Open letters claim to restore moral clarity; but too often they spread confusion. Open letters purport to express obvious truths; but recent events have highlighted the worrying tendency of the genre to be hijacked for counter-productive ends: to express obvious non-truths, for example, or — and this can be worse — non-obvious non-truths.

Some of the foregoing dangers are, we believe, inherent in the collective epistolary form itself. The trick, in crafting the perfect open letter, is to give maximalist expression to a minimalist position. Authors of open letters need to be selective enough in relaying the background “facts” of their case so as not to alienate potential signatories: these are celebrities we’re dealing with, remember, and therefore natural free-thinkers. At the same time, one has to give the letter enough moral phlegm to make it worth clearing one’s throat to put one’s famous name to it. 

The result — you might call it Maier’s Canting Theorem — is that the assessable argumentative content of an open letter is inversely proportional to a weighted average of the fame and number of the celebrities whose names are appended to it. In the place of explicit reasoning, in the course of which a position’s flaws and vulnerabilities are all too liable to be exposed, the reader of an open letter is treated to broad moral pronouncement, rendered in a high-committee prose style, and which tends to veer towards melodrama and alarmism. 

Needless to say, we, the undersigned, feel this chilling trend poses an existential risk to democracy, harms the most vulnerable in our society, and is likely to eradicate life on Earth as we know it.

OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for… pic.twitter.com/QLQel0EC7N

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) October 21, 2026

Connoisseurs of the open letter have by now probably seen the above-described defects recently on display in the public tangle that The New Statesman has got itself into. In a letter whose length is robustly predicted by Maier’s theorem — being really more of a tersely-worded postcard with 158 signatures — the magazine denounces as unconscionable the recent “censorship” of the novelist Sally Rooney. 

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The facts of the case are well-known. Among the political causes close to Rooney’s heart is Palestine, and a group called Palestine Action. Rooney has pledged to use royalties to support the group — despite the fact that it was lately sanctioned as a terrorist group by the British government, making funding them an offense. We, the undersigned, cannot help but conjecture that Rooney might have got away with her wheeze — were it not for the fact that she announced her intention to break the law in advance, and in a manner almost designed to attract attention. Given the legal jeopardy, at any rate, Rooney’s publisher at Faber has decided, with the author’s consent, to suspend sales of her novels. 

Now, we do not wish to take a collective stand on the controversial question of whether Rooney’s silencing omens a sinister curtailment of the right to free speech. We only wish to note that, if a novelist’s right to free expression includes a guarantee that others must cooperate in activities which the author loudly declares will be used to raise funds for terrorists on British soil, Rooney may well have a complaint.

It is one of the rhetorical liberties taken by open letter writers that they sometimes pass off caustic jibes as concessive praise. We only wish to add, then, that the Statesman’s own letter exhibits, rather brilliantly, one further trick common of the form: that of smuggling in inflammatory speculations to the extra-epistolary text, which the signatories themselves might have preferred not to be implicated in. In this case, there is a somewhat daring analogy attempted between the fates of Sally Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Just consider, we are invited to reason: both write novels; both have had trouble selling them in Britain at one time or another; both… have the initials “SR”? (At some point, the brainstorming exercise takes a slightly feeble turn.) 

Still, we note that one further peculiarity of open letters is that, once they begin to attract enough ink below the line, they inevitably tend to be judged as much on the basis of those who notably fail to sign as on the basis of those who do. (That may be more a “feature” than a “bug” of the genre: the creation of an implicit cost to withholding assent being part of the form’s coercive effort to organize public thinking). Notably, though presumably he was invited to, Salman Rushdie did not sign.

These quagmires give only a merest hint of the varied trouble open letter writing can lead to. Though they pretend to give a voice to suppressed truths, too often they simply echo a preachy moral consensus. Though affecting nuance, their inevitably coarse-grained rhetorical style is a standing disinvitation to detailed engagement. Even well-intentioned interventions — the famous 2020 Harper’s letter championing free speech — can undermine their own cause in subtle ways. Having spent so much time throat-clearing about the threat of “right wing demagogues”, “Donald Trump”, and slavishly assenting to the need for more DEI, the Harper’s letter may have done more to underscore the inescapability of a woke consensus than it did to oppose it.

Or consider — if you can bear to — the glaringly avant-garde approach that Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project takes to his open letters. One recent exhibit, a letter in defense of Jason Arday’s right to evade media scrutiny, was a superficially well-reasoned account made about an utterly alternative reality. Arday, the 21,000 undersigned agreed, was facing “entirely false allegations of plagiarism”. There was “no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” against him. The “baseless allegations” were therefore a “right wing” smear campaign. “Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the color of their skin,” the letter concluded, apparently without irony. If ever it is complacently assumed that the open letter lends itself to the service of clarification, then here is evidence that it is just as easily commandeered as a vehicle for the brazen propagation of falsehood.

The home stretch of an open letter is the time to get expansive; and even in denouncing them we, the undersigned, do not wish to buck the form. Why do people set so much store by open letters? What epistemic authority are these bewildering lists supposed to exert over us? Someone who thought moral opinions more reliable when dispensed by motley bands of intellectuals would seem, on reflection, as mad as someone who thought all songs sound better when performed by Live Aid. Yet the appeal of the genre seems to rest on the strange assumption that when a missive has been jointly audited and solemnly endorsed by a mongrel committee of bewilderingly disconnected names, it enjoys some strange, placeless authority. “If Kneecap, Zadie Smith, and the Chichele professor of social and political theory can all agree on this one”, such letters seem to ask, “why can’t you?”.

Needless to say, in a world without open letters floating about, some might justly worry about where we are to get our opinions from, and how we are to verify that they are in good standing with the moral majority. We acknowledge that this is a serious problem. However, having consulted each other, we believe it best that everyone should think for themselves. 

Known in Spain as El Pelirrojo (“the Ginger”), Suri was not the sort of ginger jihadi Britain produced, the kind who chased you around Whitechapel distributing leaflets proclaiming “sharia-controlled zones”. Instead, he belonged more in a Joseph Conrad novel. Living a quiet life in Neasden, he fused Islamist ideology, Marxism and modern insurgent tactics into a worldview whose legacy has colored countless later terrorist campaigns. For while bin Laden became famous for the hierarchy of al-Qaeda, Suri quite deliberately, wanted its opposite. As such, modern violent Islamism, with its lone-wolf protagonists and random stabbings, takes from Suri, not bin Laden, even as the Syrian’s legacy continues to loom large.

Born in 1958, into a conservative Aleppan family with a strong Sufi tradition, Suri came of age as Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syrian dictator from 1970, was tightening his grip on power — and crushing the Islamist opposition as he went. As a young man, Suri joined an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Fighting Vanguard, and which concluded that the only way to overthrow the regime was through armed struggle. Trained in explosives, Suri was part of a campaign of bombings and assassinations against the Assad regime, culminating in a massacre of army cadets in 1979.

The confrontation reached its climax in 1982, when the Fighting Vanguard, joined by local supporters, rose against the regime in the western Syrian city of Hama. Hafez’s brother Refaat crushed the rebellion with  brutal force, effectively ending the Muslim Brotherhood as an organized force inside Syria and scattering the survivors of the Fighting Vanguard. Many, including Suri, made their way to Afghanistan to fight the USSR.

Suri found himself in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, alongside Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric often described as the godfather of global jihad. In the rugged mountains abutting Afghanistan, he also met a wealthy Saudi benefactor — Osama bin Laden. According to Suri’s own account, he spent three years training bin Laden and other so-called “Afghan Arabs” before traveling to Madrid, acquiring Spanish nationality by way of marriage, then eventually settling in London in 1994.

In the Nineties, London had become an unlikely haven for Islamists, to the late 20th-century Muslim world what Paris, Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut had been to political dissidents in the 19th. The city’s cosmopolitan character made it the intellectual center of the Anglophone Muslim world, teeming with bookshops, activists, Afghan war veterans and assorted other political exiles — all trying to make sense of their movement’s future.

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It was in London, too, that Islamists began developing a bewildering range of political philosophies. At one end stood Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, looking to Britain’s parliamentary democracy for inspiration. At the other were those who dreamed of planting the black flag over 10 Downing Street. It was in this extraordinary milieu that Suri started turning the lessons of Syria and Afghanistan into a theory of global insurgency.

That theory marked a radical departure from the way Islam’s martial tradition had long been understood. Traditionally, anti-colonial figures in places like Algeria had conceived of jihad as a form of resistance. To them, noble means led to noble ends. The rules were simple: the enemy was the Western invader. No women. No children. No priests. Only combatants.

Suri threw those assumptions aside. Instead, he asked a wholly different set of questions, the sort that anarchists and Marxists wrestled with in the last century. Does terror achieve political aims? How should asymmetric warfare be waged? Are Muslim governments legitimate targets, as the Algerian military junta had become for Islamist militants? In many ways, Suri reimagined jihad into what the American writer Robert Taber called “war of the flea”: a strategy of guerrilla warfare, terror and asymmetry designed for the weak against the strong.

For a brief moment, following a series of terror attacks in France, Suri was noticed by MI5. But that was about it. The British security services largely turned a blind eye to Islamist activity throughout the Nineties, partly because they had yet to grasp the problem of blowback. There was also an understanding, as the infamous Abu Hamza of Finsbury Park Mosque once put it, that Islamist dissidents were free to agitate against their own governments so long as they did not bite the hand that fed them.

There was another calculation too. Some of these dissidents might one day overthrow the regimes they opposed, so it was better to keep them close than drive them underground. Indeed, some of the sons and daughters of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood exiles, who themselves grew up in London, are now advising the government in Damascus. Suri, however, always had far more global ambitions. In 1991, he attended the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress in Sudan, where he mingled with everyone from Hezbollah militants to Afghan mujahideen to Carlos the Jackal. Another attendee recalls meeting Suri there, describing him as intensely angry and confrontational.

Back in London, Suri helped publish the influential Islamist magazine Al-Ansar, publishing letters from leading jihadist figures, including al-Qaeda’s future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Suri also arranged for Western journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden, becoming one of the unlikely intermediaries between Britain’s Islamist exile scene and the emerging leadership of al-Qaeda. Suri was also an advocate of the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar, encouraging bin Laden to fall in line and preserve the nascent emirate.

By the late Nineties, Suri had returned to Afghanistan, settling in the outskirts of Kabul. Talha Ahsan, a former jihadist and Dulwich College alumnus who met Suri at this time, remembers him as “one of the smartest people” he had ever encountered. His vision foreshadowed practices that later became commonplace among groups such as ISIS. As Ahsan tells me, Suri believed in recruiting criminals, men with the courage to do things that bourgeois kids like himself could not. It was precisely these sorts of men, alienated from ordinary life, who would later carry out many of the atrocities that scarred Europe during ISIS’s heyday.

Suri’s 1600-page magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which appeared online in 2004, was a hard-nosed articulation of what modern jihad should look like. In it, he anticipated the lone wolf and the autonomous cell, each operating without a rigid hierarchy. The destruction of the Fighting Vanguard had convinced Suri that formal organizations were too easily dismantled. Jihad, then, had to become leaderless, to exist beyond any single group. In modern parlance, he wanted the fight to go viral.

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To that extent, Suri was not opposed to the objectives behind 9/11 — so much as the way al-Qaeda was organized. He well knew that charismatic leaders could be hunted down, leaving the movement in disarray. Bin Laden’s death and the subsequent decline of al-Qaeda, followed years later by ISIS’s struggles after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to prove him right. All the while, Suri argued that jihadist organizations wasted too much energy on theological infighting, instead of concentrating on what he saw as their wider struggle against the West and its allies.

Though Suri remained in the fringes during his lifetime, his ideas nonetheless seeped into the Islamist discourse via the internet and radical preachers. There are doubts as to how far he masterminded the Madrid bombings of 2004 and 7/7, yet both attacks were certainly Suri-esque. “[In my teachings] I have mentioned vital and legitimate targets to be hit in the enemy’s countries,” he remarked later. “Among those targets that I specifically mentioned as examples was the London Underground. [Targeting this] was and still is the aim.”

Beyond outrages like 7/7, Suri’s decentralized approach helped inspire other atrocities: including Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to bring down an American airliner in 2009. The countless stabbings, vehicle attacks and small-scale acts of terror carried out over the next 15 years would become the most enduring and disturbing expressions of Suri’s ideas.

Suri himself spent his last years hiding from the Pakistani authorities, before being captured and transferred to a Syrian prison around 2005. Widely believed to have died there, he disappeared into the same system of repression that had shaped him decades earlier.  But his ideas did not die with him. For if bin Laden is remembered as the face of global jihad, Suri may prove the more consequential figure in the long run, especially as warfare is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unconventional. Besides all that, the Syrian who once edited magazines in London, and took British journalists to meet bin Laden, bequeathed his successors something more durable than an organization. He left behind a method, one that continues to echo wherever individuals kill not in the name of a group — but, in vivid Conradesque fashion, in the name of an idea.

The presence of death has become more tangible in recent years. The first thing a Yom Kippur shulgoer will notice now is the security. There may be a police car or two in sight, and watchmen at the door, eagle-eyed for suspicious behavior. In order to enter a Yom Kippur service at a synagogue in Germany earlier this year, I had to present my passport to a gruff Israeli bouncer. He was satisfied by my Jewish name and countenance; another man in the queue behind me was patted down.

Over the years, Jews have had to grow accustomed to such inconveniences and precautions. Jewish schools have tight security, and they have emergency procedures in place, in case that security were to fail. They run drills and “invacuations”. In 2015, after a spate of antisemitic attacks on the Continent, it was reported that children at Jewish primary schools were being trained to play “sleeping lions” when the alarm sounded.

But Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the calendar, is both a moment of heightened vigilance, and a moment Jews have their guard down. The Arab states worked this to their advantage in 1973; and vigilance was proved necessary, again, by Jihad al-Shamie at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue earlier this year.

Hanukkah is the opposite of Yom Kippur: it is frivolity. Some Jews gripe about its commercialization, the way religious Christians do over Christmas. But Christmas was the birth of the Messiah, the Incarnation of God; Hanukkah celebrates a historical event, the Maccabean wars, which do not even merit mention in the canon of Jewish scripture. It is widely admitted that Hanukkah attained its prominence, both among Jews and in the non-Jewish cultural imagination, as an explicit counter to Christmas. Shorn of long prayers and arbitrary restrictions, and bringing with it a bounty of gifts, doughnuts, and chocolate coins, it is naturally the festival that children most look forward to.

This was the jubilant mood, blessed with Antipodean sunshine and golden sands, that a father-and-son pair of Islamists, Sajid and Naveed Akram, saw fit to desecrate. The attack at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah was the deadliest terror attack in Australian history, and the second-deadliest mass shooting. It was an attack on a robust Jewish community, with the largest per-capita population of Holocaust survivors anywhere outside Israel. One of those Holocaust survivors, Alexander Kleytman, was killed while shielding his wife of sixty years, Larisa, from the bullets. Another of those murdered was Eli Schlanger, a rabbi born in London. It speaks to the smallness of the Jewish world that one of Rabbi Schlanger’s relatives served as rabbi at Heaton Park.

Jews are frightened and angry, and they recognize where the threat is coming from. Of course they are concerned about the far-Right, and the Pittsburgh attack in 2018 gave them ample reason to be — not to mention the subsequent rise of Nick Fuentes. They have reason to worry about the far-Left, too: when Aaron Bushnell set himself ablaze for the sake of Palestine, it was feared that such propensity for violence would soon turn itself outwards; and so it did when Elias Rodriguez killed a young couple working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. But Jews in the diaspora perceive Islamist terror as the principal danger. They saw what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023, and they now see similar occurrences closer to home. The rap sheet is long. The Jewish school in Toulouse. The Jewish Museum in Brussels. The kosher supermarket in Paris. The Great Synagogue in Copenhagen. The synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. The synagogue in Manchester. Bondi Beach in Sydney.

A report published earlier this year by the Counter Extremism Group — “Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate” — found that, in Britain, “speakers in certain mosques have promoted the idea that Allah is pleased by the killing of Jews, led prayers for the Mujahideen (without directly naming Hamas), and promulgated conspiracy theories about the 7 October atrocities”. Plenty of those who recite the slogan “globalize the intifada” on London’s never-ending Saturday marches do so out of conformity and ignorance. They might prefer not to give much thought to what it means in practice; but others take the precept very seriously indeed.

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The modern Hanukkah may be a frivolity, but it imparts a powerful message. Partly that is one of hope, of light in the darkness: hope found, in Sydney, in Ahmed al-Ahmed, the heroic fruit-vendor who disarmed one of the attackers.

The Hanukkah story is not just a generic “festival of light”, however: it has teeth. It is the classical expression of Jewish defiance. No matter that it is uncanonical: the story is known to every Jewish child. It is the story of Judah Maccabee — Judah the Hammer — and his brothers redeeming their homeland, by force of arms, from the Seleucid Empire. It is, in a sense, a national epic, whose heroes win the day through sacrifice, valor, and divine favor. There is an episode, in the first book of Maccabees, when Eleazar Avaran, one of Judah’s brothers, charges at a Seleucid war elephant, and stabs it at the belly; he brings the beast down but is crushed beneath it. Al-Ahmed clearly possessed that Maccabean courage.

The Maccabees story is rousing stuff. Emma Lazarus — the poet best known for her sonnet “The New Colossus”, now inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty — was much moved by it: “Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day / The glorious Maccabean rage, / The sire heroic, hoary-gray, / His five-fold lion-lineage.” So was another, lesser-known 19th-century Jewish woman poet, Marion Hertog: “And still the Festival of Lights / Recalls those deeds of yore / That make our history’s page sublime / And live for evermore.” Probably the most consequential echo of the Maccabees story occurs at the crescendo of Theodor Herzl’s clarion-call for Zionism, Der Judenstaat. “A wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again; the Jews who wish for a state will have it.”

Jews know well what Maccabean defiance looks like: it looks like Israel. If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, and, generally, less fun. There will be more drills, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. There will, for all this, be more attacks and more deaths: no matter how much security is tightened, something will always slip through the cracks. There will be a lamentable turning-inward. Some Jews may choose, this Hanukkah, not to put their Chanukiah on the windowsill, lest it be seen by malevolent passers-by. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will come more closely to resemble Israel: sealed off from the world, armed to the teeth, and terrified, with some justification, of the enemy at its doorstep.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor was no ordinary inmate. In 2003, during a counter-terrorism raid in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed four police officers; Detective Constable Stephen Oake later died of his wounds. Convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, he was later handed another 17-year sentence for his part in the so-called “ricin plot”. He was, in every sense, a defining figure of that early wave of al-Qaeda-linked offenders.

Two decades later, Bourgass is reported to be on the cusp of his first full parole review. The precise timings are unclear, but the decision may already have been made; Bourgass might walk out of prison as early as this month. The Parole Board’s role is not to punish retrospective horror, but to weigh current risk: it must assess the man before them, not the man he was. And yet, as Bourgass’s minimum tariff is now expiring, the country is left with a more uncomfortable question: what does “rehabilitation” really mean when the beliefs behind the violence are so hard to change?

I pose that question not as a distant commentator, but as someone who spent 17 years inching through every category of the prison system, after being convicted of murder in 2005. Along the way, I lived alongside some of the most dangerous men in the country and, eventually, sat before a stern-faced parole panel myself.

The Parole Board is one of the few parts of the justice system that still works with forensic calm. It takes nobody’s word for “change”. Before any file reaches a panel, the Public Protection Casework Section (PPCS), inside His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), manages the referral and compiles the core dossier, coordinating the required reports from prison and probation. The Board then conducts a first-stage review of that dossier, and decides whether the case can be settled on the papers alone or needs an oral hearing, with witnesses called and challenged.

But terrorism cases expose the profound limitations of this process. Everything is documented, but not everything is meaningful. The ERG22+ risk tool, for instance, measures behavioral and psychological indicators linked to extremism — factors such as grievance, identity needs, susceptibility to influence and capability for violence. It can, therefore, help flag patterns, but can never reveal what someone truly believes. The Healthy Identity Intervention (HII), meanwhile, is designed to challenge extremist thinking and help offenders build up a non-violent identity. Yet its success depends entirely on honesty, while ideologically committed prisoners can learn the jargon without ever changing their core beliefs. And that is the central difficulty: the system is designed to reward behavioral compliance, not to test ideology’s durability. The file may glow; the risk may remain.

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I saw early signs of that tension when Bourgass first entered Frankland. Days after he was felled in that dinner line, he went looking to settle scores and picked the wrong target — a 21-year-old who had once been kept in a cage used for Charlie Bronson. As he made his move, the younger man clamped his hands around Bourgass’s head and bit his face. Bourgass was quickly moved to the wing next door, but the atmosphere remained tense.

Months later, Bourgass’s cell was set ablaze after claims that he and a handful of fellow Islamists had boasted they would “run the wing” once enough of “the brothers” arrived. What followed was sharp and ugly: a white prisoner was slashed across the face, followed by a small riot that left several prisoners and staff injured, one officer with a broken arm.

Those early years should have been a moment of clarity. Instead, the danger was consistently downplayed, and a new dynamic took root. With similar flare-ups happening across Category A prisons, there soon emerged what prisoners called “the brotherhood”: less an organization than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups.

In practice, these Islamist groups came to operate with a subtle but unmistakable authority, their days revolving around small acts of domination. They often isolated themselves from non-Muslim inmates, for instance, deciding who cooks in a jail’s communal kitchen. Pressure often arrived as a “friendly chat”, an offer of protection, a meal placed on a new arrival’s bed or even a copy of the Quran — gestures that looked charitable but carried an unspoken price. Refusal meant isolation, threats, or the quiet sense of eyes following you around the wing, sometimes ending in violence.

For some men it was easier to blend into the group — to “convert” for safety — than stand outside it. Their routines blended the swagger of a jailhouse thug with the absolutism of jihadist doctrine: instilling the most literal interpretations of scripture, holding cell sermons, debating conflicts in the Middle East, always framed as proof that the West was at war with Islam. The impressionable gravitated toward this intensity; the harder cases used it to justify enforcing discipline. Ideology gave the violence meaning; violence gave the ideology weight. In the dark corners of a prison cell, simple grievances hardened into hate.

And that ideology didn’t stay contained on a single wing. The brotherhood’s strength lay in its reach — often vengeful. A slight against a brotherhood-aligned prisoner in one jail might be “answered” months later in another, by different hands of the same network. I witnessed the results of that cold logic when the man who had floored Bourgass arrived at HMP Long Lartin. A decoy question at his door — “Where you from, mate?” — before a brutal rush from behind. He woke with stab wounds dotted across his face. “I was lucky not to lose an eye,” he told me later.

To anyone who hasn’t lived it, this sounds like exaggeration. It isn’t. In 2016, former prison governor Ian Acheson, in his report on prisons, told ministers to separate the most dangerous ideological influencers — men who radicalized others or used violence to enforce Islamist discipline — into dedicated units. Jonathan Hall KC’s 2022 review went further. He found that the service had long under-appreciated Islamist gang-type activity and the “perverse esteem” enjoyed by terrorist prisoners, noting how “brotherhood” groupings dominated wings and exerted coercive control. Both Acheson and Hall urged governors to take clear ownership of terrorist risk.

The uncomfortable reality is this: poorly managed prisons can entrench ideology more readily than they can challenge it. When a group holds authority and the cultural high ground on a particular wing — through numbers, status, and a ready-made sense of belonging — the incentive to change almost inevitably vanishes. Hall’s point, and Acheson’s before him, is that treating this as mere “prison culture” is how control is lost — and how the rest of us inherit the risk.

