Ed West Ed West

‘British Values’ won’t help in our fight against terrorism

Steve Hilton has called for Theresa May to resign as Prime Minister, blaming her for the security failures that lead to the three recent terror attacks. Without intimate knowledge of the workings of the Cameron administration it’s hard to know where blame does lie. And there certainly has been a large increase in the number of terror plots for the authorities to deal with this year.

The security services have an awesome job in keeping track of as many as 23,000 individuals, and so we may now be facing a sort of Israelification of British life, with barriers going up on London’s bridges this morning. Already we now have bag searches around London museums and the occasional appearance of armed policemen outside cathedrals.

There was always going to be a terror acceleration, although I’m surprised it has happened so quickly; an important factor influencing whether someone becomes radicalised is to what degree they live around non-Muslims; so as the Muslim population increases in Britain, and between 2005 and 2015 it doubled (although that rate of growth is slowing down), there will be a disproportionate increase in the pool of recruits, as more areas in urban England become concentrated.

Theresa May has pledged to end ‘segregated communities’, although the fact that no government in the history of humanity has successfully ended segregation doesn’t dampen their spirits; likewise her pledge to promote ‘British values’, an empty idea which I’ve already bored for Britain about. There is sign of hope, though. The Muslim Council of Britain struck the perfect note yesterday, its secretary-general Harun Khan saying:

‘We are ready to have those difficult conversations, as equal citizens with an equal stake in this fight. We want to turn people’s minds away from this death cult. We want to ensure families are not torn apart by being either victims of terrorist outrages, or finding out that someone they knew perpetrated such acts.’

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