the commuter belt, and initiated the wave of late Victorian building that has marked out much of outer Southend ever since. It also represented a social change that brought a large, respectable middle class into the area, further waves of which have arrived ever since, their aspirations sustained by the town’s excellent grammar schools. It has also helped secure a Conservative majority in what since 1950 have been Southend’s two parliamentary seats, and which had been held by the party since the constituency was carved out of the former South-East Essex seat in 1918. In political as well as in most other respects, the area is one that over decades has undergone no radical change.

Leigh is also an artists’ colony, with an estimated 70 painters, ceramicists and other creative people working in the town, selling their work through several galleries. Not least because of this, it has become the smart end of Southend; as elsewhere in Essex, the decline of the high street has led to premises being filled with bars and restaurants, and the service economy taking over while many of Southend West’s inhabitants take themselves off to London every day. It’s not exactly the Côte d’Azur, but it serves a remarkably similar purpose for the those who live in and around it. And it is emphatically the sort of place where people don’t get murdered in cold blood, least of all a hugely popular Member of Parliament.

Many of Sir David’s constituents would fit the profile for Essex Man, or his wife. The various waves of new, ambitious residents who have moved in to Southend since the war had their roots in the East End of London: they may even have first seen the place on one of those days trips to paddle in the sea and eat cockles, ice cream and sticks of rock, or to play in the one of the amusement parks, the most famous of which was the Kursaal. It was one of the first such entertainments in the country when it opened in 1901; it closed in the Seventies and the building it was situated in stands empty near the town’s so-called “golden mile”. The local government ward around it records one of the highest levels of social deprivation in the country; Southend is a town that has extremes of wealth and poverty. Much of its centre was redeveloped in the Sixties as the tourist trade collapsed with the advent of cheap foreign holidays, a succession of ugly concrete blocks being built to try to transform the place into a business centre. To an extent, it worked: the town is now home to the central VAT administration, another tribute to its sedateness.

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Essex veered to Conservatism from the moment most agricultural workers were enfranchised in the 1880s. At the 1886 general election, which put Salisbury’s Unionists in for six years, most of the county returned a Unionist MP. The great agricultural depression that hit rural England after 1873 hit the newly-enfranchised men hard, and Liberal free trade policies were held to blame for it. Even at the Liberal landslide of 1906, when all of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk and all but one seat in Suffolk went Liberal, about two-fifth of Essex remained Tory. After the Great War the party’s grip on the Essex electorate stiffened, helped by the enfranchisement of women who followed Mrs Pankhurst’s example and voted Tory. A story told by the distinguished journalist Colin Welch, when campaigning for Rab Butler in Saffron Walden at the 1945 election — when Labour won a landslide — sums up the independent and, indeed, aspirational mind of the locals even then. A local titled lady, who felt she was doing her civic duty in getting a Labour government elected, approached a yeoman farmer leaning on his five-bar gate to tell him why Mr Attlee deserved his vote. The farmer raised his tweed hat, listened politely and at the end of the lecture simply said: “Ma’am, oi’ve made moi poile, and yo’ can go ter buggery.”

The new towns and the influx from the East End post-war, especially in Sir David’s part of Essex, brought in Labour voters in large numbers for the first time: but the combination of essentially 18th century temperament of the indigenous population — who, like the farmer, just wished to be left alone to make their pile — and the barrow-boy inheritance of the East End proved a lethal cocktail to socialism. Mrs Thatcher’s promise in 1979 to create a new class of property-owners by allowing the sale of council houses to their tenants, and her subsequent deregulation of the City that broke the stranglehold on it of the old boy network and allowed the barrow boys to become filthy rich lit the blue touch paper under an Essex economic boom. New private estates popped up, wine bars opened, and Essex Man was invented: it was a short step from there to TOWIE. Essex became a county of small businesses: the Tory betrayal of such people after Black Wednesday led to half of Essex’s seats going Labour in the Blair triumph of 1997. Today every single seat in Essex is Conservative, reflecting the local, still Thatcherite ideology of hard work, aspiration and reward. More than ever they are making their piles, and socialism and any other doctrine can go to buggery.

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Why was Jo Cox murdered?