Bourgass himself later spent months in segregation at HMP Whitemoor amid concerns about his influence over others. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of his extended segregation had been unlawful on procedural grounds: decisions to keep him isolated beyond the initial 72-hour limit had been repeatedly renewed by prison managers rather than the Secretary of State, as the law requires, while he had also not been given enough information to meaningfully challenge these decisions. They might sound arcane, but these details matter: it shows how long the service has wrestled with the question of what to do with ideological leaders who make already-violent places more dangerous. That tension now sits at the center of Bourgass’s parole bid.

A case like this rarely reaches a parole hearing without formal evidence of risk reduction. As always, PPCS coordinates the referral and dossier; on life sentences, the Parole Board review begins as the minimum tariff nears, and considers whether the case should go to an oral hearing. Yet terrorism cases unsurprisingly don’t sit in a silo: counter-terrorism police and MI5 both contribute, and any release plan runs through what’s known as a “Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement”. Parole management, for its part, falls to the Probation Service’s National Security Division — a specialist unit created to handle the most complex, high-risk cases — if the Board agrees to release a convicted terrorist.

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Paperwork, though, is not certainty. I learned that on my first day out of prison, when I helped restrain Usman Khan on London Bridge, an act for which I received a Royal Prerogative of Mercy and later a Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Khan, too, had “done his rehabilitation work”, had sat on a de-radicalization program in custody, and was under tight license conditions. But none of this was enough to prevent the murders of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones. As the coroner’s subsequent report lays out, a man can look “compliant” yet remain ideologically primed.

That is the paradox the Parole Board now faces with Bourgass, if it hasn’t faced it already. Ideology disrupts the usual calculus. A stable workplace, supportive housing, a curfew, an electronic tag, a conscientious probation officer — these are all important. But they do not neutralize an extremist belief system. HII may genuinely shift thinking for some, but for the most committed, it becomes a vocabulary lesson, a guide on what to say, not a mechanism for change. The Board knows that and will probe it.

When Bourgass is ultimately released, the next question becomes whether the state can safely manage him outside. Probation will model scenarios; police will develop contingencies; MI5 will again contribute its view. But someone must ultimately sign a license and believe it will hold. Risk can be managed or mismanaged; it cannot be eliminated. And even if release were judged manageable, the question of deportation introduces a different kind of difficulty. Terrorist offenders like Bourgass, who entered the UK unlawfully, cannot simply be removed at the end of their sentence. Deportation requires the receiving state’s agreement, and a court must be satisfied there is no real risk of torture or degrading treatment on their return. Algeria has repeatedly resisted forced returns, and British courts scrutinize diplomatic assurances with caution, often finding them insufficient.

My hunch? Bourgass is unlikely to be freed on his first attempt. The Parole Board tends to be more conservative in cases where ideology intersects with violence, and where deportation complications muddy the supervision picture. But whether now or the next time, his return to public life is no longer a distant abstraction. It is approaching.

And that is where the deeper national problem lies. For years, parts of the high-security prison estate have served as incubators, raising up the most committed ideologues and silencing more moderate Muslim voices. The brotherhood, for its part, understood this dynamic long before the institution recognized what was happening. Until we confront that internal culture — not with euphemism, but with honesty about who commands influence on prison landings — we will keep returning to cases like Bourgass: underplaying the risks, and hoping they don’t spill back onto the streets.

In 2005, the author of this piece was convicted of murder, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. In 2019, he was was involved in stopping the London Bridge terror attack, and is now a writer and speaker. 

Soon enough, the basic facts became clear. On 13 November 2015, 10 years ago today, ISIS-inspired terrorists brought death to the city by the Seine. Three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, killing one. Yet it was the roving commandos in the city’s heart that were most shocking. Spreading havoc from a rented SEAT Leon, one group of gunmen killed dozens of innocents in cafés and restaurants. Worst of all, though, was the Bataclan, the music venue where 1,500 rockers were attending a concert. Ninety were mown down in the theater as they danced; 132 died overall.

Now, a decade on from the massacre, the killings still seem unreal. Naturally, France does its best to memorialize the slaughter. Last Sunday, some 2,000 runners wended their way from the Stade de France to the Bataclan for the so-called Marche de Liberté (“Course for Freedom”). That’s been shadowed by more official homages. Today, Emmanuel Macron and Mayor Anne Hidalgo will unveil a memorial garden at the Town Hall, and the Eiffel Tower will be bathed in the colors of the tricolor. Yet if all this happens under the rubric of Paris se souvient, Paris remembers, that barren bewilderment endures. For all the official homages, the attacks of November are still barely understood, and closure seems a very long way away — bad news for the Republic and the capital both.

In some ways, of course, France has found closure. Quite aside from the commemorations and vigils this week, there have been innumerable films and books covering the mayhem from every possible angle. One striking recent example is Paris, 13 Novembre 2045, written by the sociologist Amélie M. Chelly. Her novel follows the survivors of the attacks and the nightmares that haunt them. More prosaically, the Abécédaire du 13 Novembre, edited by Catherine Brun, covers the atrocity from a kaleidoscope of different directions, covering everything from songs to poems to graphic novels.

Then there were the trials of 20 people charged with involvement in the 2015 attacks, an epic affair lasting 10 months from September 2021. The longest criminal trial in modern French history, it encompassed over 300 lawyers and represented 2,500 plaintiffs, and was greater in scale than even the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer and infamous “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War.

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Beyond their simple vastness, the trials exposed France to countless tales of tragedy. Among the stories was that of Maia, a young architect, who was sitting that fateful night at an outdoor café with Amine, her Moroccan husband. When the attackers came, Amine was killed instantly; Maia was stunned by the sudden silence when the firing finally stopped. Then she heard the gasping and wheezing of a young man she did not know. He was leaning on her, squeezing out his last breath. Maia later said that she would never forget him, but also that she would never know his name.

Beyond these stark personal revelations, incomprehension arguably endures on a societal level. In part, this is explained by the subsequent direction of French politics. For sure, there have been further Islamist attacks, yet the full-scale confrontation between France and jihadi, promised by ISIS among others, never materialized. This was partly due to the hard-headed police and military response to potential threats. A much-improved intelligence service doubtless helped too. Among other things, that involved tightening communications with other agencies, especially the Belgians whose laxity had created a security “black hole” exploited by the terrorists.

All this has arguably meant that France has yet to fully reckon with the ideology that underpinned the 2015 attacks — an ideology which, as an article in the ISIS magazine Dabiq paraded in the aftermath, involved sharing photos of semi-naked corpses. Perhaps more telling was the article’s English headline: “Just Terror!” Amid the gloating, this represented a genuinely new slant on terrorist violence. What ISIS announced here was that indiscriminate murder was not merely a weapon of war, but also a perverted form of justice. It represented a shockingly direct challenge to both Western morality and the West’s conception of justice, based as it is on secular and utilitarian principles.

France, for all its secular earnestness, has yet to truly level with this fact. Certainly, political Islam remains a question to which no one has provided an adequate answer. For the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, it’s simply a matter of integrating Islam into a non-sectarian Republican program: an impossibility given Islamist extremists violently oppose the very concept of the Republic. The far-Right, for its part, talks openly of “a war” against “foreign religions”: specifically targeting Islam. But, again, this is mere shadow boxing. Actually tackling France’s internal enemies would, among other things, involve targeting a sophisticated propaganda network and a prison system that fosters the formation of Islamist cells. Stuck in the middle, Macron applies more and more hardline secular principles, even as senior civil servants lately warned of Islamist “entryism” into the French state.

Yet amid these high-flown political tensions, it’s perhaps Paris itself that has most struggled to come to terms with the Bataclan. At the end of the last century, the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo wrote an influential essay called “Paris, Capital of the 21st Century”. Following Walter Benjamin, he argued that Paris could regain its Belle Époque position as “Queen of the World” — by opening itself to outside, non-European cultures. The massacres of 13 November shattered such heady utopianism, revealing the multi-ethnic capital as riven by hatred, especially in its forgotten banlieues where the French-born terrorists lived. This lays bare the identity crisis as the heart of modern France: how a secular, democratic Republic can contain the factions that loathe it.

To be fair, some are still trying to grapple with the attacks. One good example is “Programme 13/11”, an interdisciplinary research program under the auspices of the Sorbonne. Directed by the historian Denis Peschanski, it is gathering first-hand testimony for future generations. Peschanski himself has called the scheme a kind of “living monument” — even as he believes that, somehow, the savagery of the terrorists can be met with the “sciences” of the French academic system.

Perhaps: yet there is scant evidence to show that many radical French Muslims have been “deradicalized” by such initiatives. That’s shadowed by other traumas: a so-called “French Intifada” may not have happened, but the country has continued to be wracked by jihadi terror, from the 2016 Nice truck attack to the 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty. It all points in the same direction: towards a deepening trauma across France’s collective memory.

Yesterday, every Paris resident received a special edition of À Paris, the city’s listings magazine. Inside, Anne Hidalgo addresses her public, proclaiming a message of “liberty and hope”. But as a Parisian myself, I can say that few of us really believe this — the wounds are still too raw.

My earliest memory of Margaret Thatcher, born a century ago today, was not a photograph or footage but graffiti on the side of Brutalist flats. It was painted rather than sprayed, in those days. Ireland being consumed by Great Britain, with the West coast of Scotland morphing into Thatcher’s face as she gnawed on Ulster with crazed eyes like Goya’s Saturn. I was scared shitless at the time but grew used to the image. And as the years passed, I would see her effigy dragged out and immolated in different places that all shared the common denominator of state callousness. Poll Tax riot sites. Post-Hillsborough Liverpool. South Yorkshire pit villages. Virtually anywhere in Scotland or Wales. Even the soundtrack had a sacrificial quality — Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” or Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine”, which earned him a grilling from Special Branch for fear he’d dispatch the Prime Minister with a withering swipe of a flaccid gladioli.

There were any number of reasons for ordinary citizens to loathe Thatcher from the miners to Section 28 to the Belgrano, the third-degree burn catastrophe of deindustrialization and the slow-burn catastrophe of financial deregulation. In Northern Ireland, she somehow eclipsed even the folk memory of the Black and Tans and Cromwell, entering the mythic. Even then, supernatural figures like the banshee, dearg due, the bánánach and the abhartach seemed sympathetic by comparison.

Few would admit it then, or now, in Irish Republican circles, but Thatcher was the demon Sinn Féin needed, and she became one of their greatest benefactors. It had been very difficult, after all, to galvanize total resistance to the securocrats of the previous Labour governments and Ted Heath’s administration. Here was an archetype. In attempting to destroy them, she made them what they are now.

Thatcher’s Northern Irish debut was a horror show. A month before her election victory, her advisor on the province, Airey Neave, was assassinated leaving the House of Commons. Neave had been a war hero, escaping Colditz, personally serving Nuremberg Trial indictments to the likes of Goering, Speer and Hess in their cells, and was known as a force to be reckoned with. The Irish National Liberation Army, a Marxist splinter group and rival of the Irish Republican Army, placed a bomb underneath his driver’s seat with a mercury tilt switch, which activated as he drove his Vauxhall up the exit ramp. As a shot across the bows, it was exceptionally brutal. It would also seem immensely counter-productive if the cause of a United Ireland and/or Civil Rights for Catholics were assumed to be the aims of the Republican movement; but assume, we should not.

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Thatcher entered, with her garlands, into a bloodbath. Republican snipers and land mines had been sapping the morale and increasing the paranoia of the security services in the north. Lord Mountbatten was blown apart on his boat, along with his grandson, a fellow aristocrat and a cabin boy. This was followed by the Narrow Water Massacre, where a passing convoy of the Parachute Regiment (the perpetrators of the Bloody Sunday Massacre of civil rights protestors in Derry) was targeted by a massive roadside bomb. The Provisional IRA responded, by remote control, from across the border, with a double-tap blast, beloved of contemporary geopolitical powers, as a helicopter ferried away the injured. Eighteen soldiers were killed, as well as a civilian when survivors began to fire across the border.

If there were a time when it felt like the IRA would win, this was it. Thatcher felt it too, so she attempted to change the framing of the war into simple criminality and a law-and-order issue. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,” she claimed, “as much as my constituency is”, which given Finchley at the time was not a place where civil rights activists were murdered with impunity or one section of the population had been subject to internment without trial or shoppers had their limbs blown off or daily assassinations were commonplace was a misnomer. Indeed, her insistence on normality just illustrated the abnormality of the place and situation — a colonized foothold of an island-nation effectively ruled over by a rheumatic and bellicose police force and a sash-draped organization that were Cargo Cult British. Northern Ireland, to the British and the southern Irish, was Bedlam.

In reality, the Lady was for turning. Declassified records from 1983 reveal that Thatcher raised the idea of a “tactical withdrawal” to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Jim Prior, and it was only, seemingly, turned down because Prior argued that it would lead to all-out civil war. It is still hard for Unionists and Loyalists to accept such orphan judgments, but equally it is of cold comfort to magical thinking Republicans who are not going to conjure away a million or so Unionists/Loyalists when our day comes. At that point, escalation from an already horrific state of affairs was a likely possibility and the Republic government knew it. Yet it shows how close the IRA came to a United Ireland. At the same time, the high-profile attacks that had raised Republican morale had soured Irish American relations enough for the US to begin to stop the pipeline of support, forcing them to seek assistance from the nefarious enemies of my enemies.

This demonstrates a privately practical Thatcher, as well as the basket case of Northern Ireland. And yet she clung. Perhaps it was Airey Neave or doubts about her role in a world of old boys and hard men. But Thatcher made it personal and ultimately misjudged and lost. Her aim was not peace but unconditional surrender, with a degree of humiliation. For all the inevitable whataboutery, the British state was the only force that could have dialed down, if not turned off the violence, killing the civil rights issue with kindness for example, and yet Thatcher dialed it up.

At the same time, the comment by Sinn Féin’s Danny Morrison that she was “The biggest bastard we have ever known” was canny. There was no love lost, yet there’s a sneaking sense of  “We could do something with this”. Thatcher’s intransigence and militarism would eventually radicalize and galvanize the Irish nationalist community and ultimately spelt the decline of the moderate SDLP. She escalated the prison protests and hunger strikes into a battle of wills, locking horns with Sinn Féin, which made the latter seem totemically powerful to the Catholic community and then, because of the deaths of the hunger strikers, this spread to the international media. It also made the battle a sacred affair, with the saintly starving neo-Catholic martyrs versus the satanic Thatcher. Having made her name as the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter, she was ill-equipped for the irrationalism of Celtic eschatology.

So, Thatcher provided the devil that the faceless bureaucrats of the pre-Thatcher era could not. Her Iron Lady ego forced Northern Ireland out of multiple possible paths and into a binary where the citizenry had to pick for or against. This played into Sinn Féin’s hands, though they would never admit it, and is actually a strategy that the activist Saul Alinsky advocated in Seventies America — find or create a common enemy to centralize and radicalize opposition and push out other more ameliorative or alternative voices. I saw this in Derry where the SDLP, who had bravely had their heads cracked open on civil rights marches for years and largely came from trade union and teaching backgrounds, become overnight, thanks to Thatcher, the Stoop Down Low Party in the eyes of the community.

It all crystallized with the Hunger Strikes. Her insistence that the Troubles was criminal rather than political was self-defeating, inadvertently showing Sinn Féin, via Bobby Sands, the power of the ballot box. Their “Armalite and ballot box” strategy being an evolutionary device. She unintentionally gave them a way forward that has since proved immensely profitable. It was in both directions an exercise in cynicism. Thatcher was onto something when she said: “It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members.” At the same time, her insistence that the “PIRA have put the Catholic Community on the rack” during this time is abject, given everything the British state had put the Catholic community through.

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In hindsight, it seems two factors made armed struggle untenable in the long run. The first, in sort, is the role of MI5 and informers or touts. It is still unclear to what extent Sinn Féin were riddled with double agents, how high it went and how it directed policy in the long term. Thatcher can take some credit for this, if anything positive can be salvaged from it, given she increased the intelligence services’ role in the conflict (their involvement with Loyalist death squads is still a pressing but taboo issue). The second was Ulsterization, initiated not by Thatcher but by earlier governments, who sought to contain the conflict within the borders of Northern Ireland, tacitly believing the population to be expendable and accurately believing the IRA could only really make an impact on the mainland (the high-profile bombing of which — Canary Wharf, for example — ultimately intensified negotiations). Both were incredibly cynical and effective.

Though Thatcher claimed as her mentor the wily Dubliner Edmund Burke, her ego meant she failed to pay heed to his wisdom, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Her opponents suffered from the same hubris as she did, dining out still on how close they came to taking her out in Brighton, endlessly repeating “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always”, a quote that ultimately proved untrue and indulgent. Had they succeeded, there is every chance their actions would have resulted in martial law and more suffering for northern Catholics, along with more bolstering of their positioning. One more boost to the ascendancy of Sinn Féin, perhaps the true aim rather than a United Ireland or civil rights equity.

Today Sinn Féin are adjacent to the blob, and more equivalent to Sturgeon-era SNP — albeit with concrete-filled weapons bunkers and piles of bodies as unavoidable as the Brits’ or the Loyalists’. They talk of a United Ireland, only one under their tutelage and for their benefit. If it happens, and almost a million Unionists will require accommodating, it will, given the dire state of the south and the north, be an unrecognizable Ireland to that which we dreamed and to the one we must start dreaming afresh, with a knowledge of yesterday’s victims and without yesterday’s ghouls. Their day has come, and, like Thatcher’s, it has passed.

The story follows Victor Ward, a vacuous and handsome male model swanning about Nineties Manhattan. Victor’s world revolves around the most inane concerns possible: clubs, paparazzi, celebrities. But soon, weird things start happening. People keep telling Victor they’ve seen him in places he hasn’t been: a hotel in Miami, a Calvin Klein show. Victor is offered an unusual new job: finding a girl he went to college with who has supposedly disappeared in London. He’s booked into a first-class cabin on the QE2, and here the narrative starts to veer sharply from the aimless frivolity of the opening sections.

In London, Victor finds the girl, another model. He falls in with her group of roommates, also all models. Victor is thrilled to be going to such cool parties with such hot people, blinded by their good looks and designer clothes. But it soon turns out these models are terrorists. Their cover is beauty and fame, and their crimes are violent and gruesome. On a party tour of Paris, Victor is blackmailed to stay with the cell, closely controlled by its leader, the supermodel Bobby Hughes, who “had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze”. Under Bobby’s leadership, the group pulls off a series of major attacks all while air-kissing their way around the glitzy Paris fashion world. Everyone is being watched, everything is being filmed, people aren’t who they say they are, and Victor’s reality collapses in on itself, conspiracies layering and deepening.

The actual goals of the model-terrorists are never explained, and they aren’t the point. The spectacle is. The first order of business is aesthetics. During a bombing in Paris, Victor thinks: “It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.”

Yet Victor’s conscience haunts him. He tells Bobby he doesn’t want to be involved, that he’s not political. “Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby tells him. “It’s something you can’t help.” Bobby tells Victor he trusts him precisely because of his shallowness: “Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’.” Stupidity has made Victor vulnerable, and ultimately dangerous. People who are political, who do have an agenda, have taken advantage of Victor because he’s distracted by surface glitz.

There are many more potential Victors out there today. In Glamorama, the allure of beauty stupefies people, turning them into the pawns of those who know how to manipulate it. The same is true on the internet, which has provided an incredibly powerful tool for politicization, even radicalization, cloaked in soft-focus lifestyle content or in quasi-ironic memes. It’s all too easy to be misled by a pretty face — or a fine set of abdominals.

It is now commonplace for dead-serious political ideas, even extreme ones, to filter into the mainstream on the basis of aesthetics alone. The “Trump Gaza” AI video that depicted the territory as a glamorous beach resort, which went viral when the President himself shared it, was meant as “satire” according to its creator. But in Trump’s hands it became a tool to normalize the idea of a full takeover of Gaza. The puerile imagery of belly dancers and golden statues sanitized the sobering reality of what this takeover would mean.

The Right has long understood the importance of looks. Roger Ailes used to evaluate potential Fox News hosts by watching them on mute. Trump’s career can be seen as a large-scale experiment in how far one can get in politics by putting image first. More so than any recent president, Trump has generated an instantly recognizable aesthetic, turning his agenda into an easily consumable visual brand. His movement is adept at using the internet’s visual language to promote his agenda through imagery that elides its gravity — one example is the Studio Ghibli-style AI cartoon of a crying Dominican woman being arrested by ICE, which the White House tweeted this spring. In sneering at his unsubtle tastes for glitz and gold, Trump’s opponents have missed that these tastes are what many Americans find aspirational, even beautiful.

The pull of beauty — of what we most want to look at — has come to determine in many cases which news events capture the public imagination, and which don’t. Aesthetically appealing images get attention, and attention is today’s most valuable asset. Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a particularly cinematic recent example, optimized to go viral. From the first grainy surveillance video, showing a peek of Mangione’s chiseled jawline, the internet was hooked. It’s true that Mangione’s story tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with American healthcare, but I’m not sure he would have become a beloved online figure if he didn’t happen to be good-looking.

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It seems our culture can’t resist a handsome criminal. Jeremy Meeks, the “hot felon” whose mugshot for gun charges went viral in 2014, parlayed his fame into a modeling career after getting out of prison, walking in fashion week shows in Milan and New York. He now has nearly 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Even fictional killers can be influencers these days if they have the look: Ellis’s better-known protagonist, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, has recently inspired a cologne and a namesake Manhattan cocktail bar — on top of a wealth of memes.

While Patrick Bateman channels the nihilism of 4chan, Victor Ward embodies the insidious triviality of TikTok. In Glamorama, Ellis captured the feeling of scrolling through a social media feed long before such a thing existed: a barrage of decontextualized images, a flurry of brands and people and eventually ideologies. If the novel had been written today, Victor’s journey would take place somewhere in the endless scroll.

Just as Victor is sucked into a dark reality through his unquestioning participation in a culture of images, many people nowadays find themselves funneled into various ideological corners by what seems at first to be innocuous content tailored to their interests. Motherhood accounts are full of gauzy day-in-the-life videos that eventually turn out to be promoting free birth or Biblical submission to your husband. Men seeking lifestyle hacks find themselves swept up in the manosphere. People can and do become indoctrinated without realizing it, drawn in by an attractive veneer. “We’ll slide down the surface of things,” Victor often thinks in Glamorama.

The models in Glamorama understand that images define reality, and not the other way around. In a 1999 interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Ellis said he chose the fashion world as the setting for his story because “where would these terrorists want to unleash this conspiracy where no one else would look for it?… They’d do it in a world where image is truth, where surface is truth.” The terrorists operate from within a “beauty culture” that “feasts on insecurity” and “makes us act in ways I don’t think we normally would act”, Ellis said.

Today, beauty culture is even more pervasive than in the Nineties. The question is: how far will we go to keep up with it? “The better you look, the more you see,” is Victor’s catchphrase — and it takes on an increasingly sinister tone as the novel goes on. In Glamorama, beauty is a trap, a smokescreen that dulls our reason. It is a warning for the image-saturated world we live in.

After passing legislation, you then have to apply it. This duty typically falls to beleaguered police services, who are blamed for laws conjured by their thoughtless political masters. Yet, if the issue at hand is Palestine Action’s proscription, after activists vandalised a pair of aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, the Terrorism Act 2000 is about so much more than the politics of Gaza. It speaks, rather, to 25 years of government failure, and how over-powered laws and under-powered cops collide to push Britain towards all-out chaos.

From a personal perspective, I’m sympathetic to banning Palestine Action. Whichever way you split it, breaking into an RAF base and deliberately disabling military aircraft isn’t just criminal damage, it’s a shameless assault on the armed forces. And besides, June’s attack came before the group’s campaign of industrial sabotage on companies it linked to Israeli interests. Reports suggest the total costs here could hit £55 million.

