The London bombings: one year on

A year of thinking lazily

29 June 2006

In the year since then our public conversation has, unsurprisingly, been dominated by questions of security and identity. But what has been most striking about the conversation is how quickly it has become diverted into an interrogation of those who seek, however imperfectly, to defend us rather than an examination of what moves those who threaten us. The question of whether or not the Metropolitan Police’s principal anti-terrorist officer should or should not receive a CBE has occupied more airtime than the question of what ideology motivates mass murderers.

The Metropolitan Police are under scrutiny as never before, following the tragic death of Jean Charles de Menezes and the botched raid in Forest Gate. But while those protesting against the Forest Gate raid chose to show solidarity with the grieving de Menezes family by sporting Brazilian football shirts bearing the dead man’s name, how many of the names of the 52 who died on 7 July 2005 have been given anything like the same prominence? The least we owe those who died that day is a serious commitment to understand what drove their killers, and a determination to tackle the ideology which guided deliberately murderous minds.

Nowhere has moral clarity been more lacking in British state policy over the last ten to 15 years than in our approach to the Islamist threat. Three particular errors have characterised our mistaken approach.

The first error has been the willingness to extend a ‘covenant of security’ to known Islamist activists within the UK.

The second error has been the determined minimisation of the Islamist terror threat. Instead of recognising the scale of the challenge mounted by political Islam, the British state persisted for years in believing that those who posed a direct danger to the country were a tiny renegade minority with no important connection to a broader ideological network.

The third error has been the failure to scrutinise, monitor or check the actions, funding and operation of those committed to spreading the Islamist gospel within Britain.

All three errors are interconnected. They spring from a basic failure of political intelligence, the inability properly to conceptualise the threat we face.