By Kester Aspden

Southend is, but in other ways is not, the Essex of what has become the popular imagination. It has a very high population density, yet its conurbation is bordered by marshlands where it is not bordered by the sea. It has a relatively unchanging culture, a tribute perhaps to the high proportion of its residents who are over 55. Yet it also has a strong youth culture, as its nightlife testifies, but many of the young people’s grandparents were putting themselves about on the Front back in the early Sixties, when mods and rockers would gather there in the hope of a pitched battle. As with all Essex towns, there have been new housing developments in recent years, though mainly on the periphery: and Southend, with what in recent years has been renamed London Southend Airport, looks outward in a way that perhaps much of Essex does not.

It is deep Essex not in the way that one often thinks of the term – the picture postcard villages such as Finchingfield or the Bardfields, 30 miles to the north, or the ancient market towns such as Thaxted and Saffron Walden – but in the sense of its distinct culture, bred for three or four generations out of the East End, and which made its new home on the mudflats of the Thames Estuary. It is in that that its Conservatism lies, why it and Sir David Amess took to each other so naturally and so well, and why despite its pockets of poverty the Left has never made any impact there. And in this generally happy world of its own making, it is no wonder the shock of what happened to an entirely innocent member of the Essex family on Friday is so visceral, and so hard to absorb.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2): 1938-43, edited by Simon Heffer, is published by Hutchinson.

David’s death is indescribably tragic. As a new MP I didn’t have the chance to get to know him well. But all the tributes from those who did describe a wonderful man and a brilliant parliamentarian. Gentle, kind, faithful, generous, committed to his constituents and constituency. His loss will be felt so keenly by his family and friends, as well as his staff, constituents and colleagues.

We are deeply saddened but also deeply shocked that such a brutal murder could take place in a routine constituency surgery, at the heart of the community that David served so well. Despite what is often written about Members of Parliament being in a Westminster Bubble, MPs dedicate an enormous amount of time on the ground in their constituencies, both on official business such as conducting surgeries and visiting schools, but also in an informal capacity, popping into the local pub, shopping at the local supermarket, chatting to residents in the park. Most MPs — and their partners and children — are very much a part of the communities we represent. It is horrible to be reminded that we are in danger in the place we call home.

Much is still unknown about the circumstances surrounding David’s death and the motives of his murderer. But, while physical attacks on politicians are mercifully rare, it is also rare that we feel truly safe. Whilst the vast majority of constituents are polite and friendly when we meet them face to face, the toxic atmosphere generated by social media – where comments about us often contain threats, personal information and abuse – ensures that MPs are constantly aware that there are many who wish us harm. Like all MPs, I could fill many pages with the online abuse that I’ve had to report or delete — on one occasion a Twitter user incited others to share my home address. I had to temporarily move my family out of our home while the police got involved.

This is not just a problem faced by MPs; a brief glance at the Twitter account of any journalist or academic will reveal the appalling state of the health of our public discourse. Vile language, threats, personal abuse, sexualised comments, demonisation and hate that would no doubt result in perpetrators’ arrest if the attacks were made in the “physical world”.

We’re in danger of losing our humanity, forgetting that behind every public profile lies a human being, who laughs, cries, loves and tries to make the best of life like the rest of us. In a free society with healthy democratic debate, we should be brutal in critiquing ideas and beliefs but protective of the people who espouse them. I fear we have turned this principle on its head, with more and more sensitivity about challenging ideas and a readiness to demonise or hate the people who take a different view.

More from this author

How to humanise Westminster

By Various contributors

I am new to politics, and before I entered Parliament I’m afraid I had probably accepted a number of the common stereotypes about MPs. But I can honestly say have never ever met a group of people who work harder and who take their responsibilities more seriously than Members of Parliament, of all parties. It is the sad truth that abuse on social media already discourages many good people — especially women — from standing for election, and the awful events of yesterday will only make matters worse.

Our security services work tirelessly to protect those in public office, and I had been contacted by four separate local police officers by the early evening yesterday, to reassure me and my staff. No doubt improvements can be made to keep us safer, though inevitably this will result in less free and open access to our constituents.

We will never eliminate all risk, and of course moments like this make all of us think twice about the potential dangers of this particular job. Yet MPs like me will continue to do what it takes to represent our constituents, not because we deny or accept the threats to our safety, but because we are resolved to serve. It might sound old fashioned, but I still believe that politics is a vocation, and many of my colleagues describe a sense of a calling to the role.

David Amess epitomised this resolve to serve and he will be remembered as someone who demonstrated all that’s good about politics. Rest in Peace.