In practice, however, arresting hundreds of would-be “terrorists” is easier said than done. After all, the sentence for the offence detailed in the Terrorism Act is anything from six months to 14 years. It hardly helps that the police are refusing to back down, simply saying offenders will be dealt with. But even the Met, Britain’s biggest police service, will struggle with 500-plus public-order arrests. There simply isn’t the custody space, without creating emergency holding and charging centres anyway. On the other hand, though, not arresting offenders will invite more allegations of two-tier policing, especially when London’s mayor seems dubious about proscribing the group to start with.

The upshot, then, is that the Met will be made to look impotent, and the law an ass. Such a scenario is every radical activist’s dream, and every public order commander’s nightmare. And that’s before you consider the broader problem. State legitimacy bleeds away when it proves unable to uphold the rule of law. That was clear enough when Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads with impunity — but terrorism? With the Westminster system already creaking, it’s easy to see how the Palestine Action debacle could spiral.

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To understand how policymakers could have ended up in this mess, we must first appreciate how the Terrorism Act appeared. Passed by New Labour in its pomp, it offered the UK’s first statutory definition of terrorism, described as “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public… for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. If that sounds flexible, it’s because the Act was intended to be a permanent solution to older ad hoc legislation.

Drafted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the end of the Cold War, legislators identified the old Prevention of Terrorism Act as ripe for replacement. Introduced in 1974, in the aftermath of the IRA’s Birmingham pub bombings, the PTA was annually renewed by Parliament. From its introduction, indeed, it was always known as “temporary provisions”, such was their severity. Fair enough: it permitted the state to detain suspects for up to a week longer than usual before charging them, while also allowing for the proscription of Irish Republican and Loyalist terror groups.

Crucially, the term “terrorism” was never defined in the 1974 Act. At the time, it seemed quite obvious what terrorism was: blowing things up, especially people. That, of course, still left other radical groups, not of the bomb-making variety but still skating the edges of legality. Prior to 2000, the Government again preferred a fairly impromptu approach. Echoing the tactics of communist groups during the Cold War, it tolerated, engaged and influenced fellow travellers while disrupting hardcore activists. This lead investigators, eventually, to genuine terrorist suspects.

The period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was pivotal here — existing laws were piecemeal and besides framed around the sensitivities of Irish terrorism. Especially with the rise of international jihadism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.

The 2000 Act was passed just seven months before 9/11. Since then, it has been continuously amended, introducing new laws responding to the ever-evolving chimera of terrorism. That encompassed everything from banning the glorification of terrorism to creating Prevent, effectively replacing the traditional police monitoring of extremists. And, up to a point, this proliferation makes sense: who, in the naive digital world of 2000, could have predicted the vicious intersectional politics of today?

All the while, the thrust of the Blairite legal revolution was distinctly European, favoring statute over common law. Slowly but surely, with its focus on procedural fairness and (ironically) human rights, the law shaped the police response to terrorism and extremism. Many of the practices resulting from this approach, from Control Orders to Prevent, have subsequently been found wanting. Extremism as a shared social problem, rather than one of law enforcement, saw the police withdraw from swathes of counter-extremism: the sort that often presages actual terrorism.

No wonder, then, that the Terrorism Act 2000 is today the legislative equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, applied to a dizzying range of social and technological problems. Deployed on the margins of extremism, it targets those shadowy slices of the Venn Diagram where radical politics, criminality and disorder all intersect. Indeed, had the often-violent Animal Liberation Front (ALF) not lost momentum by the late 2000s, it would almost certainly have been proscribed.

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Why, then, wasn’t Palestine Action banned sooner, especially when the list of proscribed organizations reveals any number of neo-Nazi grouplets which exist mainly on the internet? Whitehall’s slowness here arguably hints at another issue: Labour’s confusion over Palestine. The party’s Left flank, especially in seats with significant Muslim communities, is under siege by “Gaza Independents”. Its grassroots are instinctively sympathetic to Palestine too. The party’s Right flank, however, is painfully aware of its funny bone around extremism: hard on what it considers the “populist” Right, but fuzzy around progressive protests over environmental issues, trans rights and Palestine. As and when a radical anti-immigration group appears, I predict it will receive harsher treatment.

This will simply accelerate our seemingly unstoppable cycle of discontent, one in which the Government finds itself increasingly trapped. It isn’t often I feel sorry for Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper — but on this issue they’ve tied themselves into something of a Gordian knot. Arguably, they would have best been served by tackling Palestine Action as the Blair-era authorities dealt with the Animal Liberation Front. But that would have involved intrusive intelligence-gathering and Cold War infiltration. Instead, and especially given policing’s retreat from the wider field of extremism, anti-terrorism legislation is all that’s left. As the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Today, the police face 500 potential nails, from retired clergymen and elderly librarians to bright-eyed students, marching on the side of the angels. I’m not sure this was the intention of the Terrorism Act’s centrist architects, during those long-lost Blairite days. But policymakers’ errors are bread and butter for riot cops. And, if the proscription of Palestine Action tells us anything, it’s that our strange new world, one of endless, inchoate rage, defies containment by conventional politics. Only totalitarian regimes try to arrest their way out of social atomisation and dissent, and even if our Government wanted to try this, it’s unlikely to succeed. Yes, Whitehall needs hammers — but also other, subtler tools.

That said, recognition by Britain and France, which last week announced a similar if unconditional plan, means more than recognition by Brazil or even China. Come September’s UN General Assembly, and assuming that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t execute an implausible U-turn and embrace the two-state solution that he has rejected for years, two G7 members, among them the US’s closest ally, will have shoved Israel further towards pariah status. America is the only outside party able to influence Israeli policy in any meaningful way, and of US pressure there is little sign.

If Britain’s faltering journey towards recognition seems unlikely to alleviate the agony of Gaza’s civilians, Starmer’s announcement at least acknowledges the deeper, broader forces that have been unleashed by Israel’s actions since the October 7 attacks. Indeed, the agony of Gaza today may one day seem trivial compared to the slower but incomparably more destructive disorder that threatens the Middle East in years to come.

Few scholars have greater awareness of these forces than Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the LSE and a renowned expert on the Middle East. The Lebanese-American is usually a jovial, ebullient person but when we met shortly before the British announcement his smile was full of pain.

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“I can see no obvious way out of the disaster that is heading for the Middle East,” he told me. “Egypt is waiting to implode and Jordan faces severe challenges.” The reason is the wave of popular hatred that has built up against Israel and threatens to overwhelm Arab regimes that are linked to the Jewish state through peace treaties or, in the case of Jordan, because they harbor millions of displaced Palestinians. “Of course, the ultimate casualty will be Israel itself,” Gerges concluded. “Living by the sword, Israel has turned itself into a fortress and history tells us that fortresses fall.”

Gerges isn’t alone. I also spoke to a senior Saudi official and confidant of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and effective ruler. Before October 7, Saudi Arabia had been expected to join the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020. The prospect of Saudi adherence is distant now.

“Middle Eastern stability depends on the Gulf economies,” the official told me, “and we cannot prosper without peace. Sure, we can cope with a war in Yemen and a not-so-stable Iraq, but if Jordan and Egypt explode, the danger for us will be acute. Different groups will vie for control of our holy places, Mecca and Medina. And it won’t be like the Mamluk Empire in medieval times, with a single regime exercising hegemony over the whole region, but chaos and a free-for-all.”

A doomsday scenario may be sketched out as follows: recognition of a Palestinian state being dead on arrival, the Palestinians continue to be persecuted not only in Gaza but also the West Bank and Israel proper, while Israel engorges itself on militarism and nationalism that drive out the last vestiges of compassion and good sense. The Arab states, for their part, captured by groups that apply themselves to Israel’s destruction, in cahoots with a rejuvenated Islamic Republic of Iran and cheered on by antisemites in the West, are unable to provide basic services to their people. More and more brown people come out of the region and into the lands of white people who don’t want them. Pretty, isn’t it?

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Starmer’s posturing is a gift to Hamas

By Giles Fraser

Nor does any part of this scenario require the various parties to do anything but continue down the path they are already on. Earlier this year, for instance, Donald Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza and “resettle” its population of some two million people in neighboring Arab countries. According to a recent poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University, 82% of Israelis support the expulsion of Gaza’s residents, while 56% favor expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. (Back in 2003 the figures were 45% and 31% respectively.) On Tuesday, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, referred to Gaza as “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel”, also predicting that the West Bank, currently partly governed by the Palestinian Authority, would come under Israeli sovereignty.

The problem for Israeli supremacists is that the Palestinians won’t disappear. They are too numerous to exterminate, and their Arab neighbors have said they won’t take them in, ostensibly for reasons of solidarity but in reality for fear of destabilizing their own fragile societies. The last thing Egypt’s current strongman, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, wants is an influx of Gazans clamoring for jobs, houses and a political voice — Jordan, whose indigenous population complains of being swamped by their Palestinian guests, being the example to avoid. Finally, the Palestinians possess a keen appreciation of the deadly intentions of their adversary and something approaching a relish for the fight to thwart them.

This is crucial; as a historian I have come across numerous communities that have lacked such attributes and disappeared as a result. The Jews of Lisbon, for instance, having converted to Catholicism, in most cases expediently, suffered a hideous massacre in 1506 before being driven into exile by the Inquisition. Or take the Armenians of what is now eastern Turkey, denigrated as fifth columnists by the Ottoman government during the First World War. In their villages of mud and straw in the valleys of the Anatolian plateau, they waited docilely to be sent on death marches that killed over a million. And, of course, there is the Holocaust itself, that supreme example of a nation unprepared for the fate in store for it — and for which unpreparedness Israel is the living, breathing refutation.

To cite a contemporary case, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which took up arms against the mighty Turkish state in 1984, avoided extirpation for all of 41 years in part by refusing to lay them down again. The PKK’s recent pledge to disarm, in return for integration into Turkish political life, would put the destiny of the Kurds in the hands of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He is one of the world’s least trustworthy politicians and the PKK’s decision may prove unwise.

A movement of national liberation, rather than the bunch of jihadis Netanyahu depicts it as, Hamas has said that it will disarm once Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders — which, given the political impossibility of that happening, means never. Besides, why would Hamas give up the main weapon it has against a much more powerful enemy: the ability to strike asymmetrically, causing maximum horror and distress?

Hamas has lost support among ordinary Gazans: not because of popular revulsion at the October 7 attacks, widely regarded as nothing less than the Zionists deserved, but because of its callousness towards its own people’s suffering and its intransigence in negotiations with Israel. Yet, Hamas is wildly popular in the West Bank, and indeed elsewhere in the Arab world. Israel itself believes that terrorist networks are replacing dead Hamas fighters at a rate of five to one. “60% of Hamas fighters are the sons of martyrs,” I was told by Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford and a prominent Israeli critic of his homeland. “The easiest thing for Hamas is to recruit more fighters to replace the ones it has lost.”

As the saying goes, victory is survival for a guerrilla army. Anyone with a smartphone can watch films showing plucky Hamas warriors clambering onto Israeli armored vehicles and taking them out using explosive devices recycled from captured ordinance and finessed on the kitchen table, before, presumably, the inevitable retaliatory execution by an Israeli drone. You don’t need to kill many Israeli soldiers to show your staying power, or to convince Israeli reservists of the advisability of dodging the draft — not that Netanyahu’s government is releasing figures on those who fail to present themselves.

No wonder the other Arab nations are so jittery. In Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, trounced pro-government parties in elections last September. In Egypt, the authorities announced earlier this month that they had thwarted terrorist attacks targeting prominent figures, apparently planned by the armed wing of the Brotherhood. Recall, too, that it was a Brotherhood government that al-Sisi toppled to seize power in 2013, and whose former cadres smolder in the prison cells of Egypt’s police state. Not that the effects of Gaza will be confined to the Middle East or the Muslim world. According to a British security source, quoted by Reuters, the Gaza war is “likely to become the biggest recruiter for Islamist militants since [the Iraq invasion of] 2003”.

In the words of the Saudi official I spoke to, the Trump administration needs to take a long view that considers the law of cause and effect. Trump’s promise to settle the Gazans “in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” proclaims his ignorance of this law. The want of long-term, morally coherent thinking among the political class is marginally less glaring in Britain than it is in Israel and the US. And, if the belated and conditional recognition of Palestine remains strategically open to doubt, Starmer’s government has at least won Trump’s trust. It must now team up with the Arab nations and focus America’s attention on preventing today’s Gazan catastrophe from becoming something worse.

In its report on the 2024 summer riots, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary quizzed senior officers on their intelligence strategy. As shops were looted and cops dodged bricks, they confessed to “writing the manual as it happened”. This is new. Historically speaking, British police were masters at investigating domestic extremism, something they achieved by asking three fairly straightforward questions. What is the issue motivating a protest group? How likely is there to be wider support for that issue? Who are the agitators seeking to weaponize the issue?

It’s an approach that worked well in the past. Public order and counter-extremism intelligence helped police environmental and animal rights extremism in the Nineties and early 2000s. It pinpointed potential IRA sympathizers inside radical Leftist organizations. Later, investigators established links between criminal groups and extremism, encompassing everything from football hooligans and the far-Right to urban street gangs and Islamists.

I witnessed these successes myself. Monitoring Belfast flights from Heathrow in the mid-Nineties, I remember stopping a nervous-looking man from Andersonstown in west Belfast. I telephoned the RUC. “Ah, that fella? He did six years in the Maze for firearms,” said the Special Branch officer down the line, who knew which pubs he drank in, the school he attended and the registration number of his car. “He’s also got size 11 feet,” he added.

To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider the example of “Stand Up to Racism” (SUTR), the most prolific pro-migrant organization in Epping and elsewhere. However harmless its middle-class activists may seem, the group is closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party, itself a sect of avowed revolutionary Trotskyists. That, in theory, should mean the activist’s motives should be suspect — Trotskyists, after all, are committed to undermining oppressive state organs, using any cause du jour as their weapon.

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The invasion of the phone snatchers

By Dominic Adler

These days, unfortunately, representatives of activist groups are virtual police consultants. For example, His Majesty’s Inspectorate included analysis by the controversial group Hope Not Hate in its post-Southport report. More cynical officers see such relationships as anti-officer Trojan Horses, welcomed through the gates by spineless senior officers. The firebrand activist Lee Jasper, for instance, was once famously made a policing adviser by Ken Livingstone. I remember officers joking how inviting him inside Scotland Yard was akin to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

That institutional closeness, in turn, eventually created a ghost in the machine, one which has calcified into allegations of two-tier policing. Certainly, Reform activists are unlikely to be invited into any independent advisory groups. In my experience, ambitious senior officers are more likely to listen to the advice of media-savvy and politically connected advisers than their own officers.

Ideology, then, is clearly an important factor here — yet it’s far from the only issue. After all, the initial retreat from domestic intelligence-gathering was driven by circumstance. From 9/11, officers focused almost exclusively on jihadism. Then, when budgets were squeezed post-2008, police began culling their public order intelligence units, preferring to monitor social media instead.

Yet as the kids-glove approach to groups like the SUTR implies, it’s hard here not to return to the question of ideology. “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together,” proclaimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, when I was a Special Branch officer at the time of the 7/7 bombings. Yes, we raised our eyebrows too. Nonetheless, Paddick’s words were consistent with the establishment narrative around the sanctity of British multiculturalism. A decade or so later, London’s mayor famously suggested terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a global city. This gaslighting spawned a counter-narrative: one of two-tier policing.

This, it goes without saying, augurs badly for British police forces, which now answer to a political class openly sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning radical activism. It hardly helps, of course, that shorn of its long heritage of investigating domestic extremism, officers are increasingly taking a more broad-brushed approach, with forces seduced by the technological panopticon of social media aggregation and sentiment monitoring. Rather than expensively and intrusively snooping on the hardcore minority seeking to ferment unrest, they’ve decided it’s somehow fairer to monitor everyone.

And so the securocracy creates new definitions of extremism, such as “cultural nationalism“, or incels, or the other phantoms haunting Whitehall’s imagination. This, of course, ignores the more compelling issues, the ones politicians find intractable. Ethnic tension. Direct action. Sabotage. An era of harassment and violence, segueing into terrorism, all occurring during a time of technological plenty, one where would-be urban guerillas have cheap access to drones, encrypted communications and AI.

What’s clear, then, is that police chiefs must urgently reconfigure their national intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley himself lately acknowledged. Nor do we even need to grasp back into the depths of time here. Before the Metropolitan Police disbanded its Special Branch, in 2006, there were detectives who specialized in monitoring extremists within London’s diaspora communities. They excelled at the painstaking work of cultivating and maintaining discreet relationships with religious and political leaders. Situations were diffused. Disorder was averted. Ringleaders were identified. And cards, to put it bluntly, were marked.

Now, Britain’s non-existent borders means new arrivals import a smorgasbord of causes, disputes and feuds. That’s even as police intelligence-gathering activity — especially surveillance and recruiting informants — often invites allegations of bullying and racism. I remember when Left-wing groups, sometimes endorsed by radical MPs, supported militants like the IRA and the Kurdish PKK, and were bitterly opposed to police monitoring their activities. A more recent example would be the furore created when UK BLM supporters were approached to offer confidential information on protest activity after George Floyd’s murder.

Senior officers, understanding the nature of the beast, carried on regardless. The uncomfortable truth is that beating domestic extremism means monitoring radical activism — but not necessarily criminal activity. Such grey zones are the terrain in which extremists hide. In the late Nineties, far-Right nail bomber David Copeland passed through the radical, but not illegal, British National Party. The comparison is far from perfect, of course, but a more contemporary example might be activists vicariously linked to the newly proscribed Palestine Action. This would identify thousands of people sympathetic to “the cause” involved in entirely lawful organizations, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible) to track them all.

Understanding the law is important here too. In the dry language of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, police must be mindful of intelligence-gathering for reasons of “collateral intrusion”. This is partly why senior officers became overreliant on open-source social media monitoring: surveilling the public online is less politically risky and resource-intensive than focusing on the hardcore. That surely explains why police are wrong-footed when activists on e-scooters cause havoc inside critical military facilities. As social unrest increases, anyway, lawmakers should accept unlawful political action has always rubbed shoulders, albeit uneasily, with lawful activism, from the Suffragettes to Irish Republicanism.

And though such intensive surveillance is obviously expensive, it’s arguably still cheaper than the alternative. After all, public order policing is eye-wateringly expensive. Between October 2023 and February 2025, policing pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London has cost the Met over £53 million. How much would a rolling campaign of public disorder cost? Imagine disturbances occurring — everywhere, constantly. Apart from being tragic on its own terms, this normalization of political violence would quickly bankrupt the state.

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The Ulsterisation of English politics

By Aris Roussinos

For the police, one answer to this dilemma is reassuringly simple: local policing, the alleged core principle of British law enforcement. Beat cops are an essential part of the police’s early warning system, especially now forces find themselves with a newly radicalized, racially aware faction to consider: disaffected and underprivileged white communities. That’s especially true when they lack the religious links and clan networks found elsewhere in Britain; in places like Epping, protests are generally spontaneous and “leaderless”. Yet as they say in Belfast, nobody hears “the dogs on the street” bark as quickly as a switched-on copper.

What’s clear now is that a new approach is urgently required, one where gauging potential disorder is routine. Again, Northern Ireland hoves into view. During the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary embedded local special branch teams into police stations, purely to identify subjects of interest. Was the tactic controversial and bitterly contested? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.

Not that this is just a question of institutional change. If they were cannier, senior police officers might recognize how the system is rigged against them. They might also be less inclined to tip-toe around the elite’s luxury beliefs. After all, they remain constables, swearing an oath to keep the peace without “fear or favor”. And, if the current crop of chief officers, Linkedin technocrats with warrant cards, aren’t up to the challenge? Sack them. Keep indulging failure, though, and the uniforms on our streets might eventually be less hi-viz yellow and more camouflage and khaki.

Who is and isn’t a terrorist isn’t always clear. The Nazis regarded the French Resistance as a terrorist organization, but the British begged to differ. Was the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa a bunch of terrorists or freedom-fighters? Terrorism, according to the OED, must be “unauthorized”, but it’s not clear who might legitimately authorize it. “The state” is the usual answer to the question of who has the sole right to inflict violence, but many a government, from imperial Rome to the modern United States, has engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians, which sounds pretty much like the use of terror. Were the bombing of Dresden and Coventry during the Second World War acts of terrorism, or simply the inevitable consequences of war? Yet being at war is no defense against committing abominations. On the contrary, it’s when you’re most likely to perpetrate them.

Not all unofficial or unauthorized violence is to be condemned. What if a crazed gunman breaks into a school classroom and prepares to pick off the children one by one, while you are standing behind him with a revolver in your hand? Not many people would argue that you shouldn’t shoot him in the back, and certainly not because you’re not “authorized” to do so. There just wouldn’t be time to get the Met Police or the Ministry of Defense on the phone. I say “not many” people would be against killing the gunman because some pacifists would refuse to do so on the grounds that the use of violence is absolutely wrong. Leo Tolstoy was one of them. (“Absolute” here, by the way, needn’t mean “very very wrong”, just wrong despite any set of circumstances you might think up to try and justify it.)

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Is Nigel Farage a man of the people?

By Terry Eagleton

The only problem with this kind of pacifism is what you say to the bereaved parents at the next meeting of the PTA. Not trying to kill the gunman is obviously a mistake, which is to say that literal pacifism is untenable. There are situations in which killing someone isn’t only permissible but obligatory. Not shooting the mad gunman would be immoral. But these situations are mercifully rare. Moreover, they almost all concern the right to self-defense against an act of unjust aggression. What you can’t do is commit an act of unjust aggression while claiming that it’s in self-defense, as the Israelis are currently doing in Gaza. Violence used in self-defense must be proportionate. You can shoot the crazed gunman in the back, but you can’t roast him slowly over a fire. You can take out Hamas operatives known to be intent on murder, but you can’t turn their country into a wasteland in order to do so. Besides, the gunman in the school is guilty, which is a judgment on the act he’s about to perform rather than on his moral character, whereas the vast majority of those slaughtered in Gaza are innocent. This, once again, isn’t a judgment on their moral character but on what they do (or in this case don’t do, i.e. murder people as members or supporters of Hamas).

Terrorism, however, is supposed to be for a political purpose, which isn’t the case with the crazed gunman. Think, however, of someone intent on assassinating a president (let’s not make it Trump) when you’re the only person who can stop him with a well-aimed bullet. Some pacifists claim that in this situation they would shoot for the legs but not the head. They aren’t absolutely opposed to injuring people, just to taking their lives. This isn’t a pedantic distinction, since there’s quite a difference between being crippled and being turned into a corpse. But what if the head is the only bit of the assassin you can get in focus? In this case you can kill justly for a political end — but if you’re an ordinary citizen, the act isn’t either authorized or official.

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We have forgotten the lessons of 7/7

By Brad Evans

So the dictionary definition of terrorism is fairly incoherent. An act of violence can be legitimate without being part of your professional duty or endorsed by the state. Or it can be ordered by the state but be in every other respect indistinguishable from terrorism. In any case, it isn’t always easy to distinguish political motives from more personal ones. A disaffected youth from an ethnic minority may kill in the name of a warped version of Islam, but also because he feels alienated and aggrieved. Or you may kill someone simply for the hell of it, like the Moors murderers in the Sixties. There’s a vein of anarchist thought in 19th-century Europe which believes in destruction for the sake of it. If you can bring nothingness into being with the flick of a finger, then your powers must surely rival those of the God who created the world. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, as every child with a balloon in its hands is aware.

