By Atul Hatwal

Manchester isn’t the first and is unlikely to be the last. As the shock slowly subsides, action is needed, but not of the kind yapped out in the hot takes of some on the left and right.

On the left, there are too many whose efforts to explain, blur into a case to excuse.

Talk of the iniquities of the Prevent strategy, marginalisation of Muslim communities and British foreign policy, is irrelevant.

Just as it is irrelevant to talk about poverty or cultural anxiety when explaining the radicalisation of Thomas Mair, the man who killed Jo Cox last year.

There is no explanatory leap that connects life in Britain today to ideologies such as Islamism or Nazism.

Inflicting terror on innocents is always an unacceptable means to an end, but sometimes it is used in the service of a cause which can be understood, if not agreed with.

The IRA, PLO, ETA and Irgun would all fall into this broad category. The presence of justice in the cause is an essential prerequisite for a route to eventual peace  – it is the underpinning for a rational discourse between opponents.

But Islamism, like Nazism, advocates slaughter of the impure as an intrinsic part of the cause.

There can be no understanding or engagement with this.

No wittering about context is required. We don’t need a sociology debate. This is a matter of winning or losing.

A more forceful approach from security services is needed to track and apprehend extremists from these death cults, within the communities and social circles that coddle them.

On the right, there are too many who want to use tragedies like Manchester to remake Britain in their idealised image: more closed to the world, less diverse, whiter and with fewer civil liberties.

For this group, their tool is hysteria. Media reports that scream about the unprecedented nature of what’s happening, pray in aid of their cause.

The hyperbole ramps up fear and the pressure for something, anything to be done.

But the reality is that the destructive capacity of Islamist terrorists, as dangerous as they are, pales in comparison with the threat to mainland Britain posed by the IRA in the 1970s and 1980s.

Between 1974 and 1975, the IRA’s Active Service Unit in London – known to history as the Balcombe Street gang – killed, most weeks. Grenades, bombs, machine guns, these were commonplace on the streets of London.

Forty attacks in just over a year, thirty-five dead. It’s not just the numbers but the constant sense of threat and knowledge, week after week, that another attack was imminent. This is the stuff of which terror is made.

Restaurants and hotels routinely had sandbags in front of their windows in case of machine gun or grenade attack.

Imagine if that was daily life today with an Islamist gang responsible and a safe haven in another country, for the perpetrators, just 80 miles off the coast of Britain.

Imagine if Islamist terrorists successfully detonated a car bomb in the House of Commons killing an MP or nearly assassinated the entire British government as the IRA did.

There is something intrinsically terrifying about the idea of a suicide bomber, someone so committed to causing harm that their own life is irrelevant. But the more structured and disciplined approach of the IRA, shorn of the inherently unstable fanaticism we see with Islamists and Nazis, presented a far greater danger to Britons’ everyday lives – certainly based on empirical evidence so far – than this country’s more recent terrorist threats.

We lived through dangerous times in the 1970s and 1980s and civilisation didn’t come crashing down. We don’t need a blanket over-reaction now.

Manchester was an atrocity that demands an urgent response. A response that is targeted and does not bow to some on the right’s calls for a wholesale proscription of our basic freedoms or rewriting our approach to a cohesive society. A response that is forceful and unapologetic, unencumbered by the moral equivocation of some on the left who see blame on all sides.

Last year, in a speech about tackling extremism, Tony Blair said,

“You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don’t give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they’ll take the hardline I’m afraid.”

He used the term “muscular centrism.”

That’s what’s needed now.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

Tags: Atul Hatwal, civil liberties, hard centre, islamism, Manchester, Nazism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2017 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Uncut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.