TERRORISM
A security review is now underway following yesterday’s attacks within the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. More armed police officers are to be deployed on the streets.
Terror came on London yesterday to the seat of government and Parliament for the first time since the IRA attacked Downing Street with mortar fire in 1991. Prior to that, in 1979 Airey Neave MP was murdered by a bomb planted in his vehicle which went off in the House of Commons car park. This time, people walking on Westminster Bridge were mown down by a car whose driver then proceeded to Parliament.
The assailant rushed the officers on the gate and was able to assault and kill a policeman before being shot dead. Praise must go to the officers who stopped him going any further and to the emergency services who were quickly on the scene to tend to the dead and injured.
All such attacks are appalling but especially so when the democratic process is the target and innocent people simply taking in the sights are the victims. Partly as a result of those earlier atrocities the security around the Palace of Westminster is nowadays extremely tight while allowing life to go on as normally as possible. But the days when it was permissible to move easily around government buildings – or even walk through Downing Street from Whitehall to St James’s Park unchallenged – have long gone.
The gates at the entrance to Downing Street began as removable barriers installed at the time of the IRA hunger strikes. Now they are a permanent fixture, along with all the other security paraphernalia required in these troubled times. The more recent threat posed by Islamist terrorism has seen the Westminster defences strengthened, with concrete bollards and barriers installed to stop lorries packed with explosives driving into the precincts patrolled by heavily armed police officers.
But what yesterday’s attack shows is how sophisticated weaponry is not necessary to make the sort of impact the terrorist seeks. From what we know, just a hired car and a knife was all it took. As with the lorry attacks in Berlin before Christmas in which 12 people died and in Nice last summer which killed 84, terrorists are increasingly using rudimentary and readily available methods of causing death and injury. This was seen here with the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013. The trained terrorist bomber despatched by his jihadist masters to cause carnage is being supplanted by the self-radicalised loner who is more difficult to trace.
One saving grace in this country is that our strict firearms laws make it hard for would-be terrorists to obtain the weaponry to carry out a Paris-style shooting and kill scores of people. There has not been a major attack in this country since the July 7 bombs on the London transport system in 2005 killed more than 50 people. But we cannot be complacent and, indeed, while the security agencies have thwarted many plots since then, it is not possible to stop them all. Inevitably, however, once the identity of the perpetrator is known there will be questions as to whether he was known to the authorities, which have been expecting an attack here for some time. Vigilance and good intelligence remain essential.
The Westminster incident came as new security restrictions were announced for taking laptops and tablets on certain airlines from specified airports and as foreign ministers from 68 coalition countries met in America to step up the international effort to destroy Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil). The campaign is about to reach a critical stage. The battle for Mosul, hard-fought for more than three months, is making slow but bloody progress, with Islamist fighters staging a counter-offensive and hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped.
This was the first meeting of the military coalition ranged against Isil since Donald Trump took over the White House in January. The US president has vowed to make the fight against Isil a policy priority and the Washington summit was convened by Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, to fill in the gaps and devise a plan.
But this will be easier said than done. It will require diplomatic compromises if Syria and Russia are to be part of the co-ordinated assault. Only troops on the ground will be able to dislodge Isil fighters: air attacks will not work on their own and always run the risk of killing civilians, as happened yesterday when a school harbouring local people was hit in Raqqa. The Islamists have no compunction about using human shields. The plan against Isil must also include what to do about Libya, which will become the next HQ for the fanatics after they are driven out of Syria and Iraq.
The so-called Islamic State is acting as an ideological driver for jihadist attacks in the West. They pose a real and present danger but they also want us to over-react and shut down normal life even more than it has been already. Even as we mourn those killed and wish the injured a speedy recovery we must also deny the attackers the disproportionate reaction they seek.
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