The present Home Secretary appears somewhat insensitive to these distinctions, having recently placed spraying paint on aircraft in the same category as burning people alive. One consequence of this absurdity is that it devalues the significance of burning people alive. But then terrorism has always been too easily expanded a concept. It has its origin in the French Revolution, the event which gives birth to the modern era, and more precisely in the so-called Reign of Terror to which it gave rise. Terror becomes for the first time a specific form of politics, as though it was an alternative to neoliberalism or social democracy. It also begins life as a state-sponsored programme, not as a strike against the state. The way to govern is to scare one’s citizenry almost to death all of the time, as opposed to boring them to death all the time like the present prime minister. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that some of those who emphasize the cruelty and bloodlust of this episode seem rather less outraged by the French state’s suppression of the Left-wing Paris Commune eighty or so years later, which resulted in the slaughter and imprisonment of far more people than died at the hands of the Jacobins. The Commune, the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked, was crushed by massacres of Parisians on a scale which would normally have been inconceivable in civilized 19th-century states.

There’s a case for arguing that the idea of terrorism was invented as a kind of joke. The Revolution was an age of –isms, and the word “terrorism” can be seen, somewhat fancifully, as a satirical smack at this use of language, indicating a bankrupt philosophy which consists of nothing more than spilling guts and hacking off heads. In a darkly ironic gesture, “terrorism” raises these depraved acts to the bogus dignity of a political theory. It’s no longer a question of using violence to enforce your kind of politics. Instead, violence is a kind of politics — a politics beyond politics, in the same way that some avant-garde art represents an art beyond art. Rather than persuading people to act in a certain way, you prevent them from acting in any way at all. The distinction between war and peace can no longer be sustained. From the terrorist’s viewpoint, the social order is itself a form of violence, so placing a bomb in a crowded café is just a more spectacular version of what goes on all the time.

Alternatively, of course, you can wrap the bomb around your body and combine murder with suicide. Suicide bombers usually see themselves as the humble instruments of a noble cause, but this contradicts the fact that the act of suicide is one of supreme self-sovereignty. A character in Dostoevsky remarks that in taking your own life you become for a moment divine, since you exercise the kind of dominion that is supposed to be reserved for God. It is the ultimate state of autonomy, even if it lasts no more than a few seconds. Behind this autonomy lies a vital notion in the Western philosophical tradition, namely the idea of self-ownership. My body belongs to me rather as a piece of property does, and as with a piece of property I can dispose of it as I wish. It’s true that I can’t leave my body in a pub as I can my umbrella, and it’s not clear what it is apart from inside my body which is doing the owning; but this dream of self-possession has been a potent force in European bourgeois thought. I can own my body pretty much as I can own the bodies of others, traditionally known as slaves; and just as I am free to kill them, so I am free to kill myself. In fact, doing so is the ultimate act of freedom. One response to this lethal way of seeing is to argue that we belong not to ourselves but to each other, which sets certain constraints on what we can do with our bodies. It’s important to point out, however, that the last thing people desperate enough to kill themselves usually have in mind is the doctrine of self-ownership.

The problem with violence is that it was there at the beginning, which is one reason why it’s so deep-seated. In order to create a civilization you have to dominate your environment, and that dominion doesn’t just go away once a civilized society is up and running. Instead, it is “sublimated” (in Freud’s term) to a higher end. This is known as the political state, which has a monopoly on the use of force. It turns that force outward against its enemies, as well as inward against its various domestic adversaries. But this means that violence is built into civilization, and is not just a regrettable aberration. That is at the heart of the social order which is profoundly at odds with it. And if that isn’t a gloomy enough reflection, there are also those who feel that they are unrepresented by that order, and that they can only draw attention to their plight by blowing other people to bits.

This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

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Is Britain heading for civil war?

By Brad Evans

Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

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A new blasphemy battle is coming

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Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

That attack stands out as among the most brutal of the 2010s, a decade which saw Isis reach the height of its powers, and in which terrorism came to seem routine, inevitable and all the more horrifying for it. The perpetrator of that era was reliably one of two archetypes: an Isis jihadist or a white supremacist. The immediate context of London Bridge shows this: less than two weeks before the massacre, 22 people had died in an attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, stuffed to the gills with excited little girls. Two weeks after it, a far-Right extremist would ram Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park, killing one. Other attacks that year took place in Westminster, Stockholm, Barcelona and St Petersburg.

My generation — toddlers during 9/11, and tweens as the horrors of the 2010s filled the news, in which we were just beginning to take an interest — was raised in ambient terror. I was 12 when Anders Breivik slaughtered scores of teens on Utoya Island; I remember pictures of him on the TV, dressed as a police officer, picking his way calmly over rocks in the stream with his rifle. He was given free rein of the Norwegian Labour Party summer camp for 90 minutes before police could reach him; by the time they did, he had killed nearly 70. In him a horror-movie figure, the dead-eyed man in the woods, was made flesh; my sister and I watched the news in silence, realizing that in the real world, nowhere was safe.

The psychic residue of the low-level dread these attacks instilled has persisted into this decade; the acceptance that a joyful day out can turn, within seconds, into a nightmare, is reflected in the paranoia of crowds in present-day Britain. A video posted shortly after the recent Liverpool car ramming showed a small group of friends leaving Water Street just before the incident unfolded; “we’re leaving because I have a gut feeling”, one told the camera. He had seen snipers, he said, and felt “something’s gonna kick off, like a terrorist attack or something”. Similar stories of foresight haunt all attacks; Xavier Thomas’s fiancée told reporters in 2017 that she had had “premonitions” the day before the London Bridge killings, and that on the bridge itself she had felt something was “not normal”.

Without passing judgment on the coincidental nature of these feelings, it is telling that the apparent ability to foretell doom in this way, like a preapocalyptic seer, has returned in an age of secular rationalism. Because of the continuous uncertainty of the era of Isis attacks, the public is now primed with jumpy superstition. Social media, too, is whipped into delirium as soon as the first details of any apparent attack emerge; immediate speculation about race, asylum status and motive speaks to the desire to sort attackers into familiar categories, to know your enemy. The 2010s made us not only superstitious but less trusting, drawing out the bloodhound hatred of the other from darker periods in British history.

Looking back at the 2010s, it strikes me that those attacks marked a rare moment of the best and worst of Western societies colliding; on the one hand there are the attackers, fanatical, furious, broken outcasts, and on the other there are the victims, random bands of normal people often united merely by the desire for a nice day out. Among them would have been all sorts: good people and bad people, angry drunks and talented tennis players, bricklayers and bus drivers and management consultants — but no matter; terror attacks have a habit of flattening a scene, so that to read about it the next morning is to imagine a cataclysm happening to people as generic and benevolent as the cartoon crowds in Lowry’s Fairground at Daisy Nook.

One of the most unexpectedly frightening things about these acts of public murder is that when you imagine being caught up in one, as children of the 2010s constantly did, you perceive yourself being flattened in this way too, reduced to a smiling headshot taken from your uncle’s Facebook page and placed on a gallery spread with a single-line caption. Not only is your life taken away, but the story of your life is never your own; you become, simply, a totem of “us” violated by a despicable, remote, alien “them”.

Since Covid, terror attacks have shifted in form and geography. Islamism has not gone away, but the regularity of Isis “claiming responsibility” for graduates of jihad training camps has waned in favor of lone wolves radicalized online. Often, the motivations of recent attackers have been confused, fragmented, unanchored from specific political objectives and moored more generally to a creed of hate. Brick dust from different ideological monoliths has come to coat dark internet forums; what results is a chaotic bricolage of extremism, the purpose of which is to prop up the personal mythology of a violent loser, rather than that loser having been recruited to an established cause.

Manifestos reflect this shift. The venomous specificity of manifestos like the Unabomber’s or even Breivik’s 1,500-page Islamophobic tract has been replaced by muddled, vengeful wailing akin to an online rant, like the manifesto left behind by the Palm Springs IVF clinic bombing suspect. Meanwhile the motivations of perpetrators are getting weirder, with niche, internet-issued dogmas such as promortalism, 5G conspiracies and even “ecofascism” increasingly peppering suspect profiles. Government agencies began using “mixed, unstable or unclear” as a category of concern in the late 2010s, with the Home Office Channel programme finding in 2023 that it constituted a vast 37% of referrals, compared to 19% for extreme Right-wing and 11% for Islamism.

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The figure of the Islamist or white supremacist, so totemic in the 2010s, is not gone — the Isis-inspired rampage in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve shows us as much — but he (and it is almost always he) is now flanked by forum-haunting fundamentalists motivated more by personal grievances than the intoxicating heft of traditional fascism or jihad. The terrorist of 2025 is less likely to be a foot soldier — instead he is a main character; he is not redeeming the world from deviance, but lashing out at it for rejecting him. This makes him harder to spot, his movements trickier to predict; it also makes his fury more difficult to douse with the deradicalization initiatives of the 2010s, which knew to home in on acolytes of Anjem Choudary or Tommy Robinson for seams of extremism.

Terror in the 2020s is lonelier, murkier, stranger. And so while the legacy of the 2010s is ambient, grinding dread, the source of that dread has become dispersed, undetectable. One consequence is that this leaves us unprepared for the new face of terror; where we once watched for Islamist cells we should now also expect new heads of the hydra. As I write, Liverpool reels from a ramming incident; so too does Leicester. In Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian national, illegally in the US, is suspected of firebombing people demonstrating on behalf of Israeli hostages. For my generation, these stories are met with a sense of weary inevitability; for our parents, there must be a parallel in the constant vigilance of the Seventies and Eighties over Provisional IRA bombs.

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The failures of Prevent — to which, let’s not forget, Axel Rudakubana was referred three times — do not show us the futility of such programs so much as their toothlessness in the face of more nebulous forms of extremism (his case was closed as no “fixed ideology or motivation” was found). Those susceptible to radicalization or violent breakdowns will always mill about in our societies; a responsible culture is one which denies them access to content on the internet which will push them over the edge, stops them buying knives and guns, and is quick to stopper the pipelines of hatred which run from social outcast to woman-hater to murderer, from devout to extremist to killer.

Eight years after the London Bridge attack, Britain is still on a hair-trigger; the fundamental objective of terrorism, to create fear, is being met. Each time an attack happens, agencies and government departments own “failings” and promise to learn from them; costly inquiries stretch into years, inquests reveal minute-by-minute the events which, we tell ourselves, must “never happen again”. But can we really say those horror-filled final moments of the eight victims of June 3, 2017 won’t be repeated? Being on the back foot, as we always seem to be, is something we can all sorely afford.

I was here to hunt down one particular life: John Barnard Jenkins. “I think he works down Blackwood,” said one man, referring to a neighboring town. One woman was sure Jenkins lived at the far end of the village. A group of teenagers shouted “cachau bant!” when I asked them. I’ll leave you to translate. Most people had never heard of him. The fact is that John Barnard Jenkins died in 2020, aged 87, in Wrexham. But he grew up in Penybryn, where he moved with his family aged seven during the Second World War. It was a comfortable and “an idyllic childhood” he later wrote, with his “modern” home complete with back garden and indoor toilet.

That life would soon transform into something less savory. During his teenage years, Jenkins began reading books on Welsh history, concluding that his nation had been “downtrodden”. Within a few decades, he would become for a brief period the UK’s most wanted and well-organized terrorist, as leader of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (Movement for the Defence of Wales). The flooding of Tryweryn Valley in 1965, to make way for a private reservoir in Liverpool, and the Aberfan disaster a year later both pushed him into action. In 1969, when the then Prince Charles came to Wales for his investiture, Jenkins tried to kill him with a homemade bomb.

As I discovered at Penybryn, all that is ancient history now, as is the fervency with which nationalist sentiment exploded in Wales in the last century. You won’t find many people willing to kill for Cymru today. But you will find a growing nationalism which is finding ever-greater resonance among young Welshmen and women. Together with a rise of Welsh political identity, it could yet burst out from behind the Severn and leave Westminster reeling.

Nationalism always begins with history. But before 2022, Welsh history wasn’t a mandatory subject in the nation’s schools. Instead, students learned about King Charles I and the Battle of Hastings, of The Canterbury Tales and Henry VIII (with only a murmur of his Welsh heritage). Many here say that’s a legacy of English colonialism, deployed to prevent the formation of Welsh identity outside the community. To explain what they mean, some mention the so-called “Welsh Not”. The wooden tokens hung around the necks of students who dared speak their native tongue in class remained common into the 20th century.

Today, generations of Welsh men and women have been left bereft of any stories onto which they can fix themselves. In the south of the country, especially, the most discerning embodiment of Welshness I found was rooted in the fact that people weren’t English. But now, social media is changing that. There has been an explosion of accounts promoting the splendors of Welsh culture: Roseanne Garcia explores the country’s natural hidden beauty; Doctor Cymraeg details the origins of the Welsh language; Diwydiant Bythynnod reimagines ancient Welsh tales through stunning paintings.

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Samuel Talbot, the 27-year-old creator of TheSilureAdventurer (“Silure” refers to an ancient Welsh tribe), only got thinking about the past after his teacher told him that Welsh and English history were identical. “I remember thinking: I don’t like that,” he tells me. Talbot combines photographs of natural and historic sites with myths, legends, and folklore to create a digital window into Wales’s forgotten past, emphasizing that his is indeed a country with its own identity.

“Wales is the forgotten nation of the British Isles,” Talbot says, his voice so urgent you feel his life depends on it. He speaks in sharp, fierce bursts. “We’ve been persecuted for the longest, but we’ve the widest history. I want to honor our people, the heroes in our history that people don’t know about. I want to change our country’s course.”

Much of what Talbot talks about happened centuries ago, but he’s not alone in looking back. Many here remember fondly Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native prince of an independent Wales. Drive through many parts of Wales, meanwhile, and you’ll increasingly see the red and yellow coat of arms of Owain Glyndŵr’s, the 14th-century Welsh nobleman who defied English rule. Michael Sheen, for his part, will play Glyndŵr in the Welsh National Theatre’s first production in 2026, while the medieval soldier regularly comes out second only to Aneurin Bevan in polls on Wales’s national heroes.

Some suggest the long march of devolution has triggered this increased fervor about identity, and with it a meditation on the past. Others look to an awakening in pride through sport, particularly after Wales’s outsized performance at the 2016 European Football Championship, when The Dragons reached the semi-finals. Adam Price, the former leader of Plaid Cymru, believes this sense of feeling is bound in Wales’s tradition of storytelling. “These figures,” he says, “give people a way to make sense and meaning of their present-day situation.”

Yet whatever the truth, it’s also clear that, amid the romantic wallowing, social media allows an increasing number of Welshmen and women to see their history in far starker hues. Dale Hughes runs the King_chrxn Instagram page, which has almost 20,000 followers. The 29-year-old’s feed is mired in disgust at the nation’s recent past. From Tryweryn to Aberfan, Hughes creates close-to-the-bone videos of the events combined with unsettling archive footage. The strategy’s clearly popular. One look at King_chrxn’s comment section finds a deluge of supportive messages.

Hughes doesn’t speak Welsh, like 74% of people in Wales. Yet, like Talbot, he feels an urgency in spreading Wales’s history to the masses. “Before I knew it, I’d fallen into a rabbit hole,” he says, after learning about Tryweryn. “I couldn’t believe what I hadn’t been taught about. I just thought: how has this been hidden from us?” He’s not alone: Hughes receives messages every day from people furious with what they call “Westminster colonialism”. To his delight, he also says his videos have inspired many to take direct action in their own ways. “People send me photos of their nationalist graffiti all the time. Whereas before they would write, ‘David sucks dick’, now there’s cultural symbols. It hit me as, ‘Yes, this is working.’”

I wonder at what point these small acts might turn into bigger things. “Let’s just say, if Meibion Glwndŵr was recruiting, and I didn’t have kids, I’d probably take it into consideration,” Hughes tells me, referencing the paramilitary group that carried out arson attacks against English-owned second homes in the Eighties and Nineties.

Perhaps John Barnard Jenkins shared similar initial reservations before sliding into terrorism. He did, after all, join the British Army and later the Territorials to serve the UK abroad. But there’s a fine line between anger and action. Talking about his Welsh history books, Jenkins himself conceded: “As the years went by, my feelings intensified, leading me to believe, more and more, that it was up to me to do something about it.”

Still, despite the tub-thumping of people like Hughes, there’s little sign the Welsh are planning to reach for their longbows. In the long term, a more ominous development for the Westminster establishment is the rising popularity of Welsh culture. Music is undergoing something of a revolution here. Over the past decade, there’s been no end of singers, bands, and even rappers keen to pick Welsh over English in distilling meaning into their art. Welsh crime novels are thriving and TV shows such as Game of Thrones have drawn deeply on Celtic mythology.

And where culture leads, politics has followed. According to one recent poll, a full 72% of Welsh people aged 25-35 back independence. Soon enough, that could bring a political earthquake. For if Wales is still passionate about its working-class roots — it’s still the only UK nation to have voted Labour at every general election since 1922 — Plaid Cymru is waiting in the wings. It comfortably leads Labour in polls for next year’s Senedd vote, and Rhun ap Iorwerth, the party’s leader, is already talking about potential independence referendums.

But if Hughes’s flirtation with arson tells us anything, it’s that nationalism can easily tip from pride into violence — just ask John Barnard Jenkins. The likes of Iorwerth say the work of Jenkins and others in the 20th century didn’t reflect the Welsh nationalist mainstream, hence why their groups no longer exist. But people still look to them for inspiration, and still see Gruffydd and Glyndŵr as heroes.

The reality, of course, is that all these people did bad things. Jenkins blew things up and wasn’t afraid to kill. Gruffyd and Glyndŵr slaughtered their own, with the latter’s efforts leading to widespread famine. What’s indisputable, meanwhile, is that even peaceful nationalists such as Iorwerth are increasingly resentful about Wales’s place in the UK’s political pecking order. Wales, he says, isn’t working, pointing to the estimated £3.9 billion of Welsh money going on HS2 — a railway project that doesn’t have a single track west of the Severn. There are other things, too, from an NHS starved of central government funding to the recent defunding of Welsh language radio stations.

Then there’s the broader economic malaise, accelerated by Thatcherism and the dismantling of the country’s industrial economy. Today, one in five people in Wales lives in relative income poverty. The overall poverty rate is 23%, higher than anywhere else in the UK. While England boasts a GDP per capita of £34,241, the average Welshman brings home just £24,443. That’s even as Wales remains the hardest part of the UK for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder.

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In other words, there are plenty of more abrasive causes Welsh nationalists could yet latch on to. But there’s another possibility too — one where Welsh emotions are fired not towards the red dragon but to the Union Jack. Wales has been tied to England and Britain for hundreds of years, and its people share many of the same grievances felt by their English, Scottish, and Northern Irish kin. In recent years, much of that anger has come because of immigration. And though Wales has largely escaped the sorts of numbers settling in England, annual arrivals did rise by almost 50,000 in the decade to 2022. It should come as no surprise, then, that Reform is on the rise here too — polling at 25% for next year’s Senedd elections. And if John Barnard Jenkins has now passed into history, imprisoned in 1970 for treason before dying in obscurity, the valleys have long hosted other forms of extremism too.

In 2001, sociologist Marie Gillespie undertook a fieldwork study in South Wales exploring the rise of racism in former industrial communities. Noting the presence of far-Right graffiti, she wrote: “A subtle racism bubbles in the dark underbelly of these communities. The strength of feeling is difficult to assess, unpredictable, but potentially explosive.”

Though there was an influx of English and Italian migrant workers in the early 20th century, Gillespie’s words arrived at a time when immigration into Wales was almost non-existent. Walk through somewhere like Ystrad Mynach today — a town just 10 minutes from John Barnard Jenkins’s old stomping-ground of Penybryn — and you’ll find Vietnamese nail bars, Kurdish barbers, Iraqi mini marts. All have appeared in just the last decade.

If there was a dark underbelly in 2001, what will become of these communities when they are faced with a tangible presence of immigrants? While Iorwerth is confident that “this kind of nationalism has never been Wales”, I can’t help but think back to Jenkins, and how his history books ultimately led to homemade bombs. Yes, it is a different kind of angst. But fed up with rising costs, and grappling with the highest unemployment rate in Britain, might some young Welshmen look to a radical form of British nationalism?

Just beyond Penybryn sits Gelligaer, another former mining town, and home to a sprawling council estate. As I approach its worn, green sign, I see graffiti scrawled across a nearby wall. The words become clearer as I get closer: “No dinghy divers!” It’s a stark, sour reference to migrants arriving here on small boats — and one that could foreshadow the kind of action that propelled John Barnard Jenkins to infamy.

Behind the scenes, though, these operations are actually far closer to movie-making. The terrorists are the actors, albeit unaware of their starring roles. Like a real-life Truman Show, their performances are watched, tracked and analyzed by a small army of detectives, surveillance operatives, technical specialists and intelligence officers. Finally, the director calls “Action!” and armed officers blow doors off hinges. Surprised-looking suspects are bundled into police vans. Then, because no bombs exploded, and no civilians died, we switch off. Keep scrolling. Continue with our lives. Which is as it should be.

Over the weekend, police held seven Iranian nationals in a textbook operation. The arrests were for offenses under the Terrorism Act and the new National Security Act (2023). Though the suspects were split into two unspecified groups, reports suggest they were only “hours away” from launching an attack. The target? Sources suggest it was possibly a synagogue. Or, given Tehran’s propensity to pursue dissidents abroad, a member of the Iranian diaspora. Whatever the truth, the potential for state-sponsored terrorism presents a sophisticated challenge for Britain’s security services — especially when balanced with so many other threats, and when internal instability only continues to soar.

On and off, I worked in counterterrorism policing and counterextremism for over a decade. And as a single cog in a vast machine, I witnessed firsthand how the threat evolves, from the IRA to Al-Qaeda. I’ve also seen how our security apparatus occasionally behaves like First World War generals: fixated on fighting the last war. After all, mass casualty, cell-based Islamist terrorism differs markedly from the lone-wolves of more recent times. Then there are the loose cannons, neo-Nazis like David Copeland or internet-radicalized killers like Axel Rudakabana. The latter, especially, now consumes much of counterterrorism’s operational bandwidth. Yet CT policing is also expected to deal with them all, like a chef asked to prepare sushi one minute and a Baked Alaska the next.

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It’s no wonder, sometimes, that they hanker after signature dishes. Is the flavor of the month now state-sponsored terrorism, possibly involving the infamous Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)? If so, they may be in for a struggle, not least in the way it could herald the rise of asymmetrical warfare on Britain’s streets. Sometimes known as “grey zone” operations, it inevitably means espionage and paramilitary activities blend into policing. My very first operation was a stark reminder of how blurred things can become, as I watched paramedics working on the body of an IRA man shot dead by police.

Later, I witnessed the challenges of investigating state-sponsored criminality during the Alexander Litvinenko murder inquiry. Wider political and diplomatic considerations impact on operational decision-making. Noses are tapped. Leads are declared “not in the public interest”. We can see this already, with the Foreign Office arguing the IRGC shouldn’t be proscribed as a terrorist organization (even though it unambiguously is). Our diplomats view the well-connected IRGC as an influential conduit into the Iranian regime. The politics, given Labour’s attempts to tread a fine diplomatic and political line over Gaza, are extremely sensitive for the Starmer government — a government, its critics allege, which is strategically over-reliant on Muslim votes.

To be fair, not all foreign spies possess the efficiency of Bond movie villains. As I discovered during the Litvinenko case, the Russian FSB were slapdash, operating flashily in plain sight. We hardly made it difficult for them; London in the 2000s was a sordid playground for dirty Russian money. MI5, preoccupied with mass-casualty Islamists, also took its eye off the Russian threat. Nonetheless, Litvinenko’s killers were hardly discreet, leaving traces of radioactive poison on an airliner and in a hotel room. Then there were the Russian military intelligence operatives who, as a cover story, declared an improbable interest in the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. In fact, they were trying to poison the defector Sergei Skripal, as open-source intelligence quickly proved. A recent trial of a Russian-sponsored spy ring consisting of Bulgarian agents was similarly amateurish. The hapless agents were nicknamed “Minions” by their handlers, after characters from the children’s movie Despicable Me.

