Ian Acheson | The Spectator columnists & writers

Northern Ireland is still plagued by terrorism

It’s slow business for global terrorists these days with all the targets banged up under Covid house arrest. But there’s one place in the United Kingdom where it has been pretty much business as usual for violent extremism. Northern Ireland’s police service has just released its security assessment for 2020. This contains some startling information for a place with roughly the same population as Hampshire. Last year there were 39 shooting incidents and two security related deaths, the same number as in 2019. The number of bombings – which include viable devices defused by the army – actually rose year on year to 17, with 8 happening in Belfast. Imagine this happening in Southampton. There was better news on what are euphemistically referred to as 'punishment shootings'.

Ian Acheson

The problem with deradicalisation

Ian Acheson

The problem with deradicalisation

Is it possible to 'deradicalise' terrorists? Jonathan Hall QC, the government's terror watchdog, doesn’t think so. He may have a point, but it’s complicated. One of the institutional problems we have is a sort of misplaced arrogance based, in part, on the historic experience of counter-insurgency against violent Irish republicans. Until quite recently, the Ministry of Justice press office referred to our prison deradicalisation processes as ‘world-class.’ Hall himself only recently began looking at our distinctly Heath-Robinson terrorist risk management ‘system’ after London Bridge killer Usman Khan ran rings around it. Having enumerated its many obvious defects, he bizarrely concluded it was pretty much fit for purpose.

Ian Acheson

What Unicef doesn’t understand about police and tasers

Ian Acheson

What Unicef doesn’t understand about police and tasers

Use of force isn't like the movies. It’s often messy, frightening and it can go sideways very quickly. I vividly remember my first arrest as a volunteer police officer, surrounded by jeering teenagers in a seaside amusement arcade wrestling on the ground with a completely non-compliant powerfully built kid. When we eventually got the cuffs on him, it turned out he was deaf and most of his resistance was because he couldn’t understand my repeated attempts to negotiate with him. As head of security at HMP Wandsworth, I recall standing in the centre supervising an entirely correct and proportionate restraint and relocation of a prisoner. All the staff were white. The assailant, bowed double, handcuffed, bellowing with rage and distress, was black.

Ian Acheson

Are we any closer to stopping the next Usman Khan?

Ian Acheson

Are we any closer to stopping the next Usman Khan?

This weekend is the first anniversary of the London Bridge attack. Usman Khan murdered two young people at an event he was invited to, run by the ‘Learning Together’ scheme, which is part of the University of Cambridge. The conference was designed to celebrate the achievements of people like Khan who had joined the course while serving in high-security HMP Whitemoor. Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt were stabbed to death by the dedicated Islamist, supposedly on community supervision nearly a year after being released from prison for terrorism crimes. Twelve months later, are we any closer to understanding that fatal convergence of perpetrator and victims? My organisation, the Counter Extremism Project, in association with the University of Staffordshire has just launched a year-long study into the phenomenon of ‘Disguised compliance’ in terrorist offenders.

Ian Acheson

The Crown makes difficult viewing for IRA apologists

Ian Acheson

The Crown makes difficult viewing for IRA apologists

Series four of The Crown begins with the murder of Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore in August 1979. Mountbatten was killed with three others, on the same day 18 British soldiers were ambushed at Warrenpoint. It was a devastating blow for the British establishment. But it held a more intimate horror too. If you listen carefully to the scene in The Crown, you can hear Mountbatten speak to a ‘Paul’ as they prepare his boat, Shadow V, for its fateful journey out of the harbour before being blown to pieces by the IRA. ‘Paul’ is 15-year-old Paul Maxwell, who along with Mountbatten’s grandson, 14-year-old Nicholas Knatchbull, was one of two children the IRA murdered that day in their obsessive desire to assassinate Mountbatten, who had made his summer home across the border in Ireland.

Ian Acheson

David Goodhart’s fatal mistake in the eyes of his EHRC critics

Ian Acheson

David Goodhart’s fatal mistake in the eyes of his EHRC critics

What is the Equality and Human Rights Commission for? It’s definitely not for the likes of David Goodhart, according to plenty of progressive types reacting to the news of Goodhart's appointment as one of the EHRC's commissioners. 'Appointing the spectacularly ill-suited Goodhart to the EHRC is an awful move from the government,' says the journalist Rachel Shabi. 'The EHRC’s credibility plummets further,' says Corbynista David Rosenberg. Goodhart, it seems, has made the fatal mistake of being out of step with a long-established orthodoxy that has stacked the governance of our public institutions with left-leaning facsimiles. His views on the impact of mass immigration on established communities and the deleterious effects on social solidarity are particular grievances for his critics.

