David Cameron has given his best speech yet on tackling Islamic extremism

The Prime Minister’s Birmingham speech on radicalisation and Muslim communities in the UK given earlier today is a rather important one. Regular readers will know that I’m not easy to please in this area, but it seems to me that David Cameron has come to understand the real problem of Islamic extremism and has been developing his attitudes towards that problem.

There might be any number of reasons for this, but the most likely one is simple observation. Anybody can see that there is a problem, and a Prime Minister who has oversight on the intelligence and security threats that never come to fruition as well as those that do has a starker confrontation with the scale of the challenge than most.

The Prime Minister is right to present the threat of radical Islam as an ideological threat which needs countering. And he is particularly right in stressing the non-governmental, civil-societal responses that are needed if the problem is going to be brought under control. The whole speech seems to me to benefit from a deeper and broader understanding of the problem than any other speech recently given by a Western leader.

And although I know it won’t be enough for some, the speech contains a number of important shifts in tone. For instance the Prime Minister’s warning that people who go to join ISIS will be ‘cannon fodder’ is an important change in emphasis which I’ve called for here before. The UK government’s previous warnings about joining ISIS have sounded beseeching – a sort of ‘We’re better together’ plea. Much better, as the PM has now done, to explain the unvarnished reality of what you’re likely to face if you were foolish enough to join ISIS. ‘You’ll be raped and murdered’ is not just PR – it is the truth, and worth stating.