The latest terrorism statistics released by the Home Office last week suggest that there has been a surge in extreme right wing (XRW) terrorism in this country. Some 20% of those in custody for terror-related offences are classed as holding this ideology, the highest number (42) since records began to be kept in 2013. Should […]
Locked up in Lockdown has been something of a blessing in disguise for our beleaguered prison service. Before April last year, when draconian Covid restrictions froze regimes and prisoners in place, most metrics of decency, order and control were in freefall. Extremely high rates of assault against front line staff sent huge numbers of hastily […]
These days it’s easy to forget that the virus isn’t the only threat we’re facing. After a long discussion on Covid compliance on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, the country’s top cop, Dame Cressida Dick, was asked about the threat from that other contagion, violent extremism – still rated as ‘severe,’ in case you […]
Northern Ireland punches above its weight in many areas but it bows to no country in the manufacture of victimhood. In both the real and imaginary classes, it is truly a world beater. It would take a heart of stone not to feel for Naomi Long, the latest holder of the Northern Ireland Executive’s premier […]
There is a piece missing from Britain’s counter-terrorism jigsaw. As barbarity plays out on the streets of Paris, Nice and now Vienna – we need a plan to unite people around values antithetical to the sort of poisonous absolutism that imbues murderers with divine permission to kill. Britain’s formal strategy, Contest, is built around four […]
We are told that the Metropolitan Police will later interview the journalist Darren Grimes, under caution, investigating an allegation that he stirred up racial hatred. The suspicion of stirring seems to be based on his complicity in coaxing some malodourous words out of Professor David Starkey’s mouth when interviewed on Grimes’ YouTube channel, Reasoned UK. […]
‘This statement is untrue’. The good old liar’s paradox has tortured philosophers for hundreds of years. Sorting deception from honesty is a complex business, vastly accelerated by our relatively recent access to a relentless, often unverifiable deluge of information designed to influence, inflame and sometimes mobilise our darkest thoughts. Terrorists are ardent consumers of deception. […]
Imagine a national company that makes very important widgets. The company has an annual turnover of £3 billion. The failure rate of the widgets after a year is nearly 50%. That company is going to go bust. What I’ve just described is our decrepit and failing prison system. Each year we pour in a vast […]
If you were so inclined, where would you plant the seeds with the best chance of growing into a post-caliphate ISIS 2.0? You would do a lot worse than start in the teeming, unstable camps in Kurdish-controlled North East Syria where, according to the latest US analysis, all the components exist to radicalise the next […]
How do you like your white middle-class guilt? Thick as mince? Strained through performative ‘take a knee’ piety? Stewed into self-hate-a-thons by events an ocean or a century away? The paroxysms of well-heeled progressive Britain to appropriate George Floyd’s cruel death are many and various but you can be sure that they are never far […]
There is no shortage of social media imagery to frame the convulsion of large sections of US society after the death in police custody of George Floyd. Minneapolis burning, the leader of the free world being hustled into the secure basement of a besieged White House, the viral video of three generations of African-Americans anguished […]
The Government is currently on the rack over its apparent inability to provide personal protective equipment for all who need it on the front line of the pandemic. Junior ministers heaped on the airwaves like sandbags of impermeable rhetoric are unequal to the task of defending this position. On Tuesday morning, Local Government Minister Simon […]
At the end of last month, as Covid-19 obliterated the normal news cycle, some rather startling terrorism statistics were published by HM Government. The March 2020 transparency report on disruptive powers provides the latest in a periodic analysis of the use of state powers to disrupt and deter terrorist activity in the UK. For the […]
No Justice Secretary, least of all a Conservative one, wants to be in a position where they must authorise the early release of jailed criminals. Robert Buckland has not ruled out doing so, but is apparently resistant to throwing open the prison gates as a way of easing the threat from coronavirus. Concerns about public […]
Terrorists hate normality. People getting on with their lives as normal with high levels of personal autonomy and security is Kryptonite to violent extremists the world over. So the evolution of the Covid-19 virus from an obscure lung condition in a Chinese backwater to a lethal global pandemic will be of obvious interest to insurgents […]
It’s customary to start any discussion about the performance of our civil service with the disclaimer that it’s mostly brilliant. So, I won’t. Not because there aren’t some brilliant people in it – there are – but because this tiresomely routine genuflection hides a multitude of sins. Priti Patel’s ‘sins’ are an unholy alliance for […]
The system for managing the threat posed by violent extremists in prison and those at risk of becoming so is broken. That much was again laid bare at the trial of Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, who was this week convicted of preparing acts of terrorism, including plots to massacre ‘unbelievers’ at London tourist hot spots and kill […]
I’m presenting a half-hour documentary on Radio 4 tomorrow morning on what more we can do to reduce the dangerousness and challenge the mindset of violent extremists in prison and after release. The quality and diversity of the people I spoke with about the problems and solutions makes it impossible to do full justice to […]
Three women have held the camera’s gaze over the last 24 hours and provided powerful reminders of the deep problems we have in our public institutions, where a ‘culture of accountability’ seemingly exists in name only. The BBC Documentary ‘Exposed – the Church’s Darkest Secret’, told the story of Fiona Gardner and Kate Wood, both […]
With news of the Chief Rabbi’s indictment of Labour, it’s worth remembering that the party is under investigation for institutional anti-Semitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission – the British legal regulator and enforcer of the Equality Act and guardian of the Human Rights Acts. I know the organisation well, having joined as Chief […]