Ian Acheson

David Goodhart’s fatal mistake in the eyes of his EHRC critics

Ian Acheson

David Goodhart’s fatal mistake in the eyes of his EHRC critics

Ian Acheson

Don’t blame the police for stop and search

Ian Acheson

Don’t blame the police for stop and search

Given recent stories about the police putting your door in if you have more than six people over on Christmas day, it seems almost quaint to be talking about Stop and Search as an abuse of state power. Yet the release of statistics this week that show black people are nine times more likely to have this power used against them in the street, ought to give us pause for thought. Stop and Search is an unavoidably intrusive state activity. You can be stopped by the police if they have a reasonable suspicion that you have illicit items in your possession, such as guns, drugs or equipment to be used in a burglary. When stopped, you are asked to account for your movements and a search of your outer clothing takes place.

Ian Acheson

Rural Britain isn’t racist

Ian Acheson

Rural Britain isn’t racist

Is the British countryside racist? BBC Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison thinks so. 'Even a single racist event means there is work to do,' she said. 'In asking whether the countryside is racist, then yes it is; but asking if it’s more racist than anywhere else — maybe, maybe not.' As a native Northern Irishman who has been warmly welcomed on the fringes of southern England’s Big Empty, Dartmoor, I don't agree. It's sadly true, as Harrison points out, that there are racists everywhere in life. There are homophobes, misogynists and all sorts of intolerant people often hiding in plain sight. But these people are in the minority. And that includes in the countryside. So Harrison's performative shaming will achieve little.

Ian Acheson

The terror threat inside our prisons

Ian Acheson

The terror threat inside our prisons

Later today, two men will be sentenced for their part in the attempted murder of a prison officer at high security HMP Whitemoor in January 2020. Unfortunately, extreme violence against the men and women who put on the uniform has become almost normalised in a system beset with squalor, overcrowding and unchecked predatory behaviour. Even so, the particular characteristics of this incident are of huge concern. The two prisoners were charged under terrorism legislation. In January this year, Brusthom Ziamani, a 25-year-old previously sentenced to 22 years in jail for a plot to behead a British soldier and Baz Hockton, a violent knife criminal who converted to Islam in prison and was radicalised by Ziamani, dressed up in fake suicide belts they had made in their cells and launched a ferocious attack on prison officer Neil Trundle, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ in what was clearly a carefully planned assault.

Ian Acheson

In praise of Boris Johnson’s justice shake-up

Ian Acheson

In praise of Boris Johnson’s justice shake-up

It ought to be a good day at the office (at last!) for Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State who has outraged the legal profession. He spent most of last weekend on the media rack defending the government’s position that it might break international law to defy an agreement with the EU that it had negotiated. Today is much more straightforward. His ‘get tough’ sentencing white paper contains a myriad of proposals that will resonate with ordinary people baffled by a justice system ever more remote from the idea of public protection and punishment, lost in abstractions, passing sentences that bear little relationship to the gravity of the crime. So while it’s bad news for the criminal justice blob — that stale and increasingly disconnected coalition of woke academics, lawyers, quangos and public sector princelings who control the levers of policy and power — it’s also bad news for violent criminals, terrorists, rapists and those who attack uniformed public servants.

Ian Acheson

The ticking terror time bomb in our prisons

Ian Acheson

The ticking terror time bomb in our prisons

This week saw the publication of an independent review into multi-agency arrangements that manage terrorist offenders released into the community. The report was ordered by the Government following the horrific murders committed by released Islamist extremist, Usman Khan in November of last year who was at the time subject to these arrangements and had convinced professionals he had given up terror. It provided a golden opportunity for radical proposals to overhaul a plainly broken risk management system. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a swing and a miss. Risk assessment and threat management of ideologically motivated offenders is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for criminal justice professionals.

Ian Acheson

Was it right to jail the man who urinated at Keith Palmer’s memorial?

