John Humphrys asks: how should we react to such an event like what happened in Woolwich?
The horrific murder of a young British soldier in Woolwich has understandably dominated the news. The sheer barbarity of the crime shocked and appalled everyone. Now, several days later, what conclusion can we draw on how we should react to such an event?
The facts are well known. Drummer Lee Rigby of 2nd Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a 25-year-old father, was hacked to death and beheaded outside the Royal Artillery barracks in Woolwich by two men who initially ran him over in a car and then set about him with knives and meat cleavers. They claimed they were acting on behalf of militant Islam in retaliation for British military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider Muslim world. Armed police arrived and shot the two suspects, who are now being held in hospital under armed guard.
Fear that the murder might be only the start of a wider terrorist assault led the Prime Minister to cut short a trip Paris and return to London to chair a meeting of the emergency committee, Cobra.
Everyone, including all the main Muslim organisations in Britain, rushed to condemn the killing. But questions inevitably started to be asked about whether the murder could have been prevented, especially when it emerged that one of the suspects was already known to MI5.
The fundamental question is whether we are handling the terrorist threat overall in the right way.
To some the fact that such a dreadful killing could happen is evidence enough that we are not. On this view it is palpable that we are simply underestimating the threat from Islamic terrorism in this country and that if more unsuspecting soldiers walking the streets of London are not to become the victims of it, then we need to take much more radical action against it. Any Muslims suspected of having jihadist sympathies must be deported if they are not British nationals and those who are (such as the two suspects in Drummer Rigby’s murder) should be subject to much more thorough surveillance. It should be made far easier for the law to deprive such jihadist sympathisers of their liberty, a liberty that provides them with the opportunity to carry out atrocities such as the Woolwich killing. In short, according to this view, we need to face up to the extent of the threat of Islamic terrorism and take off our kid gloves in dealing with it.
To others, such a response is no better than knee-jerk. And according to them, it is not just hysterical but impractical. Except in a totalitarian society, the intelligence and security services cannot simply crack down on every person about whom there might be the whiff of a suspicion. Instead those services have no alternative but to prioritise.
As Lord Blair, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner told me on the Today programme on Friday, there are hundreds of young, radicalised British Muslims whose ambition is to seek terrorist training abroad. They are the ones, he said, whom the security services “must go after”. But there are thousands of Muslims in Britain who may occasionally attend meetings and rallies or pick up some firebrand Islamic literature and who have no intention of resorting to violence. Lord Blair’s point was that we cannot treat them all in the same way. There is a spectrum of threat between the two and there is no alternative to leaving the security services to make judgements about the extent of the threat any individual may pose on the basis of all the information available to them. As a result of such judgements, some will be put under intense surveillance and some will largely be left alone. Inevitably, mistakes will be made.
Nonetheless, some people are saying in the wake of Woolwich that there are things we could be doing which we are choosing not to do. Lord Blair pointed to the difficulty of rooting out lone wolf terrorists. The police, he said, cannot look behind the doors of every young Muslim’s bedroom to see whether or not they are accessing jihadist websites inciting them to violence. But that is exactly what some people think the authorities ought to be able to do and are being prevented from doing by the government itself.
Earlier this year ministers proposed in the forthcoming Communications Bill to require internet service providers to keep logs of everyone’s internet activity, which websites they accessed and the addresses (though not the content) of their email traffic. The justification for this measure was precisely that it would help the security services keep tabs on what suspected would-be terrorists might be up to. But civil liberties organisations protested strongly about this state intrusion into people’s lives and the government dropped the plan at the insistence of the Lib Dem members of the coalition. This followed what were reported to be blazing rows between the Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and the Tory Home Secretary, Theresa May.
But the tightening of our response to the supposed terrorist threat, whether of the piecemeal or more draconian sort, is countered by a wholly different approach. What lies behind this approach is the perception that what terrorists crave most of all is publicity and that our over-reactions give them exactly what they want. On this view, the way to handle the murder of Drummer Rigby is to treat it simply as that – a murder, to be dealt with by the police in the usual way. So the Prime Minister should have stayed in Paris and the media should have refrained from jumping immediately to the conclusion that there must be a wider significance to the awful event, imagining links with al-Qaeda and speculating that one tragic killing is prelude to total jihad.
But, given that it cannot be entirely fanciful to fear a more organised attack in the nation’s capital after the murder of one of our soldiers on its streets, isn’t it the responsibility of a prime minister to be on hand to deal with it? And isn’t it the media’s job to alert the public to what the significance of such an event might be even if, in the end, it turns out not to be?
Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple answer to the question of how we should respond to an atrocity such as this – except on one level. We can all share in the grief of the poor man’s family.