Sadly for British intelligence officers, Iran poses a more substantial challenge than the GRU or FSB. The Iranians are, arguably, more disciplined and committed. There’s also a significant diaspora community in the UK. And though many British-Iranians are implacably opposed to the Mullahs, cover opportunities for agents are easier to find. The current legality of the ICRG also means regime front organizations can operate with relative impunity. No doubt the Home Office will be squaring up to ever-obdurate Foreign Office mandarins, seeking to pursue diplomacy whatever the cost.

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Then there’s the issue of motive and proportionality; the Russians, although shameless, intuit a line in the sand when murdering their own abroad. They are reckless, as they were when they released poison into the hotel where they met Alexander Litvinenko, but their targets are usually strategic. Though Putin is happy to crush potential turncoats, I suspect he wouldn’t back mass-casualty terror. The Iranians have no such qualms, considering themselves at perpetual war with the West and particularly Britain: the “Little Satan” to America’s plus-sized version. Jews are another target. Iranian-backed terrorists blew up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85. I therefore find myself unsurprised to learn the regime is suspected of trying something similar in the UK, with MI5 publicly warning of hostile Iranian intelligence activity in this country.

The authorities face another challenge too. Terrorism — and counterterrorism — is a destabilizing issue in our increasingly Balkanized society. Countering state-sponsored threats involves a rapidly evolving kind of hybrid conflict. It’s a shadowy, difficult and sometimes controversial arena for the police and security services to operate in. Human rights laws and “proportionality” will be tested to their limits. Mistakes, as happened at Stockwell, will inevitably happen. Politics, usually of the grubbier variety, will be engaged. And, tragically, innocents will die if terrorists succeed. As the IRA famously said of their attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life, the police have to be lucky every time. The terrorists? They only have to be lucky once.

Such terrorism, especially when linked as it is to religion, also has a knock-on effect to what we used to optimistically call “community cohesion”. The truth is that there are many in Britain who would be equivocal about an attack on the country’s Jews. Some would even support it. Chief constables, politicians and the Home Office are acutely aware how an attack might well provoke public disorder, as it did in the summer of 2024. As MI5 Director General Ken McCallum has warned: “There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat and/or change shape in terms of what is being targeted.”

No wonder, then, that radicalization and extremism will continue to flourish on all sides. Are the police ready for these grim consequences? Of allegations of two-tier policing? As I’ve written before, if the “Prevent” program is anything to go by, I doubt it. As it is, I would suggest we’re in an early-Seventies scenario, one where the situation in Gaza replaces Vietnam in helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. Only a tiny proportion need to convert their anger to violence to prompt widespread societal disruption.

Even worse, mainstream British policing is in a sorry state. Counterterrorism is well-funded, but draws its personnel directly from existing forces. Labour’s plans to create a national counterterrorism force doesn’t change the fact it will continue to recruit from the same pool of demoralized, inexperienced and poorly-led officers. Specialist officers aside, the societal impact of terrorism — such as the public disorder, which terrifies senior police and politicians — is still dealt with by conventional police officers using conventional methods. Counterterrorism and extremism is a broad, interconnected spectrum. To continue the movie comparison I made earlier, if an operation was a Hollywood movie, the hard yards of counter-extremism intelligence are a niche BBC 4 documentary, and even the biggest studios can only film so many epics at once.

If my experience is anything to go by, anyway, there’ll be barely time for the production team to enjoy a beer before they’re summoned to work on one sequel, and then another. Each time, there’ll be new stars. New plots. New locations. The directors and producers will have unrealistic expectations and deadlines, cursing the studio’s endless and contradictory demands. Meanwhile, the production team will follow their unsuspecting stars through viewfinders or rifle sights. They’ll listen to covert signals intelligence. They’ll meet in backrooms with nervy informants. And they’ll all be thinking the same thing: will we be lucky this time, or will they?

And so the counterterrorism show will trundle on, from the CCTV trawls to the criminal trails at the Old Bailey. Yet on the streets, and on the internet, angry voices will amplify, and the causes of extremism will only persist. The overlooked police and intelligence service officers who deal with it are the runners and extras of counterterrorism. And we should wish them luck too: over the years ahead, they’re surely going to need it.

Welcome, dear reader, to the strange and warped online world of incels, where the fictional brutal murder of a girl is not a crime, but a punishment. Indeed, here is a society of boys and men where sexual failure is extolled as a virtue, sex is seen as contaminating and the real-life mass-killers of women are elevated to the status of martyrs.

Adolescence, Netflix’s much chewed-over drama is notionally about incels; Jamie, the disturbed boy at its center certainly sounds like one and murders a female classmate who contemptuously calls him one. While the show obviously wasn’t intended for incels — its target audience was the parents of teenage boys and politicians — many have watched it and have been avidly discussing its merits and demerits. Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the show with Stephen Graham, ought to listen up and prepare himself for some critical feedback.

For my sins, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit lurking on incel online spaces, in part out of a morbid curiosity to see what I would find there, but mainly because I want to better understand their political and intellectual culture — and because conventional writing on incels tends to be so phenomenally bad, with its sensational alarmism and self-dramatizing tone of moral shock (“I infiltrated the dark rabbit hole of incels and what I found there traumatized me to my core…”).

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In some ways, they (“involuntary celibates”) are boringly familiar: yet another victim group that defines itself in relation to an enemy (women) which it blames for all its problems. But in other ways, incels occupy a world that is as strange as it is unsettling, with its own folklore and incomprehensible vocabulary. “Foid” for example, is a derogatory term for a woman, while “Stacy” and “Chad” are two sides of the same reviled coin: respectively, a sexually attractive woman and a sexually successful man. Tyrone, Chadpreet and Chaddam are all ethnic variations on Chad, while a “currycel” is an incel from India. “LDAR” denotes “Lay Down and Rot”, “AWALT” means “All Women Are Like That”, “roped” refers to suicide and “mogging” is when Chads act in ways that threaten or diminish the masculinity of other men. Although Adolescence contains a brief reference to the “80/20 rule”, according to which 80% of women select from just 20% of the male dating pool, the show barely scratches at the surface of this subculture.

From what I already knew about incels and their contempt for “normoids”, I had fully expected that they would unanimously loathe Adolescence, if only because of the wave of adulation it had received in the mainstream media. But I was wrong: some actually liked it.

On one incel forum I found multiple discussion threads on the show. Traviscel* noted that although Adolescence was “blatant anti-incel propaganda”, it was nevertheless “psychologically accurate” in its portrayal of the killer, Jamie. “I liked how the kid had extreme body dysmorphia, and constantly fluctuated between being a troll, being a simp, feeling worthless, and easily irritated in his desperation for power”, he explained. He particularly liked the third episode in which Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist played by Erin Doherty. “The actress was amazing and so was the incel killer,” Traviscel continued, praising Doherty for her “skilled” portrayal of “a manipulative little whore” who entraps Jamie into confessing. As for Jamie, he was like “OJ [Simpson] in that he constantly denied he killed that bitch, despite getting caught red handed on CCTV”. “I liked how it had simple answers,” Traviscel concluded, which he took to be that Jamie was an incel because he was bullied and because “sluts” had rejected him. If Adolescence was indeed “anti-incel propaganda”, as Traviscel put it, it clearly had no effect in penetrating his breastplate of incel righteousness and self-pity.

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Many more, though, dismissed the show as unrealistic, “retarded”, fear-mongering and superficial. A recurring criticism centered on the casting of Jamie, played by the 15-year-old Owen Cooper. The broad consensus was that he was too good looking to convince as an incel. In a vote on “Would you let Jamie from Adolescence join the forum?”, over 80% said no, reasoning, as one commenter put it, “He’ll grow into a Chad.”

The other point of consensus, across all of the discussion threads on the show, was that the real victim wasn’t the murdered girl, Katie, but Jamie himself. Adamcel*, for example, confided that “I couldn’t see the perpetrator, a 13-year-old boy, as the villain in this, not even logically”, elaborating that Jamie’s violence was a morally intelligible, even excusable, reaction to being bullied.

Some incels were particularly scathing about how the show failed, in their view, to capture the complexities of the manosphere, ridiculing the scene in which one of the detectives working on the case speculates about the kind of mindset-material that might have radicalized Jamie. “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff,” Detective Sergeant Misha Frank says, adding: “It’s the Andrew Tate shite.” This, according to Dariuscel*, was to elide the “redpill”, which holds that women are superficial and only attracted to Chads, with the “blackpill”, which holds that incels, no matter what they do or how hard they try, will never find sexual intimacy or happiness with a woman. Tate, who is not only sexually successful with women but also potently shames other men who lack his confidence and “loverboy” skillset, is thus especially reviled among incels. “Andrew Tate,” Dariuscel clarified, “is a sex haver mogger masculinity coper that shouldn’t be associated with incels at all.” Tate, for his part, has distanced himself from incels, stating, via a spokesperson, that it is “unjust” for him to be made a “the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence”.

But what really got under their skin was how, as they saw it, the show had trivialized their ideological beliefs by suggesting that they had been brainwashed. Indeed, for incels, the idea that they have been tricked into their beliefs is intolerable, since it contains the fatal implication that those beliefs are untrue and can only be accepted through coercion. If incels believe that society is anti-male or that all women select men based on looks and status, it is because they really do believe this and because it captures their sense, however deranged it may seem to others, of how the world is.

In my brief trawl, I found that, unlike many other journalists who skirt around it, I didn’t want to cry or vomit or cringe in terror at what I saw and read. But I did feel an overwhelming sense of sadness at what a terrible dead end the subculture is, ensuring the self-damnation of so many of those who seek solace and connection in going there.

It also made me acutely aware of how fantastically naive Adolescence is in its exploration of how Jamie came to embrace incel beliefs and in its implicit assumption that if only Jamie’s parents had been more assiduous in protecting him from the manosphere he would have been okay. Spend any time lurking on incel forums and you come to acknowledge that many of these men and boys are there because they want to be there and not because they’ve watched some ridiculous piece of Andrew Tate content or because they’re the unsuspecting victims of a vast grooming operation. They are there because they find it cathartic to vent about their frustrations, because they want to be understood and because they can express outrageous thoughts and feelings that they would be unable to express anywhere else. And because they clearly take great pleasure in defiantly transgressing the civilized norms of a society that they feel has rejected them and because sacralizing misogynistic killers like Elliot Roger is meant to enrage the normies.

Had the makers of Adolescence done their own bit of incel-trawling before writing the show they might have come up with a story that better captured the appeal of an oppositional subculture for boys and men who are unable to form sexual relationships with women and who have come to see their lives as hopeless. Instead, they contrived to make a clumsy and reductive drama that has served to fan the flames of a moral panic that shows no signs of abating.

Of course the smug and self-congratulatory makers of Adolescence would no doubt insist that if there’s a panic about the scourge of violent misogyny then clearly this is all to the good. But the thing about moral panics is they often take on a life of their own and materialize consequences that their instigators hadn’t intended or envisaged. One such consequence is the mass stigmatization of young boys, which is all the more sinister for concealing itself in the benevolent language of vulnerability and safeguarding.

Another and perhaps more unsettling irony is that Adolescence, in trying to expose the dangers of online misogyny, has massively amplified the most extreme exponents of it, catapulting incels to the center of a global conversation about boyhood, masculinity and violence. In doing so, it has brought the most fringe of subcultures to the attention of countless numbers of young boys who might previously not have heard it or had viewed it with indifference. For some incels, all this sudden fervent attention is unnerving, while for the more ideologically strident among them, it is to be welcomed. As one poster triumphantly put it, “Good, that means inceldom is spreading. They can’t ignore it anymore.”

***

*Some names have been changed

Jonathan Hall’s post-Southport review, published yesterday, essentially concurs with these experts, advising that it would be unhelpful to expand the legal definition of terrorism to include non-ideological rampages like Southport.

But Starmer wasn’t wrong to say that terrorism has changed — and those very changes have vastly complicated the business of demarcating between different forms of extreme violence.

To better understand how terrorism has changed and how best to classify opaque and liminal figures such as Rudakubana, I recently spoke to Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and one of the world’s leading scholars on terrorism. “Like any phenomenon, terrorism is always changing and reflects the broader tensions and turbulence of society,” Hoffman told me.

Currently working on the 4th edition of his seminal book Inside Terrorism (1998), Hoffman has been tracing the changing face of terrorism for 27 years. “When I wrote the first edition, I argued that terrorism had to be an organizational phenomenon with an identifiable command and control structure,” he said. In that book he also made a firm distinction between a terrorist and a criminal, insisting that whereas the criminal is “acting primarily for selfish, personal motivations,” the terrorist’s goal is “ineluctably political (to change or fundamentally alter a political system through his violent act)”. Hoffman furthermore noted that the political nature of the terrorist’s motives is what distinguishes him from the “lunatic assassin”, whose “goal is more often intrinsically idiosyncratic, completely egocentric and deeply personal”.

His first order of business, when he started revising the 2nd edition published in 2006, was to soften the emphasis on the organizational structure of terrorism. This was because of the rise of al Qaeda: a group that encouraged lone individuals, with whom it had no direct connection, to undertake terrorist attacks. By the time ISIS came to prominence a decade later in 2016, the era of the “lone wolf” was in full swing. “And that’s when the lines began to blur,” Hoffman said.

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From the late Seventies until the blurring began in 2014, there was a broad consensus in terrorism studies, which was based on three assumptions. First, terrorism was rational: the calculated and discriminate use of violence to achieve a desired political end. Second, and connectedly, terrorists used violence not for its own sake but as a tool for drawing attention to their grievances and believed that excessive civilian casualties would generate the wrong kind of publicity and harm their cause in the long run. Third, terrorists, for the most part, were psychologically normal: they were bad, certainly, but not mad.

But when over 50,000 people from 80 different countries started leaving their homes to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that consensus began to fracture. “Right there you’re dealing with an enormous pool and you’re going to have a cross-section of society, including those who may have mental health issues,” Hoffman said. “Terrorism has become so much more egalitarian now,” he further explained, chiefly because “you don’t have to belong to a terrorist organization anymore — you can just show some sympathy or affinity to that organization”. Indeed, with no real bar to entry, other than a willingness to kill or die for a cause, anyone can claim to be a terrorist and have that claim validated both by the terrorist group whose name they invoke and the mass media which thrives on covering terrorism-related stories. Hoffman said that the conventional wisdom that terrorists are normal was “always an exaggeration”, but that in the age of self-ID terrorism it no longer holds.

In addition to becoming more egalitarian, terrorism has become less onerous as a “project of the self”: whereas at one time recruits to terrorist groups had to demonstrate loyalty, discipline and proficiency with weapons, now lone actor terrorists need show only the most superficial commitment to the causes they latch onto. By way of example, Hoffman cited Omar Mateen, who “at the last minute declared his allegiance to ISIS, probably with the assumption that if you can hitch your fortunes to a terrorist organization you’ll get much more attention”. In 2016, Mateen murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; less than half an hour into his attack he made a 9/11 call in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS. “How political is it if you’re leveraging on ISIS because you’ll know you’ll get a lot more attention by doing so?” Hoffman added.

The other major shift Hoffman observes is a new logic of barbarism, where terrorist violence has become more excessive and untethered from any civilizational restraint. Indeed, for many terrorist groups and actors, violence is an end in itself, where the overwhelming purpose isn’t to effect political change, but simply to terrorize and maximally harm a reviled enemy. Expanding on this, Hoffman said that he had just read Emmanuel Carrère’s new book V13: Chronicle of a Trial, which records the horrors of the November 2015 Paris attacks, where ISIS commandos murdered 130 people. Carrère quotes an investigator who, in response to an “odd question” about how he “felt about the killings”, said: “How I felt? I don’t know. I can only tell you that there were 30 holes in one victim, 22 in another, 14 in a third…” He also quotes one of the survivors who says that the terrorists “turned on all the lights and were shooting people, I’d say with a certain relish”. “I’d always argued that terrorism is altruistic, in the sense that it serves some collective goal the terrorist believes in,” Hoffman said, “but that’s now harder to maintain in the face of terrorism’s turn to ultra-violence.”

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So, do these shifts suggest that Starmer’s characterization of Axel Rudakubana was correct? Is the Southport killer a new kind of terrorist? “He may not have stated his allegiance to a terrorist group or done anything that situated his act of violence in a political context, but he was clearly animated by terrorism in the sense that he downloaded the al Qaeda manual and watched beheading videos,” Hoffman said. “This underscores the power of these organizations”, he went on, intimating at a distinction between the substance and style of atrocities. While Rudakubana may not have acted in fidelity to ISIS’s ideology, he certainly enacted the group’s ethos of sadistic and excessive violence; among the many harrowing details that surfaced after Rudakubana’s trial was the vast number of “sharp force injuries” he inflicted on the girls and how he had tried to decapitate one of them. “I’m glad to see those kids are dead, it makes me happy,” Rudakubana was heard to have said shortly after his arrest on the day of the massacre.

Hoffman acknowledged that Rudakubana’s extremist interests and extreme violence are not sufficient to make him a terrorist, but he suggested, convincingly in my view, that their toxic amalgamation foreshadows a newly emergent hinterland in which the sadistic mass killer and terrorist meet. This has been facilitated by what he called the “ubiquity” of terrorism as a mass-mediated global spectacle, subculture and aesthetics — and a seemingly limitless supply of anomic loners who develop a cathartic identification with it.

To further complicate the picture, Hoffman said that not only has it become more difficult to define terrorism, but that it has become increasingly challenging to determine what its motives are, “because they’re not as clear as they once were”. This is also emphasized in a leaked Department of Homeland Security assessment from last year. Hoffman attributes this to the proliferation of lone actor terrorism and the ideological promiscuity that post-organizational violence permits. Referring to Nicholas Cruz, who murdered 17 at a Florida high school in 2018, Hoffman asked, “Was he an incel or was he a neo-Nazi or neither?” For Hoffman, although Cruz outwardly evidenced an interest in both ideologies, it wasn’t clear that either one directly motivated his attack, although they couldn’t be discounted as an influence on him.

As our interview drew to a close, Hoffman confided that, despite studying terrorism for nearly five decades, he still wrestles with the conceptual challenges it continually throws up and that revising Inside Terrorism hasn’t exactly been plain sailing. This will be of scant comfort to the British authorities who must not only summon the clarity of thought to meet these challenges but also work out how to best contain extremist-fixated-non-extremists like Axel Rudakubana. More immediately, they will need to decide on whether Prevent, a counter-radicalization program which was originally envisaged to deal with al Qaeda and then expanded to focus on the far-Right and incels, is the best vehicle for leading this effort.

When I asked Hoffman what he thought of Prevent, to which Rudakubana had been referred three times and which has come under intense fire for failing to thwart his path to violence, he was philosophical. “I’ll be Quranic or Talmudic and say that if it prevents just one act of terrorism then it’s a useful tool and as good as saving the whole world”. But he was also starkly realistic. “We’ve over-exaggerated the power of these programs,” he said. Referring to Shamima Begum and the more than 800 British citizens who joined ISIS, he asked, “where was Prevent?” The core problem, in Hoffman’s view, is that Prevent and other similar programs are based on the assumption that there are pathways to terrorism that can be readily identified. But this is a fiction: “The most serious terrorists aren’t going to evidence the warning signs that a mental health provider, teacher or police officer might pick up on.”

The other problem for Prevent is that there is no real consensus on what these warning signs are nor, in the aftermath of Southport and other recent atrocities, is there much public confidence in Prevent’s capacity to thwart those who are determined to commit mass violence, whatever the driving motivation.

Is there a difference between the rampage violence of a sadistic mass killer and that of the lone wolf terrorist? At the extremes, there assuredly is, but there is also an expanding grey line that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two and for which the authorities and their favored experts lack even the most basic map for navigating. Whether the 4th edition of Inside Terrorism will supply one is unclear, but the next time Starmer feels inclined to make any categorical statements about terrorism he could do worse than find his way to a copy once it’s published.

Prevent has become a well-covered — and, by extension, notorious — brand. But this celebrity leads people to overestimate its power. Prevent, frequently described as a counter-terrorism program but perhaps better understood as a funding stream covering several programs, is small beans compared to the cost of traditional parts of state infrastructure dedicated to counter-terrorism. Because of how Prevent is structured, it is difficult to find overall figures; but its budget for the whole of London is reported to be somewhere in the low millions — a fraction of the £9 million the Mayor of London spent advertising the Ulez expansion.

So, what does it do? Prevent has three objectives: to tackle the causes of radicalization, to safeguard those at risk of radicalization, and to rehabilitate anyone who has been radicalized. Any risk related to non-ideological threats, such as psychological problems and violence obsessions, should — in theory — be picked up by the likes of the NHS and social services. However, many end up with Prevent, while specific and impending threats are handled by the police and security services.

To meet its remit, Prevent trains public-sector workers — especially teachers — to identify signs of vulnerability to extremism. Any risky parties are then referred to the Channel program, where attempts are made to de-radicalize. To identify, triage and interact with those potential threats requires a high degree of cooperation between agencies, such as police, social workers, prisons, schools, local authorities, the NHS, and Government departments. Yet, as can be the case in complex systems, the lines of accountability can be blurred between agencies, and cases can be missed or closed prematurely.

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This was reportedly a factor which led to Ali Harbi Ali leaving Prevent too quickly. Failures were identified in other recent cases, such as Usman Khan (who killed two people near London Bridge in 2019), Khairi Saadallah (who killed three people in Reading in 2020), Ahmed Hassan (the 2017 Parsons Green tube bomber), and Rudakubana. Having observed the process by which people are referred to Channel, I suspect the number of people identified as potentially risky compared with the resources to assess and triage is also a challenge.

But even if the identification and referral process were to work perfectly, what Prevent is trying to achieve is a tall order. Consider for a moment the probable efficacy of an initiative with no ability to compel people to engage, with limited resources and limited opportunities to intervene, in the face of all the factors that might radicalize someone. Imagine a psychologically troubled outcast, for whom hatred dressed up as a moral crusade provides his very existence with meaning, surrounding himself with affirming narratives and dreams of glory, and then pit those against a voluntary initiative which you might have heard about from one of your teachers at the school you hate. It’s hardly an even match.

As a result, Prevent also operates further upstream, developing counter-radicalization narratives and providing grants to grassroots community groups to strengthen social cohesion. This creates opportunities for early intervention which might help to build resilience against radicalizing forces, but the strategy comes with its own challenges. Firstly, Prevent money has found its way to the wrong groups on more than one occasion, funding those who, rather than countering radicalization, were propagating it. Secondly, governments are most effective in shaping perspectives when their messages are ubiquitous and reinforced across all elements of the social and cultural fabric — as with “follow the science”. In practice, many Prevent initiatives will struggle to cut through the noise.

Given the obvious challenges, persistent threat and limited funding, why are policy officials trying to make an already unenviable task even harder by widening Prevent’s targets?

In 2023, William Shawcross’s “Independent Review into Prevent” recommended it refocus on the most acute threats to national security to maximize impact, along with some other sensible proposals which the Government mainly accepted. But, as a report from Policy Exchange last month notes, a leaked Home Office “Rapid Analytical Sprint” on extremism policy has since suggested taking the opposite approach. It proposed broadening the definition of extremism by conflating it with extreme violence and other forms of harm to society, while diluting the focus on the most pressing ideological threats. The same sprint appeared to equate Islamist extremism with more obscure ideologies that do not pose the same level of risk.

Perhaps officials are happy to broaden their definition of extremism because they overestimate the efficacy of their policies to overcome it. In my experience, many of those involved in social programs — and to a lesser extent in Government — assume that their well-intentioned efforts make a meaningful difference. This, however, is rarely the case. Many social programs concerned with influencing behavior, when evaluated robustly, show weak or no positive effects at all. This is because across the domain, there is little tradition of reliably establishing cause and effect. As a result, incorrect assumptions are made about what influences behavior, especially over the longer term. An often-quoted example is the “Scared Straight” intervention, which sought to deter young offenders from crime by exposing them to life inside prison. For many years, this was assumed to reduce offending — until proper assessment concluded it most likely increased it.

