Does Andy Burnham regret his opposition to the ‘Prevent’ strategy?

Perhaps we’re now past the moment of shock. Certainly we’ve moved fairly swiftly past the other stages of post-massacre grief. With the departure of Katie Hopkins from LBC it is good to see that Monday night’s attack in Manchester has not gone completely unpunished.

The desire to point fingers and scapegoat is a perfectly normal response to an outrage of course. It’s just people’s priorities I worry about. However, since people seem willing to start pointing fingers, perhaps I can suggest some candidates.

Andy Burnham. In order to get elected Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham made a tactical decision to cosy up to the Muslim communities of Manchester. One of the ways in which he did this was to call – almost exactly one year ago – for the government’s ‘Prevent’ strategy to be scrapped. Indeed he claimed it was ‘Today’s equivalent of internment in Northern Ireland – a policy felt to be highly discriminatory against one section of the community’.

As anyone who knows about internment will know, nothing that has happened in the UK in recent years has been anything like that policy. Ah, but it’s about perception, one can hear Andy say, while he flutters his eyelashes. If a policy is felt to be highly discriminatory by anyone then discriminatory it must be. So that for instance when the terrorist apologists of a group like Cage complain that Prevent is discriminatory, and tour campuses up and down the country telling Muslim students this is the case, then eventually the ‘feeling’ grows that it is discriminatory. Even when it isn’t.

Which brings one onto some of the other people who should have fingers pointed to them at the moment. From 2014, for two years, Salman Abedi was a student at Salford University. What waters did he swim in there? Investigations will still be ongoing.