Ian Acheson

Was it right to jail the man who urinated at Keith Palmer’s memorial?

The wheels of justice have, for once, turned with decent haste and Andrew Banks is now banged up. Banks's crime? To relieve himself at Saturday's demonstration just inches away from the memorial of PC Keith Palmer, who was murdered trying to prevent an Islamist terrorist gain access to Parliament in 2017. The contrast between supreme sacrifice and supreme idiocy can hardly be greater. My reaction, like those of many others was repulsion at what looked like a disgusting act of desecration. Westminster Magistrates' Court was told that Banks had consumed 16 pints, hadn’t slept, didn’t notice PC Palmer's memorial and was in London to ‘defend statues’ but he couldn’t say which ones. As a composite of many of those involved in the disorder and violence of last Saturday that led to 113 arrests, this is a decent proxy.

Ian Acheson

Tougher terrorism laws are popular. But will they actually work?

Ian Acheson

Tougher terrorism laws are popular. But will they actually work?

Social media is predictably swamped by the usual well-heeled, left-wheeled liberal rights activists decrying the major changes to terrorism laws introduced by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland this morning. The new Counter Terrorism and Sentencing Bill entering Parliament today delivers swingeing changes to the sentencing, risk assessment and supervision of this countries violent extremists. Fatal defects in the system had become all too apparent in two acts of jihadi terrorism that straddled last Christmas. The murderous rampage of Usman Khan, who killed two young people involved in an educational charity supporting him when on licence from prison, was followed by Sudesh Amman’s dramatic assault. His attack on shoppers in Streatham after authorities were forced to release him from prison while still a danger to others prompted emergency legislation to stop the imminent automatic release of other terrorist offenders.

Coffee House Shots

What does coronavirus mean for Britain’s prisons?

21 min listen

Coffee House Shots

What does coronavirus mean for Britain’s prisons?

21 min listen

Ian Acheson

How will the government handle coronavirus in our prisons?

Ian Acheson

How will the government handle coronavirus in our prisons?

Covid-19 has entered our prison system. There are now at least two confirmed coronavirus cases in HMPs Manchester and Highdown in Surrey, which means staff and prisoners there are in isolation and hospital. This was inevitable, and as I have said previously, our overcrowded and under-resourced jails need special, urgent consideration. Prisons incubate many malign things behind their walls. Local prisons in particular are overcrowded and insanitary transit camps for people and viruses. So, now that prisoners have become infected, what’s to be done? The Government does have a plan. I understand that next week legislation will be introduced that will allow certain risk assessed prisoners serving more than 12 weeks and less than four years to be released early under Home Detention Curfew (HDC).

Ian Acheson

The nightmare scenario of a coronavirus prison outbreak

Ian Acheson

The nightmare scenario of a coronavirus prison outbreak

Scared about coronavirus as you go about your everyday life? Spare a thought for those living and working inside our battered prison system. In Italy yesterday the anxiety that underpins all incarceration suddenly exploded into violence. Rioting left six prisoners dead, staff were taken hostage, dozens escaped and one prison in Poggioreale near Naples was ‘completely destroyed’. The ferocious backlash was in response to tough new measures introduced across the country to try to slow the relentless progress of Covid-19. These included a ban on the all-important prisoner family visits, which are seen by experts as dramatically increasing the risk of contagion in places almost wholly unsuited to withstand its effects.

Ian Acheson

In defence of the Prevent strategy

Ian Acheson

In defence of the Prevent strategy

What is the point of UN Special Rapporteurs? On Tuesday, their expert on terrorism and human rights, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, released a report which was seized upon by the Independent and the usual dodgy ‘advocacy’ groups that speak on behalf of convicted extremist as being evidence that our counter-terrorism Prevent strategy violates international law. Rapporteurs are independent subject experts hired by the UN and given a mandate by its Human Rights Council to investigate and report on areas of concern. I have fond memories, while at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, of being lectured on our dire housing situation by one such visiting rapporteur, the Brazilian former Marxist Raquel Rolnik (Favellas anyone?).

