Britain under fire again

Author: Daily Times

Theresa May has no right to be “shocked” following this week’s suspected attack on Parliament. As Prime Minister, her duty is to take responsibility for the situation; while also being held to account.

In a move that may or may not be surprising, certain quarters of the British press chose to describe Salih Khater, the 29-year-old man who drove a car into a security barrier outside the Houses of Parliament, as coming from “another country”. When, in truth, he is a British citizen. He was reportedly applying for a Sudanese visa to return to his country of origin; according to the paperwork found in the vehicle.

This represents the second such incident in little over a year that has targeted Parliament. Last March, 52-year-old Briton Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians near Westminster Bridge. And still there is a certain amount of resistance to calls from London Mayor Sadiq Khan to pedestrianise the immediate surrounding area on the grounds that this is what “they” want: to change the British way of daily life that allows the rabble access to such iconic landmarks.

“They”, of course, refers to Islamist extremists. Downing Street went on the record to reveal that 13 such terror plots as well as four by the far-right had been thwarted in the last 18 months. If this had meant to reassure, it was a miserable fail. For the PM’s office proceeded to drop the following bombshell: the number of live counter-terrorism investigations had jumped from “more than 500” in March to the considerably higher figure of 676. In just four months.

All of which begs the question, especially given the capital’s skyrocketing knife crime rate, why May does not do the needful and commit to reversing the cuts made to police funding that she herself undertook as Home secretary. Any concerns about limited public coffers could be eased by simply presenting multinational companies with backdated tax bills.

Because there is, it must be said, a vast difference between turning the nation into a surveillance state and providing optimum security to the citizenry; especially given that May has admitted that the terror threat to the country remains “severe”. This was a point reiterated by the Mayor who, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s attack, pointed out that the central government had slashed one billion pounds from the police budget over the last decade.

The PM must now answer as to how many more plots could have been prevented had Britain been home to a more robust police force.  *

Published in Daily Times, August 16th 2018.

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