One of the few robust evaluations in this particular domain, conducted seven years ago, suggested that only a small handful of civil-society counter-radicalization programs had a positive effect. Given the average effectiveness of social programs and the complexity of countering radicalization, this is not surprising. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Prevent should give up, when it is still capable of playing an important part of our counter-terrorism strategy. But without good evaluation — something, incidentally, that is lacking across Government — there is no accountability, and overreach becomes a tempting way to inflate roles and egos. To systematically measure cause and effect and then adapt or cut programs that do not work demands certain technical skills which are rare in law enforcement and adjacent fields. But more importantly, and perhaps even rarer, this sort of evaluation requires the willingness of policy officials to disappoint the civil-society groups whose programs are failing.

Rigorous evaluation will tell officials if their programs are having the desired effect, but the government should also consider the effect of rhetoric. The fear is that authorities’ overuse of the label “far-Right” is likely to increase rather than reduce support for the actual far-Right. The broadening of the Overton window, and normalization of a term that should be reserved for genuine extremes, risks amplifying radical sentiments and undermining the credibility of the state at a time when trust in Government and national institutions has fallen to historic lows. In his report, Shawcross noted an imbalance between the narrowness with which Islamist extremism was defined by Prevent, and the breadth of definition applied to far-Right extremism, at times including mainstream Right-wing commentary with no connection to radicalization. Officials have even suggested that watching comedy series such as Yes, Minister or The Thick of It could be red flags for far-Right extremism.

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Since the Shawcross review, these more contentious perspectives may have been reconsidered. But more recently, Home Office officials have proposed that accusations of “two-tier policing” are examples of far-Right narratives. No doubt, malign actors would seek to capitalize on perceived grievances, but two-tier policing is not a myth: a YouGov survey last year showed that large proportions of the public see discrepancy in police treatment of different causes. The details of individual cases make comparisons difficult, but it is legitimate and a necessary component of policing by consent for the public to question inconsistencies in law enforcement decision-making.

This disconnect between officials and the public on two-tier policing is yet another symptom of the groupthink that has permeated much of the arts, academia, media, Government, and social and charitable sectors in recent years. It derives from a culture that has fundamentally degraded some of our most important national institutions.

In Britain, absent any political leadership prioritizing cultural change within the public sector, mandarins may be tempted to wait out the eventual demise of a culture which prioritizes ideological consistency over objective evaluation, intellectual rigor, and the effective function of public service. But the longer it takes, the longer tough policy areas such as counter-terrorism will continue to struggle.

Prevent plays an important role in Britain’s strategy against terrorism. Like in so many other areas of policy, we need to do it better. Understandably, the Government’s focus will be on improving visible outcomes in health, public safety, immigration and the economy. Yet to have any hope of its policies succeeding, it must also focus on that which is less visible: the culture of those institutions tasked with delivering them.

Neil Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism policing, was particularly critical of Farage, who he accused of giving “succor” to the far-Right, as well as “undermining the police” and “creating conspiracy theories”. Public figures such as Farage, Basu advised, should “keep their mouth shut”. This, by the way, is the same Neil Basu who earlier this month accused Elon Musk of trading in “dangerous rhetoric” about Britain’s grooming gangs; Basu clearly thinks that Musk should keep his mouth shut, too.

Well, Farage couldn’t keep his mouth shut and the more his Left-leaning critics pushed back against him and tried to turn the Southport attack into a story about the far-Right, the more he felt that a cover-up was underway. This is typical now of how Britain treats these crimes, with each political faction talking past the other, asserting a claim to victimhood.

When some three months later the Crown Prosecution Service announced two further charges against Rudakubana, including one under the terrorism act, Farage was positively vociferous. “Perhaps I was right all along,” he said in another video. On Monday, after Rudakubana pleaded guilty to all 16 charges against him and it transpired that he had been referred three times to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalization scheme, Farage was unequivocal: “I was right all along.” He again referred to a “cover-up” and suggested that had the authorities disclosed “the truth” at the outset the riots of last summer might not have happened. “This is two-tier policing…it is an outrage,” he added with cold indignation.

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But was he right all along? And what really is “the truth” that the authorities were withholding? On the question of whether Rudakubana was being monitored by the security services, which was Farage’s original suspicion back in July, he is categorically wrong: he wasn’t being monitored by the security services. Indeed, he wasn’t being monitored by anyone, although he became known to a range of services in 2019 as his mental health declined and he engaged in increasingly erratic and threatening behavior. This is what prompted the referrals to Prevent.

It is probably important to clarify that Prevent doesn’t collect intelligence on terrorism suspects nor monitor their activities. Instead, it’s a program intended to foster change in the mindset and behavior of those who have come to embrace an extremist ideology but not yet committed any offenses. And because the Prevent officers who dealt with the Rudakubana referrals were not convinced that he’d been radicalized into an extremist ideology, those referrals went nowhere. Had it been otherwise, and had Rudakubana exhibited support for, say, the Islamic State or some other terrorist group, he would almost certainly have been invited to attend a “Channel” program, where a mentor would have attempted to challenge his extremist convictions. Even so, it would have been well within Rudakubana’s rights to have refused any such invitation, since Prevent has no statutory powers to compel a referred person to cooperate.

But if there was a cover-up, as Farage claims, he might be disappointed. Because it isn’t the one he thinks it is: Rudakubana was not a terrorist. Which is to say that his motive in carrying out the atrocity in Southport was not political. He had no ideology, no injustices he wanted to avenge or draw to public attention, no burning cause that radicalized him and turned his mind to murder. What he had instead was a deep fascination with murder itself and the dark pornographic culture surrounding it.

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time of the Southport attack, was first referred to Prevent in 2019 when he was 13: he had been searching for material on US school shootings at his school. A further two referrals were made in 2021, after he had sought out material on Libya and past terrorist attacks, including the 2017 London Bridge atrocity carried out by an Islamic State-inspired cell. According to official sources, this material was not terrorist propaganda, but consisted of news articles. On each occasion Prevent officers were satisfied that Rudakubana’s behavior, though concerning, did not meet the threshold for intervention by Prevent.

In a statement on Monday evening, Merseyside police described Rudakubana as “a man with [an] unhealthy obsession with extreme violence”, elaborating that “no one ideology” could be deduced from his online interests and behavior. “And that is why this was not treated as terrorism,” the statement clarified. It also made clear that the police had failed to locate a motive behind the Southport massacre.

Among the 164,394 documents that Merseyside police sifted through on the digital devices Rudakubana had access to, there was an item solemnly titled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al Qaeda Training Manual”. It is a crime under Section 58 of the 2000 Terrorism Act to possess such a document, since it’s deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. But this doesn’t necessarily demonstrate, much less prove, sympathy for jihadist ideology and the authorities clearly believe that Rudakubana’s possession of the document was a function of his acute and abiding interest in violence. Many on the Right, though, leapt on this as evidence of Islamist hatred.

The authorities, for their part, insist that there has been no cover-up and the statement by Merseyside Police directly challenges this accusation. “We have been accused of purposely withholding information, this is absolutely not the case,” it said. “From day one,” it went on, “we have constantly been in touch with the CPS who have advised us on what information could be released. We have wanted to say much more to show we were being open and transparent, but we have been advised throughout that we couldn’t do so as it would risk justice being delivered.”

It is on this last score, then, that Farage is on stronger ground, for it isn’t entirely clear why the authorities were so slow in disclosing details about who Rudakubana was and whether he was being monitored by the security services, especially given the fervent public interest in the case and the unlikelihood of this information jeopardizing the prosecution of Rudakubana. These actions only inflamed suspicions on the Right and consequent righteous anger on the Left.

Farage is also onto something when he invokes the spectre of two-tier policing, for let’s imagine, as I did when I first wrote about the Southport massacre in August, that Rudakubana was not the son of Rwandan immigrants to Britain, but a white teen who had targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children. Would the police have exercised the same degree of caution in releasing information about the suspect and would they have been so quick to rule out declaring the atrocity a terrorist incident? It seems unlikely, given its fierce commitment to anti-racism and its keenness to publicly demonstrate that commitment.

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Let’s also imagine that rumours were rife about the white teen and how his parents were known racists with links to a white-supremacist group. Riots ensue, with black youths at the forefront. Would Starmer and his government rush to condemn the rioters as mindless “thugs”, as they had done in the case of those who rioted after Southport — or would they instead have empathized with their “legitimate anger”, which is how Neil Basu spoke about the grievances of BLM protesters in 2020.

And let’s imagine further that the police subsequently discover a copy of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto on the teen’s computer, a document that sounds the alarm about the ethnic replacement of white Europeans through mass immigration and calls for terrorist violence to put a stop to it. Would the authorities, in announcing the new charge, have the patience to explain that that possession of this document, though contrary to UK terrorism legislation, does not by itself indicate a commitment to far-Right ideology, as they had done when announcing the same charge against Rudakubana? This also seems unlikely, especially given the inevitable accusation of racism that would follow.

Farage is right to point out — and to keep pointing out — the double standard in operation here. But the facts of the Southport massacre are not just inconvenient for the Government, they are for all those who want to believe in a sinister cover-up over jihadist terrorism.

The bigger and more urgent question is how or whether the authorities can stop the next mass-casualty atrocity from happening. Clearly, Prevent, in its current form, is singularly ill-equipped to discharge that task, primarily because its remit is to prevent political radicalization and not manage the personal miseries of deeply disturbed people. Moreover, even if its scope were widened to include the risk of mentally unwell people who are morbidly fascinated by violence, it’s unclear how this would work in practice, what coercive powers it would be given and how it could work in an effective way.

Of all the inconvenient truths that Southport exposes, perhaps the most troubling one is our powerlessness to stop the recalcitrant few whose violence is as senseless as it is unpredictable. But it is within our power to respond to any horrors that might befall us by refusing to play politics in their aftermath.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

After each mass shooting or terror attack, we begin the collective actuarial task of apportioning cultural and political blame. After the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, Salon published an article under the remarkable headline: “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” The author, David Sirota, is no fool: He was trying to make a point about how Muslims are unfairly blamed en masse after paroxysms of Islamic fundamentalism. And, yes, his outlet was going for clicks. But he and his editors were also playing the game we always play.

In Jabbar’s case, the blame game is deceptively straightforward. He was a convert to Islam and adorned his truck with an ISIS flag. To commentators on the political right, this was the “globalized intifada” that the most ardent pro-Palestinian activists have been calling for. It’s notable, though, that he seems to have turned to jihadism only recently, as personal disappointments and financial obligations piled up. Islamism was the last, deadly stop on his journey to all-American loserdom.

It is, of course, of paramount importance to investigate Jabbar’s ties to extremist groups. But those determined to tether him to radical Islam miss the point. Jabbar had far more in common with Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, than with Osama bin Laden: A quiet rage builds over the years. Marriages fail. Ventures collapse. 

Just watch the 2020 video Jabbar recorded to promote his real-estate business. He is crisply dressed and uses all the right corporate lingo. His office is neat, with a poster touting “discipline” behind his right shoulder. But there is no enthusiasm to his voice, no light in his eyes.

There was a time when the military was a route into a decent life, especially if followed by a college degree. Jabbar was a veteran and college graduate, but these institutions didn’t provide him with stability — or a sense of community. And if his social-media feed is anything like yours, or mine, it was full of glamorous people living their best lives, shifting the paradigm, crushing it, leaning in. It isn’t difficult to imagine the widening gulf between the real and the digital becoming intolerable.

His military service is a notable and alarming indicator, one he shares with another recent attack. Shortly after the carnage in New Orleans, a man later identified as Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, killing only himself while wounding at least seven. Both Jabber and Livelsberger served in the US Army and had received multiple commendations. They served their country before turning sharply against it. And though we all think we know why — Palestine, the manosphere, guns, Trump, video games, Soros, vaccines — the truth is that the breakdown is more complicated, and more perniciously institutional, than such narratives permit.

Abandoned by elites over Vietnam — a war engineered by so many of our best and brightest that they should have held the 1965 Yale-Harvard football game in Saigon — the armed forces have never really recovered their standing. Nor, it’s worth noting, has the US military won a major conflict outright in nearly a century. Today, the military reflects American pathologies instead of expunging them—and those issues are far deeper than whatever “wokeness” exercises Trump and his nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Other cases are even harder to fathom. Just hours before the slaughter in New Orleans, the FBI arrested a Virginia man who was in the possession of “the largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’ ever found in the FBI’s history.” According to The New York Times, the suspect, Brad Spafford, had a #NoLivesMatter insignia on his backpack. He wasn’t a social-justice activist (#BlackLivesMatter), nor a pro-police conservative (#BlueLivesMatter). Spafford was a nihilist. He simply wanted to kill. 

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The loss of institutional integrity is everywhere, and you can plainly see it. A few years ago, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse wrote an essay headlined “Everything Is Broken,” in which she advised readers to “give up on our current institutions,” since “they already gave up on us.” That is perhaps possible if you have sufficient social capital, as well as capital in the bank account. But if you are Jabbar, already living on the margins, dragging failed businesses and failed marriages behind you, giving up isn’t going to look quite so easy. 

What I mean to say is that Jabbar didn’t “fall through the cracks,” as the cliché goes. The cracks have widened into canyons spanning entire sectors of society. Sure, maybe a social worker missed obvious warning signs. But what ails the people, no social worker can fix. That is not to malign programs that help veterans suffering from PTSD, women escaping abusive relationships, or those struggling to pay their mortgages. These are necessary in a country that makes mere existence into a savage free-market contest. But perhaps we should think about what it is that we exist for, other than mere animal survival. 

It takes no great leader to condemn a killer like Jabbar. But it will take an exceptional figure to name, let alone address, the societal ills that he and Livelsberger and Spafford embody. Doing so will not be politically expedient. But it is also necessary. We can’t go on much longer treating the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the true index of our collective health.

After the attack in New Orleans, there was some discussion among the relevant parties over whether the Sugar Bowl — a high-stakes football game — should still take place at the Superdome. The decision was made to postpone until Thursday night, whereupon fifth-ranked Notre Dame blunted second-ranked Georgia’s formidable air assault, the Fighting Irish beating the Bulldogs, 23 to 10.

The question of whether a football game is to be played after a national tragedy is truly one of the great modern quandaries of our time. Two days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland. It wasn’t a happy contest. “This was a game that nobody was interested in playing, coaching, watching, or writing about,” a columnist observed.

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And yet the show must always go on. There is a relentlessness to American life that foreigners perceive more readily than those born here. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence observed. “It has never yet melted.” In the decades since that observation, it has only become more true, not less. When, in 2001, the NFL cancelled a weekend of games in the wake of 9/11, Brian Billick, who coached the Baltimore Ravens, disagreed with the decision. “I don’t want cowards to dictate what we do in this country,” he said, “That’s where my anguish is right now.” 

If we had real public intellectuals, perhaps they could help make sense of the moment. But they ceased to matter long ago. Now, you head to X (the app formerly known as Twitter), which will give you the take you already had, just a few notches angrier. The same huge and impersonal forces that ripple through all of us can crack some. If you have the material and psychic armaments needed to survive a moment such as ours, consider yourself lucky. Fewer and fewer people do.

And yet, the show goes on. Before the rescheduled game, NPR ran a segment about the Sugar Bowl and the people who attended despite the attack. An on-the-ground correspondent spoke with a man from Cincinnati who had come with his son, both “decked out in Fighting Irish gear.” The fan said that he had been watching the news and had come to the conclusion that it was safe to be there. “So, I have no issues,” he said, failing to understand that he was being asked a moral question that went beyond his own safety.

As if to help him along, the correspondent explained that the fan had been “a senior at Notre Dame back in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, when the Fighting Irish played Georgia and lost big time.” Back in the studio, the host chuckled. “OK, so he’s looking for payback,” she said.

Laughing for the camera. An unintentionally pointed preposition. I think I meant only to say at, but what if it was performative, either in response to a cameraman urging the women to vandalise a photograph of an unknown and possibly already slaughtered Jew, or an act of bravado on the women’s own parts? You never know for sure what you are looking at on film or how it came to be there. But the brief scene was unforgettably hateful in its callous insolence, however one interprets it. Scrawling with a marker — a marker bought for the occasion? — over the face of someone you don’t know. Someone in desperate trouble. A small act of terror in itself, I thought. And then, in tearing it off the wall, as though to say “may you never be found’, a smiling act of collusion in the abduction, the disappearance and, perhaps ultimately, the murder. A message to the family who invested hope in that poster: may you be eternally disappointed!

I have wondered — sitting this past year in the cowardly sanctuary of my London apartment, listening to the warlike whirr of the helicopters and the scarcely less warlike yells of the weekly peace protest — whether the women have ever seen that footage of themselves. And, whether they have or they haven’t, if they’ve regretted it. They did what they did very soon after the massacre, while the smell of blood and rumour lingered still in the air, when every charge was met by denial, and it was all too easy to read events according to the rigidities of one’s politics. Even the evidence of our eyes became handmaidens to falsehood. Rape? What rape? Rape didn’t suit the prepossessions of the hour. But is it not possible, now that time has passed and certainties have been shaken, that the women recall what they did with shame and maybe even reproach each other with it? “It was your idea.” “No it was yours.”

What if — while we are wondering — they wondered, when they saw pictures of released hostages, whether one of them was their hostage? Would that have made them feel better? Or what if, when they saw pictures of murdered hostages, they wondered if one of those was theirs? Would that have pierced their carapace of mirth? Or was the original defacement an expression of inexpugnable loathing?

Which brings us back to what is for me the greatest mystery of all: how the slaughter and, in some cases, dismemberment of innocent Israelis, men, women and children can have delighted educated people around the world to the point where there was no further violence against them — not even genocide “in context” if we read Harvard’s President correctly — that they couldn’t countenance with joy?

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Is this the end of Israel?

By Howard Jacobson

Yes, it was hysteria and many of the more publicly hysterical have since rowed back a little on their frenzy. But why, at any stage of the massacre, was there irrationality on this scale? We were back in the Middle Ages, some said, when the Jew was in league with the devil and hatred of him was unquestioned and contagious. But wasn’t that hatred begat from ignorance? Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?

To the two grinning women I ask this question: what did you hate so much about that hostage? That he or she was a Jew? That he or she was a Zionist? I am going to assume you will say that towards Jews, as Jews, you entertain no animosity. You are not racists. What is it about Zionists, then, that you will tear at their faces and call for their obliteration? Their colonialist endeavours? You look educated; you will know, in that case, of Zionism’s origins in 19th-century thought (the novelist George Eliot was an early advocate), that it was a movement to help a beleaguered refugee people achieve self-determination not unlike that sought by Palestinians today and supported by you, and who, to begin with, had no colonial or exploitative ambitions. Yes, there were exceptions. Pioneers might not be colonists but that doesn’t make them saints. Nor are refugees above fighting dirty to grab a better life. But a minority of overweening, hard-hearted Jews does not a Zionist Empire make, any more than Hamas makes a Palestinian People.

I harbour no ill will towards Palestinians, so when I say that they made life hard for the first Zionists, I am not blaming them. I understand why they feared for the future of their land when largely European Jews, however weakened and peaceable, began their return to a country they — not without the justification of history — considered theirs too. In answer to Palestinian fears and resistance grew Zionist fears and resistance. Why apportion blame? We wouldn’t have the word “intractable” if we didn’t need it to describe conflicts with no simple solutions. And this is one of them.

There are bad Zionists. There are bad Palestinians. I am a Jew and on the side of Zionism, which doesn’t make me an enemy of people who aren’t. I understand Zionism’s original necessity. Any student of history should. But I do not seek the obliteration of Palestinians because they opposed Zionism almost from the start, waged continuous war on it, and butchered every Zionist they could lay their hands on one year ago.

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Why I'm sticking with Joe

By Howard Jacobson

All right, October 7 was Hamas’s doing. You didn’t look like Hamas to me. And you might or might not have been Palestinian. But you too revelled in the destruction of a Zionist who was unknown to you and of whose political beliefs you were ignorant. He might, for all you knew, have been a passionate advocate of peace. There are many such Israelis. But every Israeli was a Zionist to you and every Zionist a devil. Explain that to me. What does it feel like to hate so irrationally, to so relinquish your independence of judgement that you will hate on someone else’s say so and make an enemy of a poster?

See if you can find that clip. It might have originated as a selfie, so you could just have it on your phone still, along with your holiday snaps. Or you could have confused it, after the event, for a fashion shot. Voguish outfits, voguish opinions. If you do find it, take a long look. I can’t recall whether the incident took place in the course of a peace march, but if it did, ask yourself how it might have contributed to the peace, how it might have saved a single life, not of a Zionist (since you hate Zionists and so don’t care), but a Palestinian.

You may choose to accuse me of Jewsplaining. Fine. Better that than having my face scratched off. Understand, however, that it is not only as a Jew but as everything else I am that I ask you to acknowledge the barbarism of what you did. To hate without knowing who you hate, to de-person a stranger, is to let ignorance be your tutor. And once ignorance rules, darkness descends on everybody.

That isn’t the only parallel between the massacre last year and its precursors in New York and Paris. As with 9/11, the horrors of 7/10 were initially marked by shock, then calls for huge retaliation. As after 9/11, a backlash swiftly followed. Over the past 12 months, campuses and city streets have been swept by anti-Zionism, just as anti-Americanism became the rage on the Left in the early 2000s. Two decades ago, moreover, there were massive protests decrying America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and calls for the troops to stay home, much like today’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. And as after 9/11, the backlash proved impotent. The US hung on in Afghanistan until 2021. Today, Israel is busy expanding its war to Lebanon — and perhaps soon to Iran as well.

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Yet surely the strongest parallel between those earlier atrocities and October 7 isn’t the bursts of violence, or the reaction, or the escalation. It’s that term I started with. It’s Islamism, and the way the West consistently refuses to name its true enemy. I mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, along with those other barbarians at the gates. On September 12, 2001, after all, we declared a war on “terror”. But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. In later years, as the enemy started to strike us at home in Western towns and cities, we called it “violent extremism” and lumped it together with fascism and other forms of homegrown zealotry.

This happened first, and most importantly, because the enemy told us it was fighting in the name of Islam, and we refused and still refuse, categorically, to wage war on one of the world’s great faiths. Second, we thought we could use our vast military and intelligence resources to weaken and destroy the enemy without being trapped into starting a war with a fifth of humanity. We failed to understand the difference between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.

By failing to name Islamism as our enemy, we allowed it to prosper. Consider, for instance, what happened in Afghanistan. After 20 years of fighting that enemy without a name, spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of lives, we abandoned the country to the Islamist thugs of the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in American history, cloaked by shabby political expediency. We looked away as the Islamists catapulted Afghan women and minorities back to another Dark Age.

There have been other consequences too, often much closer to home. As we remained silent, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots quietly entrenched themselves across Western cities, from Australian universities to Manchester suburbs. Enabling them to build mosques and take over schools, moreover, our silence has allowed them to proclaim themselves as spokespeople for every Muslim in the West.

This continued reluctance to see the enemy before us allows it to burrow into more and more hearts. As increasing numbers of desperate people arrive upon our shores from war-torn lands, many are finding solace in a new community in those same mosques and schools, as well as online. And for those of us unwilling to turn a blind eye, our Islamist enemies are ready with their tried-and-tested accusations of Islamophobia, carefully deployed to shut down discussion of the true nature of their threat. Any critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are defamed as racist and intolerant — as purveyors of “hate”.

In this effort to freeze discussion the Islamists are aided and abetted by the ideological Left. In Europe, they proclaim their faith in multiculturalism. In America, social justice warriors do the work on campuses and adjacent institutions.