Ian Acheson

Beware Sinn Fein’s Trojan horse

Ian Acheson

Beware Sinn Fein’s Trojan horse

I got my first Irish passport a few months ago. It felt like a vaguely transgressive gesture because my primary British identity was forged on the Northern Irish border where many Unionists like me paid for their UK citizenship in blood. In the event, if anything, I felt proud of the way this document allowed me to articulate a dormant part of my identity. Sinn Fein’s remorseless rise in this weekend’s Irish general election has strangled that hopeful feeling. Sinn Fein have surged ahead to top the poll of first preference votes, smashing the Republic’s dominant two-party cartel that has ruled Ireland in coalition for a generation. The vote share of this insurgent movement has doubled since the last election to 24 per cent, overtaking Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, neither of which have capitalised on a buoyant economy; and in Fine Gael’s case, in the shape of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, a good war on Brexit.

Ian Acheson

Terror cells: how Britain’s prisons became finishing schools for extremists

Ian Acheson

Terror cells: how Britain’s prisons became finishing schools for extremists

Sometimes it appears as if, over the past ten years, the government has been actively trying to destroy the whole criminal justice system. It’s like an evil experiment: impose a 20 per cent cut in the prisons budget, meaning a 26 per cent reduction in the number of operational front line staff — then sit back and see what happens. What happened was predictable, with disastrous consequences for both inmates and the public. As a previous Conservative home secretary once said, our prisons became places that ‘make bad people worse’. Imagine a young man like Sudesh Amman arriving in prison after his first offence. He was already a drug user, known to have a cannabis habit. He was mentally unstable and radicalised by Islamist propaganda.

Ian Acheson

Can our prison system ‘cure’ convicted terrorists?

Ian Acheson

Can our prison system ‘cure’ convicted terrorists?

We’ve just celebrated the birth of a refugee who went on to radicalise a group of fishermen and transform the worldview of millions of people. You might not feel comfortable with this depiction of Jesus Christ but it does illustrate the challenges and limitations of language and labelling when dealing with contemporary violent extremism. I was on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning to speak about Healthy Identity Intervention (HII) – a psychosocial approach to changing the mindset of terrorists which was used in prison to treat Usman Khan prior to his murderous rampage on London Bridge. I was asked to comment after the HII programme's main architect, the forensic Psychologist Christopher Dean, emphasised the limitations of the approach on changing a determined terrorist psyche.

Ian Acheson

Usman Khan’s time in prison could hold the key to explaining his murderous attack

Ian Acheson

Usman Khan’s time in prison could hold the key to explaining his murderous attack

London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan appears to have spent some of his final months behind bars at HMP Whitemoor, a high-security prison near Peterborough, where some of the country’s most dangerous people are held. The prison's chequered history could be relevant to the horrific events that unfolded in the capital last week. I last visited Whitemoor near the beginning of 2016. This ‘new build’ prison, finished in 1992 with space for around 450 inmates, was designed to be escape proof. Two years later, five IRA terrorists and a gangster brutally disabused this notion by escaping over the perimeter wall armed with a gun that had been smuggled into the ‘supermax’ special secure unit where they were held. A prison officer was shot during the escape.

Ian Acheson

Locking child killers up for life won’t solve our prison crisis

Ian Acheson

Locking child killers up for life won’t solve our prison crisis

What should we do with adults who murder children? 'Nothing good' is a perfectly understandable response. Child killers occupy a unique position on the destitute outer fringes of humanity. Bogeymen made real, they are in fact often pathetic, hideously damaged individuals driven to satisfy appetites we can only guess at. The Conservatives have announced that adults over 21 who murder children under 16 will never be released from custody. It has made for a good Sun newspaper op-ed; justice secretary Robert Buckland is pushing against an open door with the electorate. It's not just Tory voters who never want these aberrant individuals to see the light of day again. Ask any parent and wait for the sound of sharpened pitchforks.

Ian Acheson

Winning the online war after the fall of Isis

Ian Acheson

Winning the online war after the fall of Isis

Home Secretary Priti Patel downgraded our national terrorism threat assessment last week from ‘severe’, where it has sat for the last four years to ‘substantial’. Attacks have now been reduced from ‘highly likely’ to ‘likely’. We’re never given the full analysis of the reasons for the changes in alert levels, which is independently assessed by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC). But it’s fair to say from what we know, it’s more an art than a science. And there are plenty of reasons to remain pessimistic. The threat of violent extremists across the ideological spectrum to cause us severe harm continues. It’s undoubtedly true that in terms of numbers, attacks and potential attacks thwarted by the security services in Western Europe have been on a downward trajectory from 2016 onwards.

