Sinn Fein have an unusual relationship with Belfast’s Europa Hotel, where last night they held a packed meeting to launch their Stormont election campaign. They remain political cheerleaders for the IRA who turned the place into the most bombed hotel in Europe during the Troubles. That’s all Semtex under the bridge now though. When challenged […]
Why did the Mayor of London sack the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police just five months after agreeing a two year extension to her contract? Sadiq Khan’s supporters will argue he was reacting decisively to an unsustainable weight of organisational ordure heaping on Cressida Dick’s besieged force. Cynics might observe that he was simply correcting […]
A few days ago in Parliament, Prisons Minister Victoria Atkins gave a response to a written question on prisoner safety so suffused with doublethink I almost feel proud of my former colleagues in the Ministry of Justice who inevitably crafted it. Atkins was asked if the standard sexual re-offending risk predictor was being used to […]
Events in the US following the murder of George Floyd are an object lesson in what happens when policing is ripped out of communities. From Minnesota to Seattle via San Francisco, the progressive fetish of slashing police numbers in reprisal for bad law enforcement – both real and politically expedient – has been disastrous for […]
There were a few blinks of lucidity in last week’s governmental fever dream. The minister for Equality and Levelling Up, Kemi Badenoch provided some shelter from the maelstrom with a robust and well timed letter to colleagues on, of all things, The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). I realise this won’t set the Westminster Village […]
You may not remember the name Kaylee-Jade Priest, but don’t feel bad. Her murder at the hands of her mother in August last year has been somewhat overwritten by the national outrage over little Arthur Labinjo-Hughes. During the trial of yet another pair of wretched and sadistic narcissists – a parent and partner who used […]
Recent arrests and convictions have added weight to an official narrative that was already at pains to imply far-right extremism is equal to the threat posed by its Islamist counterpart. On Tuesday, Ben Raymond was found guilty of membership of the Neo-Nazi group NS31. He was referred to as their chief propagandist, a grandiose title somewhat undermined […]
In the brief time before the horrifying scenes outside a maternity hospital in Liverpool were supplanted by other less difficult preoccupations, ordinary people were asking impertinent questions. How was it possible for Emad Al Swealmeen to deceive so many people? Why was he not removed from a country he had no right to be in […]
How do we stop terrorist offenders from deceiving well-meaning but naïve professionals responsible for managing their risk? That’s something I have been puzzling over recently along with an international panel of experts on violent extremism ranging from reformed jihadists to forensic psychiatrists. Today, my organisation, the Counter Extremism Project launches a discussion paper, ‘Hiding in […]
Publication of the review of the Government’s ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism strategy can’t come soon enough. After the grotesque murder of Sir David Amess last weekend, details have emerged that the suspect had been referred to Prevent for screening after reported suspicions he was becoming radicalised. His alleged killer, Ali Harbi Ali, 25, has been detained under […]
The runaway trans-orthodoxy express unexpectedly hit the buffers yesterday. Professor Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosopher at Sussex University, had been tied to the rails for having the temerity to challenge the received wisdom that biologically male people could wish themselves women merely by saying so. Stock is certainly no bigot: she has written extensively on […]
This is a good month to bury bad policy. On Sunday, as Kabul folded in the face of violent extremism, people in Omagh recalled the work of other zealots who on that day in 1998 murdered 29 men, women and children in a terrorist outrage that could have come straight from the Taliban playbook. While […]
Between late October 1980 and early that same month in 1981, 10 republican terrorists, all young men serving time in HMP Maze near Belfast, deliberately starved themselves to death. Their suicides, the culmination of a long-running protest to demand that the British government recognise their crimes as political, are regarded by modern day republicans as […]
Neo-Nazis are the fastest growing cadre of violent extremists in our prisons, and now yet another offender motivated by far right ideology has entered our creaking jail system. Last week, Andrew Dymock was jailed for seven years for terrorist offences. Earlier this year Dymock, 24, was found guilty of multiple charges of encouraging and fundraising […]
You’ll probably need a strong stomach to wade through the Troubles oral history archive, one of the proposed innovations announced by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland yesterday afternoon to replace the basic notion of justice and accountability. ‘My skull fractured like an eggshell. The eye sockets in my skull disintegrated into my head, […]
Professor Swaran Singh, who yesterday published his independent review into discrimination in the Conservative party, is no stranger to racism. I remember lunch with him a few years ago when he described the racist abuse he received as a bewildered and lost young Doctor trying to find his way to his digs when he first […]
The story of the dog catcher and the Provos tells us something important and largely missing from the tale of the honourable discharge of veterans minister Johnny Mercer from Government service last week. Mercer resigned and/or was sacked, take your pick, stating that he could no longer reconcile the Government’s pledge to protect former servicemen […]
Big Tech is under pressure as never before to stop augmenting violent extremism through online platforms that fail to restrict access to materials and people who groom potential terrorists. After the Capitol Hill insurrection, animated by social media, the pressure is on for a fix before legislators step in with little regard for tech giants’ […]
The Government’s independent terror watchdog is barking. That’s all the levity I can squeeze out of Jonathan Hall QC’s worrying latest report on the operation of our terrorism laws, published earlier this week. Mr Hall has taken a particular and welcome interest in how terrorism operates in prisons and how the law interacts with the […]
For those of us who think the criminal justice system is out of balance with the needs of public protection, particularly around national security, the introduction of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill yesterday is welcome news. With a couple of big caveats. Justice Secretary Robert Buckland has his critics, but he can hardly […]