And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and only one year after October 7, we are still refusing to name our enemy. The irony is that not everyone struggles as we do in the West. Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home, the protector of Mecca and Medina, yet which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Syria, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt. This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques — and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology right across the region and beyond. I witnessed this firsthand, in Kenya. They came to my home when I was only 15, and seized control of our local mosque. One reason I understand the Muslim Brotherhood is that, as a teenager, I was recruited to it.

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At first, the Saudis thought they and the Brotherhood were ideologically aligned. But the Brotherhood eventually turned around and tried to overthrow them. At that point, the Saudi princes, capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity, rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, their mosques, their newspapers — and their soil.

Today, a year on from Hamas’ heinous attack on Israel, we should welcome Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and most importantly, against Iran. Yet Israel must also learn from America’s mistakes. Remember that the war isn’t over until the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is destroyed. And for that to happen, we must first recognise our enemy in our midst, and that begins by naming it.

But it was also a threat. In 2007, 22,000 African Union (AU) troops were brought into Somalia to support Mogadishu’s fragile government. But at the end of this year, they are scheduled to leave. And there’s every reason to believe that al-Shabaab could take over and destabilise neighbouring nations with a large Somali diaspora. Indeed, there are already reports that al-Shabaab is in contact with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. Such an alliance would further imperil international shipping routes and have enormous consequences for the world economy.

It could also spark more serious threats closer to home. After all, in the aftermath of 9/11, it was in Somalia — not Iraq or Afghanistan — that a new generation of Western jihadists were spawned.

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By Tam Hussein

By the turn of the century, London had already become a haven for dissident preachers and jihadi ideologues: Abu Qatada, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, Hani al-Sibai and Abu Hamza al-Masri. But it also produced its own English-speaking radicals, who coalesced in a square mile known as Lisson Green, in the very same borough as the Houses of Parliament.

Many of the youngsters who grew up in the area had been too young to be meaningfully aware of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan or Bosnia, but they swam in the ideological currents of the aftermath. Sheikh Abu Qatadah, a top jihadi ideologue, used to deliver sermons there on Fridays. As did Anwar Awlaki, a firebrand preacher who openly gave jihadist talks and was a favourite of Mohammed Emwazi, the man who would later become known as “Jihadi John”. Just down the road, Muhammad al-Rifai, a man who claimed to be the Caliph of the whole Muslim world, lived in a council flat.

A few years ago, one of those who heard their sermons agreed to speak to me using the pseudonym Abdullah. Abdullah grew up in Lisson Green and attended the youth club where I worked for one summer in 2003. He told me about the Islamist currents that dominated the area: even the local five-a-side soccer team was named the “Shishanees” (the Chechens). Abdullah became devout during his teenage years and joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist organisation that called for the return of the Caliphate. As an activist, he invited many of its members to his secondary school to give speeches to the Muslim pupils.

The youngsters stewed in this ideological cauldron when a new conflict emerged in Somalia. The fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre’s government in 1991 created a power vacuum and a decade-long civil war. Eventually, the Somali people’s desire for peace and order resulted in the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). This group, founded by religious scholars, established a semblance of law and order in the capital Mogadishu and succeeded in pushing out the nation’s CIA-backed warlords by 2006. In Lisson Green, this was a cause for celebration. A new generation of British Muslims had grown up with tales of Western jihadis and their spirited adventures in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, and they were eager to emulate them. Suddenly, they saw their opportunity in Somalia.

They were encouraged in this by Abdul Majid, an outspoken Somali-British local who drew many youngsters into his orbit, especially Bilal Berjawi, who attended the same youth club as Abdullah. Berjawi was a pug-faced bruiser with a Beckham-like voice and a reputation as a fighter. He attracted a circle of boys from the youth club and they travelled to Somalia in 2007.

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Some described the times under the ICU as idyllic. Some, such as Mohammed Ezzouek, went there claiming to want to study Islam and live under Islamic law. But the good times did not last. The Ethiopian government, alarmed by the presence of the ICU on its border, pushed them out of Mogadishu and rearmed the warlords who were back in the capital by the end of the year. This attack on the ICU radicalised its youth wing and it later split off as a separate organisation known as Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen — the Young Mujahideen Movement, or al-Shabaab for short. And as they embarked on a war against the Ethiopians, al-Shabaab declared allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Faced with this threat, the young men from Lisson Green fled Somalia trying to reach safety in Kenya. Once there, some were detained and interrogated, while a handful returned to the UK having turned their back on both Somalia and Islamist ideology. Others, however, became more radicalised. And chief among them was Berjawi, who became a full member of al-Shabaab and was purportedly trained by Harun Fazul, the man behind the 1998 terrorist bombings in East Africa. Indeed, Fazul chose Berjawi as the leader of the London network. Over the next few years, Berjawi came in and out of the UK to fundraise for the group.

After proving himself, Berjawi went on to become an important commander for al-Shabaab, until he was killed in 2012 by the US in a drone strike, reportedly with British complicity. But Berjawi left behind those he recruited: in particular, Mohammed Sakr, Mohammed Emwazi and Alexanda Kotey. Sakr and Emwazi tried to enter Somalia again in 2009, using a cover story that they were going on safari in Tanzania. In Syria, Emwazi and Kotey would become the Western faces of the Caliphate.

Meanwhile, those who could not take part in jihad in Syria were recruited to carry out terror attacks in the UK. Michael Adebolajo, an associate of Berjawi who had tried to join al-Shabaab, murdered British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013. Three years later, two promising university students, Tarik Hassane and Suhaib Majeed, were convicted for their part in an Isis terror plot in West London; both men were from Lisson Green or nearby. They had been acting under Kotey’s instructions.

This was the effect of the rise of al-Shabaab. At the time, policymakers appeared to be more preoccupied with threats emerging from Afghanistan and Iraq, or dealing with the aftermath of major terror attacks such as the one that took place in London on 7/7, to appreciate the presence al-Shabaab had on a small but significant number of young Muslims in the West. Somalia appeared distant and war-torn.

Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation, with a turbo-charged jihadi discourse heightened by the horrific situation in Palestine. Young disaffected Muslims watch as the media appears outraged by Russian targeting of hospitals in Ukraine but relatively indifferent when the IDF targets hospitals in Gaza. They see themselves as othered, devalued and forgotten. Spurred on by social media and Telegram groups, they see the likes of the Taliban defeating the Americans or the Houthis doing something for Gaza while the rest of the Muslim world appears impotent.

For them, al-Shabaab offers an animating force. If its flags rise in Mogadishu, a new generation of Western jihadists could return to the Horn of Africa.

Yet dig a little deeper and things become a tad more nuanced. For all the caustic characterisations thrown the rioters’ way, their motives were far more complex and varied.

Thus far, police have made more than 1,000 arrests connected to the riots. More than 40 people have already been sentenced and that number is likely to rise markedly in the coming weeks. Already, however, what is striking about this group is their heterogeneity. Among the not so usual suspects: a 43-year-old woman who pushed a wheelie bin at police; a 34-year-old homeless mother-of-five who contrived to do the same, but instead ended up face-planting at the feet of her intended target; a 25-year-old homeless man; an 18-year-old with ADHD, a 15-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy; a bingo-playing gay couple; and a 69-year-old retired welder.

The nature and seriousness of the violence of the rioters seems to vary greatly too, ranging from vandalism on cars to punching a police officer in the face. While the worst of the violence was very grave indeed — a library was torched and sacked in Liverpool, and there were attempts to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers — some was more ridiculous than properly lethal: one teenager, aged 19, lobbed an egg at the police while chanting in support of Tommy Robinson.

Yet while there doesn’t seem to be a single profile of a rioter, three profiles have emerged — profiles that, ultimately, we need to distinguish if we’re to understand why these riots took place. Based on trial information and extensive online footage of the riots, they are: Combatants, Geezers and Scallies, and Losers.

The first group — Combatants — refers to the kind of rioter that many have in mind when invoking the image of the far-Right thug: namely, inveterate racists alongside self-proclaimed patriots motivated by fears about white replacement and hostility to the British state and police for their perceived collusion in this. Combatants are almost exclusively men who see themselves as defenders not only of English culture, but as the protectors of English women and girls — from, in their eyes, the rapacious sexual desires of non-white, and especially Muslim, immigrant men.

Despite this relatively strict categorisation, what remains unclear is how many Combatants were involved in the riots, how much of the violence they were responsible for, and whether that violence had been planned in advance. Nor do we know whether they were members or affiliates of organised far-Right groups or looser networks of ex-EDL activists and hooligans, like 28-year-old Liam Ryan who assaulted a black man during unrest in Manchester city centre and was already subject to a football banning order.

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The second group — Geezers and Scallies — refers to older and younger men respectively with criminal backgrounds whose participation in the riots was motivated not by any considered ideological grievances, but an abiding interest in manufacturing mayhem and the drama of violent contention. Historically, riots have always attracted this kind of dissolute stress-seeker, because they present ripe opportunities for a tremendous tear-up, including hand-to-hand combat with reviled authorities and the ritualised looting of goods that are later invariably discarded or destroyed.

Unlike the violence of Combatants, there is no instrumental logic to the violence of Geezers and Scallies: it is done and enjoyed for its own sake, because it’s thrilling and existentially satisfying. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that the violence is senseless; indeed, during much of the past fortnight’s disorder, it’s hard to miss the blatant defiance, spite and mockery on show towards the police. One rioter, for example, prior to having a brick thrown at his groin, danced effeminately in front of riot police, an act of mockery that was captured in camera-phone footage that swiftly went viral.

The final group — Losers — refers to that type of rioter, both male and female, whose participation in the riots was spontaneous and situational. Many of these accidental rioters were drunk when they entered the fray, either because they’re alcoholics or had been out on a bender or both; one 30-year-old rioter who hurled metal sheeting at police in Hartlepool had reportedly drank 30 cans of larger and had no memory of his involvement in the disorder. For some, it was the first time they had been in serious trouble with the police before, unlike the other two categories of rioters, many of whom have extensive rap-sheets.

It isn’t fully clear why the roughly dozen Losers sentenced so far participated in the violence, and none can coherently explain it, other than that something in the spectacle of violence beckoned them to enter it and join in the communal revelry of semi-authorised transgression. This is something most now deeply regret and not a few have sought to distance themselves from the ideological convictions of the Combatants they were rioting alongside. For example, Kieron Gatenby, whose sentence of 16 months in prison for lobbing an egg at police in Hartlepool seems especially harsh, did not harbour any racist views, according to a probation report. “He says he is disgusted at being involved with people who were chanting racist slurs,” Gatenby’s solicitor told Teesside Crown Court at his sentencing hearing. Similarly, it transpired at the hearing of Stacey Vint that her involvement in the riots in Middlesbrough was animated more by alcohol than ideology.

Of course, the overall picture may yet change. But it does seem to suggest that the narrative that the riots were wholly the handiwork of far-Right thugs is oversimplistic. Many of the rioters didn’t see themselves as part of some political resistance; they were bored and some were angry.

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The other salutary effect of looking at the profiles of the rioters is that it humanises them: in those pallid and lived-in faces in the police mugshots, we see a cross section of English working-class people from mostly northern towns. We read reports of teenage boys and girls who were involved in the disturbances and perhaps wonder about their turbulent lives and “lived experience” of white privilege. We read about someone like Stacey Vint, who is homeless because she fled an abusive relationship, and perhaps feel a stab of sympathy for her — or at least some sense of injustice that she was given such a punitive sentence (20 months in prison).

By contrast, you don’t find much humane empathy towards the rioters on social media or in the liberal press, but instead contempt and loathing. This expresses itself in different ways, one of which is a blatantly classist revulsion that sees the rioters as an odious and atavistic skidmark on multicultural society. The other is a kind of elite disdain that hides its moral revulsion under the cover of alarmist concern over the “radicalisation” of white working-class people; here, ordinary aspects of white working-class culture such as piss-taking are interpreted as signs of extremism in precisely the same way that ordinary aspects of conservative Islam were once red-flagged by Right-leaning terrorism experts like Sebastian Gorka.

None of this is to say that we should be sentimental or lenient towards the rioters. But it is imperative that we avoid painting them all with the same brush — and that means doing the more painstaking work of looking closely at their profiles and motives. Those who do otherwise — whether they are the Prime Minister, a think-tanker or a grifter angling for the Government’s attention — can call the rioters far-Right thugs or even terrorists if they like. But they shouldn’t kid themselves that they’re doing anything other than playing the grubby game of politics, much less providing any understanding of why the riots unfolded, and how they could unfold again.

Then there are those who, far from being curious, want to stare into the face of a suspected perpetrator and see their worst enemy projected back at them. Since the Southport knife attack on Monday, it is this tribe that has been most vocal.

Until today, the name of the suspect behind the stabbing rampage was not released; he is 17 and the law prohibits the naming of child suspects in criminal proceedings, except in very rare circumstances. And yet, within hours of the Southport rampage, a number of accounts on X claimed to have seen his name. “He is alleged to be on MI5’s watch list, had ‘mental issues’ and was a Channel migrant,” wrote one conservative “journalist” with more than 200,000 followers. Laurence Fox, meanwhile, blamed the attack on the “national emergency” of uncontrolled immigration. In response, he croaked, “you’re about to see the roar of the British lion”. In the event, that lion turned out to be a tanked-up geezer in a tracksuit, while his roar amounted to hurling wheelie bins and bricks at police.

Within hours, it had become clear that these claims were false. According to Merseyside Police, the suspect was in fact born in Cardiff. We also know that he moved to the Southport area with his Rwandan parents when he was aged six. In other words, he was a second-generation immigrant, not an undocumented migrant who had recently arrived in an illegal boat.

But put this knowledge to one side — should the personal identity of the perpetrator of mass-casualty violence matter? From a human perspective, it shouldn’t; had the suspect of the Southport atrocity been a white teen whose parents were from Reading instead of Rwanda, the horror wouldn’t be any less horrific. Yet even so, it does matter, to the degree that it might shed a light on the motives (if any) of the perpetrator. Atheists called John Smith, for example, are unlikely to carry out acts of jihadist violence, while women don’t commit incel-inspired outrages.

And of course, in today’s atomised world, identity has never commanded such political and existential power. Had the suspect of Monday’s stabbing spree indeed been white, and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children, it seems likely that many on social media would condemn Britain’s racist superstructure. Which is to say that politicising massacres isn’t just a vice of the online Right, but is fully alive among online progressives too.

Merseyside Police, for its part, has said that the motivation behind the Southport attack is “unclear”, that it is not being treated as terror-related, and that the suspect acted alone. Two possibilities follow from this. The first is that the suspect had personal reasons for launching his attack, however outrageously shallow, incomprehensible or incoherent they may seem to us. For all we know, he may have wanted Taylor Swift to notice him, much like John Hinckley Jr, who tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981, wanted Jodie Foster to notice him. As Kat Rosenfield recently observed in a smart piece on Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, “the desperate desire to believe that life-shattering violence must have some kind of deeper meaning”, though understandable, belies the fact that a lot of violence is “not just senseless, but depthless, a lizard-brained impulse in search of an outlet”.

The second possibility is that the suspect may be mentally ill and that his illness is such that he had no clear or stable motives for doing his attack; that is, he acted not according to his free will, but in response to some imagined voice, command or imperative that he felt he had no choice but to follow. According to a recent report in The Guardian, police investigators are “increasingly focusing on the state of their suspect’s mental health or potential neurodivergence in the years before the attack”.

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For those seeking to make political hay out of the Southport massacre, this second possibility is vehemently rejected as a form of rank gaslighting designed to distract us from what they see as truth — which seems to be that the sort of people who commit monstrous atrocities against children are not from here but over there, where monstrousness is widespread. As one prolific commentator on the online Right put it: “If they come out and they say this geezer’s got mental health problems… I’m on it… We’re not in a Middle Eastern country… This is England.”

Elsewhere, another prominent poster sought to expose, in his view, the blatant double standards around the reporting of political atrocities in the UK: “If Southport killer is white = far-Right. If Southport killer isn’t white = mental illness/thoughts and prayers.” If this formulation has a familiar ring to it, it is because it is an exact inversion of a particular brand of Muslim victimology which holds that, if the perpetrator of lethal violence is Muslim, he is automatically branded as a terrorist by the media, whereas if he is white, he is portrayed as a lone wolf with mental health problems.

Others have insisted that the Southport attack, for all its unique and unspeakable horror, is part of a wider pattern of mass-casualty violence in the UK, where the perpetrators are disproportionately first or second-generation immigrants. Is it racist to point this out? It certainly can be, and much of the commentary in recent days has been infused with prejudice. But, crucially, it doesn’t have to be. For example, the claim that black or Muslim people are intrinsically violent or terror-prone is, undoubtedly, grossly racist. What isn’t racist, however, is to sensitively explore the economic, social and cultural circumstances in which individuals and groups act, and investigate how those circumstances may allow malevolent impulses to flourish.

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How might this look in practice? Most obviously, it requires us to look at the nature of an individual’s encounters with wider British society and how or whether it has failed them in some way. But it also requires us to explore the pathologies of tribal grievance and cultures of honour, shame and retribution that migrants themselves bring to their host society, and how this in turn shapes their encounters with it. We also need to probe the relationship between migrant populations and mental illness: if culturally displaced people, particularly those who have fled war zones, are more prone to mental health problems, how can we better treat them to manage their risk to others and to themselves?

These are difficult and urgent questions that neither the Right nor the Left seem willing to address; with the former seemingly content to stoke white victimology for clicks and likes, and the latter inclined to pretend that the real problem is the reaction to such violence by the far-Right. And in the middle, many are left idly wondering how such an outwardly normal and introverted kid could be suspected of doing something so unfathomably evil.

Mired in toxicity, there are surely few more depressing ways to honour the victims of Southport. There is nothing “British” about it, and nor is it “progressive”. And, almost certainly, it won’t help to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Last Friday, at about 11:30am, a 25-year-old Afghan went on a knife spree at a rally in Mannheim. He stabbed Michael Stürzenberger, the convener of the rally, along with a policeman and four others, before a second policeman shot him. Two days later, the officer succumbed to his wounds.

We still don’t know everything about the incident. What we do know, though, is that it is a deeply sad — and obvious — metaphor for the way Western countries function. People protest Islamic violence. The press smears them. Islamists attack. The state tries to subdue the protestors. The Islamists continue attacking. Rinse and repeat.

It isn’t even the first time Stürzenberger’s protests have been attacked. He has been assaulted twice before by Islamists, in 2013 and in 2022. Why? Well, according to the mainstream media, he is a far-Right extremist. As Euronews puts it: he has been “previously linked to Pegida, a xenophobic extreme-Right group with a strong neo-Nazi following, prompting an investigation by the German federal state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.

And what did this investigation uncover? Little more than the fact that he’s a relatively normal man who condemns Islamic violence — and who, like many such people, including some of my friends, has now ended up being stabbed. Yet Stürzenberger’s normalcy hasn’t stopped the German legal system from persecuting him. One of his convictions was for sharing a photo on Facebook of a Nazi shaking hands with an Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a doctored photo. Just a photo. After all, photos reveal facts — but in Germany, even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record.

Last week’s attack prompted the standard response from the German political establishment. The Chancellor condemned it. He expressed sadness. His government promises to investigate, to defend “against Islamist terrorism with determination”. But did anyone buy it? Though there are exceptions like Hungary, these attacks seem to happen regardless of national borders, and regardless of whether the country in question has a Left-wing or a Right-wing government.

The more cynical among us are inclined to claim that they keep happening because no one really cares. But that is lazy thinking. Not all of these politicians are feckless monsters, however temporarily gratifying it may feel to say so.

So why do they seem to do nothing? Part of the answer — a significant part of the answer — lies with the cluster of policies and assumptions that all mainstream European countries have written into their rules regarding immigration.

The first concerns treaties. These governments are signatories to international treaties that inadvertently leave them with no option but to leave their borders unprotected and to allow unwanted migrants to stay put. The Geneva Convention on Refugees. The European Court of Human Rights. As long as these are in place, national governments can do little to stop Islamists from entering — even if they wanted to.

The second concerns constitutions. Western nations abide by constitutional laws that leave them with no alternative but to allow the Islamists to recruit operatives and establish networks, mosques, schools and charities devoted to the spread of political Islam. Again, there is nothing they are able to do, because Islam is not singled out in their constitution as a singular cause for concern. If it were, the lawyers for these institutions would sue, saying that it is illegal to treat Islam differently. And, infuriatingly, under the current system, they would be right.

The third concerns perceptions. Our governments assume that anyone — citizen or organisation; journalist, politician or academic — critical of the government’s way of handling Islamism is a dangerous bigot who must be shamed into silence. Maybe such attitudes were forgivable half a century ago, but it is pretty obvious now that there is nothing bigoted about fearing Islamism. Islamists make that clear with increasing regularity. Nonetheless, it is not as if any human is immune to the effects of the echo chamber. The elites swim in a pool where everyone believes that racism underlies opposition to open borders. This is particularly true of Germany’s elites, who are still so focused on stopping the re-emergence of Nazism that they see it everywhere, and are blind to any other threat.

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What this means is that, without a seismic shift, there is actually very little that can easily be done about the first two problems. Even if he wanted to, the Chancellor of Germany does not have the authority to change Germany’s basic law, let alone an electoral mandate. And while the Bundestag could just about get Germany out of some of its international treaties, because those treaties underwrite Germany’s international relations, they underwrite the trade her economy needs for survival.

The constitutional problem is broadly similar. All constitutions lack perfect foresight. Of course, it’s true that, when these documents were written, states had no business treating religions differently. But that was before Islamism arrived. Once Islamic migration really began in earnest, the days of procedural neutrality should have ended. And while none of this is to say that peaceful, patriotic Muslims should be targeted, Islamism — as I well know — is plainly different.

We do not yet know whether Mannheim’s second attacker, who stabbed an AfD politician on Tuesday night, was an asylum-seeker. He may have just been an ordinary immigrant, or even a German-born citizen. But if I were a betting woman, I would bet he came in on one of the many schemes designed to help threatened people, in very small numbers, in a previous era. Most conventions around refugees were drawn up just after the Second World War or the Cold War, with those conflicts’ problems in mind. Things are different now, and the change is killing our nations.

What is the cure? It certainly doesn’t involve electing a centre-right government. As the past 14 years in the UK have shown, centre-right governments do nothing. Instead, what is needed is a shift in international and constitutional law, or events like those in Germany will just keep happening until the nations of Europe collapse.

No doubt I’ll write this article again in a year. And the year after that. But if we think big, and enough of us wake up, then one day, I’ll be able to stop. Until then.

A recent article in The Telegraph, warning of “the ‘perfect storm’ turning teenagers into terrorists”, is a case in point. The opening few paragraphs focus on Joe Metcalfe, a white neo-Nazi from Haworth, West Yorkshire, who had plotted to kill Muslims in an attack modelled on the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019.“The acne-afflicted teenager,” we are told, “is part of a growing phenomenon of teenage terror offenders in Britain, with 2023 seeing a new record of 42 under-18s arrested.” The report also singles out the case of another white teen, albeit one who converted to Islam and planned to attack non-Muslims at the Isle of Wight music festival in July 2022.

The subliminal message conveyed here is that indigenous British white boys are not all right, but rather are potentially far-Right— a message that news outlets have been pushing ad infinitum for the past few years. Drill down into the actual data on Britain’s convicted teen terrorists, however, and you will find a different and less politically convenient story. According to a report published last November by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, between January 2016 and October 2023, 43 individuals in England and Wales were convicted of terrorism offences they committed as minors. The majority were far-Right (25), while 16 were jihadi and two had no clear or known ideological motivation. All except one — Safaa Boular, who was jailed for life for her role in an Isis-inspired plot to attack the British Museum — were male. The youngest was just 13. (The authors of the report, Hannah Rose and Gina Vale, have posted their dataset here.)