Ian Acheson

Is Rory Stewart running to become London mayor because he’s bored?

Ian Acheson

Is Rory Stewart running to become London mayor because he’s bored?

Rory Stewart's announcement that he would run as an independent candidate for Mayor for London was typically civilised. This was no political suicide bomb. Instead Stewart waited for his erstwhile party’s conference to finish before making his move. But this trademark decency does not render his decision any less barking to his detractors. I’m on friendly terms with Stewart and had enthusiastically supported his Conservative leadership campaign which, after this abrupt defection, does leave me feeling like a bit of an arse if I’m honest. But Rory is very hard to dislike, not least because his innate decency, ability and desire to listen and respond to ordinary people is clearly authentic. Yet ability and stickability are both important if you want to leave your mark in this world.

Ian Acheson

The dangerous myth of the ‘bad border’ in Northern Ireland

Ian Acheson

The dangerous myth of the ‘bad border’ in Northern Ireland

The Irish border is awash with journalists and pundits from Great Britain, scratching their heads in wet frontier fields patrolled by incurious Friesians. No border bridge has been left unmolested by visiting television crews in search of a sombre framing shot. The former ‘Killing Fields’ outside Enniskillen were my home until I left for university in England at 18. I don’t decry the honest attempts of blow-in journalists to explain the conundrum of what Churchill wearily dismissed as the ‘dull and dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ – it’s a bit of a head melter all right. But the blaring singularity of the ‘bad border’ narrative we hear far too much of is both ignorant and dangerous. The Brexit border discourse in Great Britain, with few exceptions, cleaves to an overwhelmingly nationalist/catastrophist perspective.

Ian Acheson

The Yellowhammer report is nothing like a real contingency plan

Ian Acheson

The Yellowhammer report is nothing like a real contingency plan

The latest Operation Yellowhammer disclosures put me in mind of a book I read a few years ago describing an unsettlingly plausible zombie outbreak in Britain. When the streets were too full of undead shamblers for the government to ignore, the Home Secretary asked officials who were barricaded in his office for the contingency plan to deal with this apocalypse. He was handed one sheet of A4 on which was simply written, ‘run away screaming.’ I wonder whether Michael Gove had anything much more coherent to rely on when he took up the reins at the Cabinet Office at the back end of July and asked for the latest no-deal arrangements? Barely a month before, the senior civil servant at the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) responsible for contingency planning had bailed for the private sector, hot on the heels of the HMRC mandarin in charge of frictionless border preparations.

Ian Acheson

The false equivalence between victims and perpetrators of the Troubles

Ian Acheson

The false equivalence between victims and perpetrators of the Troubles

Julian Smith used to have the unenviable task of being Theresa May's chief whip. As the newly-appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, he now has an even harder job. Wrangling unbiddable MPs pales into insignificance when arbitrating the causes and consequences of a brutalised polity. Members of Northern Ireland’s devolved government still refuse to sit with each other and the legislative assembly is defunct. The police service is chased off Northern Irish housing estates by teenagers and regularly targeted for murder by dissident republicans. Putrid commemoration of dead terrorists saluted by gunfire and sinister paramilitary parades barely raises an eyebrow. Warnings about Brexit leading to a breakdown in peace in Northern Ireland are building to a crescendo of shroud-waving opportunism.

Ian Acheson

Boris Johnson is right to talk tough on crime. But can he deliver?

Ian Acheson

Boris Johnson is right to talk tough on crime. But can he deliver?

Remember #rorywalks? This was the hashtag created to follow the progress of Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart as he travelled around Britain meeting people in places detached from mainstream politics. One encounter that sticks in my mind happened when he met a couple from east London, who told him that they wouldn’t start a family because their local area was too unsafe to bring a child into the world. Whether apocryphal or not, it is clear that there are parts of Britain where criminality and incivility has become normal, battering the morale of our most vulnerable citizens. The public mood is not receptive to further ‘understanding’ of people who seem to be able to offend with impunity or the legions of experts and publicly-funded charities that dominate the airwaves endlessly contextualising and excusing appalling behaviour as a societal, rarely an individual responsibility.