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