Jet-set jihadi

A Nigerian Islamic fanatic flies to the Netherlands and tries to blow up a plane bound for Detroit in Michigan — and yet there was something grimly inevitable about the fact that it was Britain where police were scrambled and London where the fanatic’s accommodation was searched.

A Nigerian Islamic fanatic flies to the Netherlands and tries to blow up a plane bound for Detroit in Michigan — and yet there was something grimly inevitable about the fact that it was Britain where police were scrambled and London where the fanatic’s accommodation was searched. As Gordon Brown’s Cabinet plodded into the underground bunker after being summoned for an emergency meeting on Boxing Day, they might well have asked: why is it always us? How did Britain become the Petri dish of global terrorism? Why does every major attack seem to lead back here?

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab succeeded only in burning his balls, as Rod Liddle put it in his Spectator blog. But though Abdulmutallab failed, his attempt is still instructive. But for an accident of chemistry, some 300 people would have been slain on that Christmas day flight. The man himself — his motivation, his background, his links — tell much about the continuing war on terror. Eight years on, it is a war which ministers still struggle to comprehend.

A few months ago, the Cabinet Office finished the second draft of ‘Contest’, the official manual handed down to government departments to direct the war on terror. It is a document infected with the errors of the Labour years. It sees money as the solution to every given problem — and lack of money as the cause. ‘The experience of poverty and exclusion can create specific grievances which may then lead to radicalisation,’ the document reads.