The shameful silence surrounding David Amess’s murder

Ali Harbi Ali has been given a whole life sentence. But perhaps this is too steep an introduction. Perhaps, like me, you’re beginning to lose track of the various perpetrators of Islamist terror in Britain as the news blurs into a constant revolving track of incidents, arriving to a sense of outrage deadened by repeated horror.

Ali Harbi Ali murdered the MP Sir David Amess in a constituency surgery, in a direct assault on British democracy. He told the horrified crowd that he wanted ‘every parliament minister who signed up for the bombing of Syria, who agreed to the Iraqi war, to die.’ He said he did it ‘because of Syria’. He claimed Sir David ‘deserved to die’.

And your MPs, your representatives, tasked with responding to this outrage, decided that action was needed. It was time to regulate the ‘corrosive space’ of social media’. It was time to pass ‘David’s law’, making sure people in public life ‘can no longer be vilified’.