Mi5

Douglas Murray has an important piece in this week’s Spectator looking at the stultifying political culture around counterterrorism. Civil servants frequently thwart ministers wanting to adopt a harder line against extremists while a number of radical groups remain legal despite repeated pledges to ban them. This cultural stasis is not confined to mandarins in Whitehall. Ever since 9/11 the police and Security Service have pursued a disastrous policy of cultivating ‘clerical honeypots’. The thinking behind it seems reasonable enough at first glance: leave extremist clerics to preach in the open and then you can easily identify the network around them, and the various actors within it. The callous terrorist attack

I would have loved to have been in the room when David Cameron’s advisers were thinking of an acronym for the new anti-terror committee. Something that sounded scary enough, but not too Monty Python. They eventually went for TERFOR, according to the Mail on Sunday, although it’s still unclear what the T will stand for. But there’s still time. It reminds me of an old New Statesman competition where readers were invited to invent a committee whose acronym mocked its existence. The great Robert Conquest won, teasing the mag for its sympathetic approach to the Soviets: his proposal was Institute for New Statesman Editors and Contributors for Underwriting the Russian

If, in the aftermath of an act of would-be terror, the people refuse to be terrorised does it still remain a terrorist act? Perhaps but there’s a sense, I think, in which we should not grant yesterday’s guilty men the title “terrorist”. Murderers, surely, will suffice? There is no need to grant them the war they so plainly desire. This murder in Woolwich was an uncommon act of barbarity; the product too of a kind of mental illness. That does not excuse the act, far from it, and there’s no need to be sparing in our condemnation. But, appalled as we may be, it seems important to recognise and remember