More striking, though, was the fact that none of the 43 had managed to commit an act of terrorist violence, none had procured a firearm and only one had come close to making a workable explosive device. Indeed, most were not, in fact, terrorists at all, but were instead the online fanboys of terrorism: they had downloaded, disseminated or created terrorist content on the internet — and a few had done a combination of all three. These are all offences under UK terrorism legislation and are punishable by up to 15 years’ imprisonment. One of the teens, a neo-Nazi from west London, had made a poster inciting violence against Prince Harry, calling him “race traitor” on account of his marriage to Meghan Markle. Another, a Muslim from Sutton Coldfield, had set up a “mujahdeen channel” on Telegram, where he gave a lesson on how to make a Molotov cocktail and offered advice on how to travel to Syria to join the jihad there.

The data cast an illuminating light on the ideology of the offenders, but you need to probe further to understand its implications. Of the 43 teenagers in Rose and Vale’s dataset, 13 — almost a third — were convicted of preparation of terrorist acts, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. And of those 13, seven had sought to join jihadi groups in war zones in the Middle East and North Africa, but were stopped by counter-terrorism police, while eight had unsuccessfully plotted to carry out terrorist acts in the UK. Among that last group, five were far-Right and three were jihadi.

Rose and Vale acknowledge that the “more serious” terrorism offences “were more common among Islamist individuals”, but they don’t enlarge on this point, although they make it clear that of the eight who plotted terrorist violence, the two who came closest to succeeding were jihadi-inspired. “While the extreme Right-wing teenage plotters outnumber Islamists in our dataset,” they write, “it is interesting to note that two planned large-scale Islamist attacks could meet the threshold of ‘late stage’ disruption after months of research and reconnaissance.”

It is also interesting to note that Rose and Vale’s dataset would look very different had they gone further back to the declaration of the Isis caliphate in mid-2014, giving them a decade-long perspective. That dataset would have included Shamima Begum and her two now deceased schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, and the other Bethnal Green schoolgirl who apparently inspired all three, Sharmeena Begum. It would have also included Talha Asmal, 17, who travelled from Dewsbury to Iraq to join Isis and in June 2015 carried out a suicide bombing there. And it would have included many other teenage boys who made the same dismal life-choices as Asmal. It would, in short, have produced an overwhelming statistical disproportion between jihadists and the far-Right and further cemented the impression that British teenagers who embrace jihad are far more dangerous than those who engage in far-Right terror fandoms in their bedrooms.

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Another striking detail is that there are no incels among the 43 convicted teens. I point this out because while incel culture has reportedly “gone mainstream” in UK schools, no British schoolboy until now has been convicted of incel-related terrorism offences in this country. Given the enormous gaslighting around this issue of late, and the even bigger public and private digital-training-grift that parasitically engorges on it, the conspicuous absence of incels in the data is more than noteworthy.

A yet further striking detail is that of the 43 offenders, 13 had been referred at least once to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalisation programme, which, according to William Shawcross’s review last year, is excessively focused on Right-wing extremism, despite 80% of live police investigations involving Islamist plots. Prevent’s defenders insist that the scheme has stopped countless young people from engaging in extremism, but it’s impossible to empirically demonstrate this, given that we can’t know how their lives would have turned out had they not received support from Prevent. What we do know, however, is that a significant number who had received such support went on to commit terrorism offences. In one revealing section, Rose and Vale quote one of the teens as boasting: “I just had a two-hour conversation with a coconut mozlem which works with the government…He tried to ‘deradicalise’ me…They think we’re gunna stop following the haqq [truth] out of fear of them or of ignorance.”

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Looking at the cold data, then, the overwhelming picture that emerges is not of dangerous masterminds, but of chaotic and cretinous loners immersed in an infantile online demi-monde of gore, murder fandom and sectarian hatred. Many grew up in troubled families and suffer from mental health problems, particularly autism. And while they were all vigorously invested in their ideological beliefs, their ability to competently act on them was, as Rose and Vale moderately put it, “less clear-cut”. Joe Metcalfe, for example, would have been a more serious proposition had he known how to drive: his plot came to a pitiful end when he stole his dad’s car and crashed it into a fence. Another far-Right plotter from Rugby was similarly ham-fisted, prompting the judge at his trial to describe his attack-planning as “inept”.

None of this means that teenage extremists are not a potential threat, and Rose and Vale are rightly determined to dispel the idea that they have no agency and were led astray by mysterious “online groomers”. The recent stabbing of an Assyrian bishop by a 16-year-old boy in Sydney testifies to this: he survived the attack, but his right eye didn’t.

The attack was revealing in other ways, too. Bishop Emmanuel has apparently forgiven his attacker, which is his right to do of course, while a spokesperson for the attacker’s family has relayed to the media that the teen had “anger management” problems and is a devout Muslim without being “fanatical”. Here we can see the inverse of today’s extremism panic, where the temptation is to pretend that it’s not happening at all, or that it’s only happening among those sketchy white kids.

The Head of the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing, Matt Jukes, recently told a journalist that, when he first started his career in counter-terrorism 25 years ago, the dominant foes were organised groups such as al-Qaeda, whereas today the threat-picture looks very different: “One in five of the people we arrest [today] is a child… principally boys,” he said, adding that some were as young as 11 and that much of his work is now taken up with liaising less with MI5 and more with child and adolescent mental health services, schools and colleges.

Counter Terrorism Policing, in other words, has become an ancillary of Britain’s already over-bloated and ever-expanding therapeutic state. This is alarming for all sorts of reasons. Not only does it risk stigmatising the young people who come within its remit, but it also diverts resources away from investigating threats that are far more serious than that posed by acne-ridden teenagers in their bedrooms.

The Manual spooked Western intelligence agencies. Did this mean that terrorists were being trained to operate like MI6 agents? And if so, how could they be defeated? It’s a paranoia that has only grown in the past two decades. From terrorist groups to semiconductor companies, non-state actors increasingly have access to highly sensitive information of national importance. Espionage is now anyone’s game; the need for security everywhere. Only this week, two men in the UK — including a former parliamentary aide — were charged under the Official Secrets Act with spying on behalf of China. And while this might seem a throwback to a Le Carré world of inter-state espionage, the reality is that any modern spy worth their salt would be as interested in Britain’s private sector as it is in our government.

The British state has begun to realise this. In 2022, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum and FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a joint address to business and academic leaders. When it came to the threat of Chinese espionage and cyberattacks, they said: “most of what is at risk from the Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It’s yours.” Nowadays, private companies developing products in areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotech have access to such sensitive information that, if it got into the wrong hands, it would be a national security issue.

Far from the Cold War era of stealing nuclear secrets — think Aldrich Ames and the Rosenbergs — spies today are more likely to want to nick your PowerPoint. In January last year, a Chinese spy named Zheng Xiaoqing stole a data file from General Electric Power, which related to the design and manufacturing of gas and steam turbines. The IP was thought to be worth several million. He attempted to hide the file within the code of another file — a picture of a sunset — using a technique called steganography. The choice of target is instructive: it is increasingly the Nvidias and ASMLs of the world (both semiconductor companies), and not the CIA or MI5, which have access to secret information of national importance.

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This diffusion of knowledge and power away from the state and intelligence agencies, and towards private companies, marks a stark shift from the Cold War era. Back then, there was no confusion: the British and American intelligence communities had a monopoly over secrets. In fact, the Cold War was in many ways a war of intelligence, and its Manichean nature — an existential competition between the US and the Soviet Union — was far more stable than our current multipolar system. As Tom King, chair of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee in the Nineties, lamented in 1998: “Was not the Cold War, in its awful way, a form of rigid security system that has now collapsed?”

Ironically, globalisation was initially seen as the panacea for Cold War tension. The Marshall Plan of 1948 was President Truman’s attempt to induce Europe not to turn red with a large injection of cash. And four decades later, it was the desire for American blue jeans which helped bring down the Berlin Wall. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of terrorism, that the West figured out that globalisation and interdependency was a threat, not a cure. Today, in an interconnected world where we rely upon one Taiwanese company (TSMC) for all of our smartphones, economic and national security have become one and the same.

Well-aware that it cannot afford to turn a blind eye, the UK Government has overseen an influx of national security legislation in the past few years all designed to tighten scrutiny. The National Security & Investment Act, introduced in 2022, is designed to protect the UK’s critical infrastructure — from telecommunications to AI — against foreign acquisition. More recently the new National Security Bill, introduced in December 2023, is the most significant espionage law since the Official Secrets Act of 1911. And a new arm of MI5 — the National Protective Security Authority — was established in 2023 to advise private UK companies on how to combat cybersecurity. “Economic security” has also become a significant issue. In a speech last week Oliver Dowden laid out plans for export controls and tighter regulation of sensitive research projects in British academic institutions, arguing that “our economic and security interests are intertwined as never before”.

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What this wave of legislation suggests is that national security has become so all-encompassing and diverse that it can no longer be separated from the rest of government. Legislation, not secret agents, is being used to counter security threats. In a globalised world, the politician’s pen is replacing the agent’s pistol.

Some fear that the government’s increasing role in dealing with national security may lead to its politicisation. Just last month, the UK banned foreign state ownership of newspapers, responding to the attempted acquisition of the Telegraph by the UAE conglomerate RedBird. Prior to the ban itself, the acquisition was seen to “represent a very real potential national security threat” by a group of 18 Tory MPs. The problem is that, although the concerns over the Telegraph instance were well-founded, the broader notion of “national security” remains undefined and ambiguous — even in a major piece of legislation like the National Security & Investment Act. The risk is that, with the ever-widening scope of “national security”, it becomes a political issue, defined and redefined by politicians at any given moment.

Across the Atlantic, earlier this week Congress approved a bill to ban TikTok unless the the Chinese company ByteDance sells the US platform. The concerns stem from two issues. The first is the fact that for many people TikTok acts as a de facto source of news: its ownership by a Chinese company therefore essentially translates into a foreign-held media company. Second, there is the issue of TikTok’s vast pool of data — and fears that the CCP has access to it. The danger is that TikTok could be used for surveillance, Chinese-sanctioned propaganda, and ultimately to undermine American democracy. In the run-up to an already potentially toxic presidential election, those worries are not unfounded. Nonetheless, the forced sale of TikTok is yet another example of Western governments feeling compelled to use a blunt instrument (legislation) to tackle issues of national and economic security.

Pressure has mounted on the UK to follow suit. And the UK has in general very much followed (or been lent on by) the US to toughen its national security legislation in recent years. Just think back to Trump’s row with Johnson over Huawei in 2020, when Britain was on the cusp of allowing a Chinese company to dominate the UK’s 5G network. But we also have less weight to throw around in the global economy than America. The US can easily absorb the shock of any unintended consequences inflicted by heavy-handed legislation. The UK, on the other hand, has to walk a finer line between national security and staying open for business. There can be no such thing today, economically speaking, of an isolationist Britain.

This collaboration (and, in some cases, confrontation) between the state and private companies who hold IP and technology of national importance is not necessarily a bad thing. But as the lines between economic and national security blur, the trade-off may well be a politicisation (and bureaucratisation) of national security by those in Whitehall. And this does represent a fundamental break with the past. As the intelligence academics Antonio Díaz Fernández and Ruben Arcos put it, the days of the Cold War “secret state” are giving way to the 21st-century “protecting state”, in which national security seeps into everyday life.

Since the Cold War “national security” has expanded from the narrow realm of military power and deterrence to include terrorism, environmental security, migration, cybersecurity and now economic security. Of course, parliamentary bills will never replace the world of James Bond entirely. But, as Bond’s own Chief of Intelligence put it a little over a decade ago: “Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they aren’t nations… It’s in the shadows — that’s where we must do battle.”

As someone who researches and writes about terrorism for a living, I could say that I had a professional interest in watching this type of murder porn, but that would be only half-true; I wanted to watch. I had no good reason to, unless writing this article justifies watching a terrorist repeatedly slash a man’s throat with a knife, as was shown in a minute-and-a-half video released on Saturday by Isis’s Amaq News Agency and further amplified on X by a Right-wing British activist called Tommy Robinson. I’m not so sure about the soundness of that justification.

These videos are defiling. No one has the right to watch a video of someone getting murdered or their stricken body mutilated by a group of killers. To do so is to violate their privacy and dignity. And it’s nothing less than an abomination that someone like Cheong, who is handsomely paid via Twitter ad revenue, should receive a financial reward for circulating these videos to his nearly one million followers. Cheong later tweeted on Friday that he would not be posting any more videos or images of the Crocus City Hall attack, “as it does not serve anyone’s interest to see the lifeless, and bloody bodies of so many innocent people”. However, this thought didn’t seem to have crossed his mind a few hours earlier that very evening.

When the American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded on camera in 2002, the Islamist militants behind it set a grim precedent, launching an era of the terrorist snuff film that continues unabated to this day. Terrorism, as Brian Jenkins pointed out some 50 years ago, is a form of theatre, “aimed at the people watching”. But Pearl’s beheading signalled something new in the history of political violence: the use of the camera as a weapon of terror and radicalisation.

Prior to this, terrorists parasitically used the international media to disseminate the news of their atrocities, just as that media was in turn parasitic on them for news stories. But now with access to cheaper and better cameras, they could become auteurs of terror, with total creative control over their own spectacles of violence. This development reached its apogee with the rise of Isis in 2014 when, within the space of four chaotic years of expansion and contraction, the group presided over the murder of over 2,400 people on camera. Many of these murders were carefully staged, but others were recorded on GoPro cameras from the POV of the killer-assassins.

Just as Isis was about to lose its last sliver of territory in Syria in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant launched a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 Muslims. He had livestreamed part of the attack on Facebook. Tarrant, a far-Right terrorist, had assiduously followed the Isis playbook, using maximum savagery to generate maximum exposure. But not even Isis had livestreamed their atrocities, a further innovation that has since been copied: in May 2022, another far-Right terrorist called Payton Gendron murdered 10 African-Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, broadcasting his shooting spree on Twitch, an online gaming platform.

At the same time, the victims of terrorism have become auteurs of their own terror: thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, we can now see terrorism from the point of view of the victims and in real time. This, too, is a new and significant development in the history of terrorist communication and, as with any new technological innovation, the ethics around watching and disseminating these videos have yet to be fully worked out.

Many of the videos of last week’s attack in Moscow were recorded by those who were on the receiving end, desperately fleeing or hiding from the gunmen. These videos are not as shocking as the footage produced by the killers, but they are nonetheless horribly visceral, taking the viewer into the foreground of the horror as it’s unfolding. Should you watch?

There are two contrasting ways of thinking about this. One is that, by recording their “lived” death or near-death experiences, the victims of terrorism want us to watch and to witness their private trauma and suffering as a form of recognising some public truth: This happened to us. The implicit assumption is that the viewer should witness both the horror of their experience and the inhumanity of those who are inflicting it on them: that we should not feel complacent or indifferent to their suffering. As Susan Sontag put it in Regarding the Pain of Others: “Let the atrocious images haunt us”; let us not shy away from “what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously”.

Perhaps this is why so many of the partygoers who were attacked by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 filmed it on their smartphones: they wanted to document and certify the unthinkable horror that was happening to them, just as they had filmed every other significant event in their all-too-short lives. The Israeli government, for its part, publicly released attack footage from both Hamas fighters, who filmed some of their atrocities on GoPro cameras, and terrified Israeli victims as they hid and sought refuge moments before their death. In one tweet, the Israeli government posted footage of Hamas fighters shooting a dog, explaining: “We wish we didn’t have to share these videos, but we can’t stop. We need you all to know.”

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By Simon Cottee

The opposing viewpoint is that watching spectacles of terror is fraught with moral risk and should be avoided. This is for two reasons: first, watching directly colludes with the terrorists who want people to watch their acts of terror, regardless of whose perspective the horrifying footage is recorded from. Second, there is the possibility that, in repeatedly watching images of terror, we become desensitised to them, leading to passivity or even a perverse kind of voyeurism that, like pornography, creates an insatiable desire for ever more extreme content. This was Sontag’s original concern in On Photography, published in 1977, before changing her mind in Regarding the Pain of Others, which appeared in 2003. Atrocity images, she then worried, can “transfix” and “anesthetise” after repeated exposure.

Given the rise of the smartphone and a social media driven by outrage and excess, Sontag’s later position looks less and less convincing by the day. We should, of course, know about the suffering of others, but the sheer volume of haunting images that now assail us, bidden or otherwise, fundamentally changes the calculus. We have surely now gone beyond a saturation point, and although it’s hard to completely avoid gratuitous online atrocity footage, one quick and easy way of seeing markedly less of it is to unfollow or block those shameless content-curators who make a career out of exploiting our most base impulses.

Yet this is easier said than done. “There is a demand for crazy on the internet that we have to grapple with,” former President Barack Obama said in April 2002. And I am just as susceptible to that demand as everyone else hooked on social media. Perhaps this explains why I so loathe the curators of online atrocity porn: they show you disgusting things and arouse your curiosity, and then you feel no small measure of self-disgust for watching. This is, of course, less than ideal — but it’s at least better than feeling nothing at all.

Last week, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) released its long-awaited report from Operation Kenova, a seven-year criminal investigation costing £38 million, into the activities of a British Army agent known in the media as “Stakeknife”. Rumours about this agent first surfaced at around the time of the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998. Stakeknife was said to be Freddie Scappaticci, a bricklayer from Belfast who was recruited by the army in the late Seventies. It was claimed that his intelligence had saved “countless” lives, even if it came at a terrible price.

The chilling allegation against Freddie Scappaticci was that during his time as an army agent he became a senior figure in the IRA’s infamous “Nutting Squad” (to “nut”, in Northern Ireland, is to shoot someone in the head). Part of Scappaticci’s job had been to find spies in the IRA and interrogate them, in other words hunting down people like him. If the Nutting Squad extracted a confession from a suspected agent, a recording was sent to the IRA Army Council where the likes of Martin McGuinness would decide if the victim was to live or die. Usually, Scappaticci recalled, the order that came back was: “take him out and give him it”. Newspaper reports suggested that Scappaticci might have been involved in as many as 50 murders. In itself, this was shocking. Far more disturbing was the idea that his army handlers knew about this and may have been complicit.

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Stakeknife's final escape

By Matthew Teague

Operation Kenova was set up in 2016 to investigate the claims about Scappaticci and, if true, build a criminal case against him and his handlers. It was hoped that this would provide justice for the families of those who had been abducted and murdered by the Nutting Squad. Over the next seven years, a team of 72 detectives conducted 336 interviews, and went through more than 12,000 classified records from the archives of the local police, the army and MI5, in what will ultimately go down as the largest murder investigation in British history. But it led to no criminal prosecutions. That’s mainly because its principal target, Freddie Scappaticci, died before final charging decisions could be reached. The man leading Operation Kenova, Jon Boutcher, recently appointed Chief Constable of the PSNI, accepted that his investigation had failed to deliver justice. But he was adamant that it could still remedy the historical record, and provide lessons for future British governments.

The Operation Kenova report published last week was clear and uncompromising. On too many occasions, Boutcher wrote, Scappaticci’s handlers turned a blind eye to their agent’s horrific crimes. Some of these handlers, when questioned by Boutcher’s detectives, argued that Scappaticci’s intelligence had allowed them to save “hundreds” of lives. Boutcher strongly disagreed. After going through most of the written reports attributed to Stakeknife, he estimated that this intelligence saved no more than about 10 lives. Although his team did not find any direct evidence of Scappaticci taking someone’s life, they estimated that he was personally involved in as many as 14 killings. Based on this, Boutcher estimated that more lives were lost as a result of Stakeknife than were saved, a catastrophic inversion of the moral trolley problem that his handlers had been playing with real lives in Northern Ireland.

What’s interesting about this conclusion is that Boutcher did not criticise the initial decision to recruit Scappaticci. Nor did he state that this agent should have been dropped as soon as he joined the Nutting Squad. Instead, Boutcher argued this was a question of degree: that Scappaticci had been allowed to go too far and that his handlers had failed to provide rigorous oversight. And they did this because Stakeknife was a prize asset. The ultimate goal for anyone in the business of running spies is to recruit an enemy official as an agent. That’s been the case since the dawn of espionage, and it was true in Northern Ireland. Britain wanted agents deep inside the IRA, and would sacrifice at least some principles to get them there. But this wasn’t following some existing law, nor are there other well-known examples of agents from MI5 or MI6 being free to kill with impunity. And that’s why the Stakeknife story should make us fundamentally confront what it means for Britain’s operatives to pose as members of violent extremist organisations.

In Britain, we have historically maintained a respectful epistemological distance from our intelligence agencies. “Secrecy”, the historian Peter Hennessy wrote, “is as much a part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds.” As recently as the late Eighties, we indulged the idea that MI5 did not officially exist — during the Sixties, MI6’s headquarters still displayed a plaque saying it was the “Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company”. When it comes to the secret world, we have a history of looking the other way.

During the Troubles, this laissez-faire stance bled into the way that agents like Stakeknife were run. When a senior Special Branch officer went to Margaret Thatcher in 1986 and told her that a worrying number of police informants in Northern Ireland were taking part in serious crimes, the response from Downing Street was clear: “Please continue to do what you’re doing. But for goodness’ sake, try not to get caught.” This attitude percolated down from the top, until it reached the men and women looking after the likes of Scappaticci. It was in the background as they tried to figure out what to do with the intelligence he was supplying. Each time he told them about a forthcoming attack, or a murder that was being planned, they faced a dilemma: will we save more lives if we act on this intelligence, or if we don’t?

The same real-life game theory was applied during the Second World War by government officials in Bletchley Park. They knew that if they acted on everything, the Germans would work out that their encrypted Enigma messages were being read and change their codes. As a result, there were times when the British chose not to intervene in order to save more lives in the long run. In a very similar sense, Scappaticci’s handlers often chose not to act, hoping that protecting their source would ultimately allow them to save more lives. But according to Jon Boutcher, they frequently made the wrong call, and should have intervened many more times than they actually did. And part of the problem, Boutcher suggested, was that those in the intelligence community had “a tendency to view the Stakeknife case through rose-tinted spectacles”. They were beguiled, he felt, by the mythology surrounding this agent, and the “irony” and “poetic justice” of having a spy inside the IRA’s spy-hunting unit. Maybe they also believed that nobody was ever going to rake over the details of what they were doing, which would help to explain why they were willing to give Scappaticci what was, in all but name, a licence to kill.

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Ireland will always be divided

By Tom McTague

It’s rare for a police investigation to lead to new legislation, but the Stakeknife case was the driving force behind the government’s 2020 Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. Never before had Parliament debated whether government agents should be allowed to take part in murder. But Operation Kenova had shown that the law on agent-running was woefully inadequate. This new bill would clear up just how far government agents could go. Some politicians called for an upper limit on agent criminality, and hoped that this bill would make it impossible for spies to participate in serious crimes including sexual violence, murder and torture. No amount of intelligence, they argued, could ever justify murder.

But the government — or rather the intelligence agencies — disagreed. Their argument was that by allowing some crimes, and not others, it might be possible for a terrorist leader to identify any spies in their group by asking them to carry out a proscribed activity. Anyone who refused would come under suspicion. As a result, the final draft of this unprecedented legislation, described in The Guardian as “shameful”, had no upper limit on agent criminality. It became known as the “licence to kill bill” before it had even passed.

On the face of it, this new law is deeply troubling. MI5, MI6, the police, and a surprisingly long list of other government agencies now have the power to authorise their agents to commit serious crimes. But look at the detail of the legislation, and you can see that a situation like the one in which Freddie Scappaticci found himself, when he came to believe that he had a licence to kill and could freely take part in as many IRA killings as he saw fit, is unlikely ever to happen again. The new law is by no means perfect, though it has introduced a system of checks and balances that were not there during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But ultimately it only relitigates one of the central ethical dilemmas of liberal society: how much harm do we permit the security services to inflict in order to keep us safe?