We may never know whether the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks were meant to disrupt the election campaign, but it would certainly be in keeping with the extremists’ desire to undermine our democracy. The week of polling day is also the worst possible time for politicians to come up with a considered response to a threat that makes the petty bickering of the campaign trail fade into insignificance. This is about a cultural and ideological divide that is far greater than the differences between Labour and the Conservatives, socialism and capitalism, or Brexit and Remain. Yet the response of the political parties has been an utterly predictable reversion to type.
Jeremy Corbyn has taken the traditional left-wing line of blaming foreign wars before calling for more public spending on the police. Theresa May has ramped up the right-wing rhetoric, declaring “enough is enough” and talking tough about harsher sentences and potential new offences. Neither leader has addressed the real problem, which is that there are young men living in Britain today who feel so little connection with their fellow citizens that they are willing to blow themselves up in a crowded foyer in Manchester or drive a van into innocent people walking along London Bridge. The truth is that all the longer sentences or extra police officers in the world will never stop somebody buying a knife and going on a rampage in the name of Allah. You have to prevent them wanting to do it in the first place.
“The response of both parties has been a reversion to type
There is growing evidence of a link between segregation, deprivation and extremism. According to an analysis by the Henry Jackson Society think tank, published in March, a tenth of Britain’s convicted Islamist terrorists came from just five heavily Muslim council wards in Birmingham. More than three quarters of Islamist-related offences were committed by people living in the poorest 50 per cent of neighbourhoods in England and almost half by individuals living in the most deprived 20 per cent. Dame Louise Casey’s recent review on integration highlighted the vicious circle of sectarianism and poverty, arguing that “the less integrated we are, the more vulnerable communities and individuals become to the divisive narratives and agendas of extremists and potentially the greater the likelihood becomes of hate crime, sectarian violence and terrorist attacks”. But — for different reasons — neither Mr Corbyn nor Mrs May is able or willing to confront the fatal consequences of social division.
The Labour leader is part of a left-wing clique which has always celebrated a version of multiculturalism that encourages difference rather than integration. More worried about offending religious sensitivities than gender equality, he turned a blind eye to segregated seating for men and women at party meetings. He campaigned against the Prevent strategy for countering extremism on the grounds that it discriminates against Muslims, while supporting the human rights charity Cage, which has praised the Isis executioner known as “Jihadi John”. One Whitehall source says Mr Corbyn and those around him are driven into strange alliances by their hostility to the West: “Like in the Cold War, it’s a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’,” he explains. “They are quite happy to blame the West rather than standing up to the extremists.”
The prime minister is equally short-sighted about the social conditions that breed extremism. On Sunday she stood outside No 10 and insisted that “we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom”, yet she remains determined to increase the number of faith schools and to overturn the admissions cap that prevents schools from selecting more than 50 per cent of their pupils on the basis of faith. I am told that had David Cameron still been Conservative leader he would have pursued a very different approach — his advisers had drawn up a proposal to impose a temporary ban on the creation of new faith schools in highly segregated areas.
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“The Casey review was ‘smothered and killed’ by May and her team
The former prime minister also intended to appoint Dame Louise as the government’s director of integration, based in the Cabinet Office with a remit across Whitehall. Now she has resigned from the civil service and, in the words of one Cameron ally, her review has been “smothered and killed” by Mrs May and her team who were nervous about it from the start. Although the inquiry was set up to examine links between integration and extremism, the Home Office (under Mrs May) insisted that it should steer clear of anything that could be seen as counterterrorism. There was an element of turf war perhaps, but also an ideological determination to distinguish between radical ideas and violence. “They see terrorism as separate from extremism and extremism as separate from segregation,” the friend of the former prime minister says. “They fought all the time not to have them linked.” It was a position characterised by Michael Gove, when he was education secretary, as waiting to shoot the crocodiles when they neared the boat rather than seeking to drain the swamp in which they bred.
Yesterday Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s former director of strategy, called for Mrs May to resign for failing to keep the country safe. The remark reflected a long-standing frustration among the former prime minister’s allies about her intransigence over attempts to curb radicalisation. The previous regime became increasingly irritated at the Home Office’s snail-like implementation of the counterextremism strategy announced by Mr Cameron after the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013. It took more than a year for an expert panel to be appointed to conduct a review of Sharia and the inquiry has still not reported. A plan to regulate and inspect madrassas — described by Mr Cameron as places where children were “having their heads filled with poison and their hearts filled with hate” — has not been implemented 18 months after it was announced. Meanwhile, a proposed law for countering extremists ran into the ground after the Home Office failed to provide a workable definition of extremism. “I don’t want to say that Home Office inertia has made the country less safe but there was far less progress on these issues than we wanted,” the Cameron ally said.
With two days to go until the election the political parties are trying to fit the terror threat into their campaign messages: for Labour, the choice is “investment versus cuts”; for the Tories it’s “security or risk”. Both are missing the point. Whoever is elected prime minister must be ready not only to deal with the terrorist threat but also to confront the segregation and deprivation in which extremism thrives.