On the fourth anniversary of 7/7

It is four years ago today that I sat down to write a brief post under the heading Seven Seven, and followed it up a few days later with a longer account of my own tangential and highly tenuous contact with history.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that day.  If we are to believe our rulers, there have been scores and perhaps even hundreds of Islamic terrorist attacks that our (it is said) brave and professional security services have disrupted.  Suspiciously few of these, however, have resulted in a prosecution.

In fact, suspicion seems to be the lasting product of 7/7.  On the day that the memorial to that event was consecrated, more or less, the Daily Mail, having picked up yesterday’s snippet in the Guardian, was shouting from the rooftops that:

Far-Right extremists ‘are plotting spectacular terrorist attack in UK’, police warn

Neo-Nazis are plotting a ‘spectacular’ terrorist attack on Britain to fuel racial tension, Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism officers fear.

Senior officers have increased their surveillance of suspects to monitor their ability to carry out a deadly attack aimed at causing a ‘breakdown in community cohesion’.

The chilling warning comes after last month’s startling gains by the BNP in the local and European elections which many fear may ‘embolden’ violent Far-Right extremists.

Commander Shaun Sawyer, from the Met’s specialist operations wing told a meeting of British Muslims last night: ‘I fear that they will have a spectacular ...

‘They will carry out an attack that will lead to a loss of life or injury to a community somewhere. They’re not choosy about which community.’

...  Sir Norman Bettison, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, said: ‘The big bad wolf is still the Al-Qaeda threat.

‘But my people are knocking over right-wing extremists quite regularly. We are interdicting it so that it doesn’t first emerge into the public eye out of a critical incident like an explosion.’

There is vanishingly little information given to back up the claim.  A Hitler-idolising fruitcake named Martyn Gilleard, who was jailed last year, is the best they can come up with.  Does that wash with the British public?  Take a look at the recommendation figures on the comments to the Mail article.

For their part, Nationalists are deeply vexed.  Nationalist bloggers have been quick to pour scorn on the story, and point out that it bears the imprint of the ubiquitous Gerry Gable of Searchlight, the Community Safety Trust, which is where the British Board of Deputies meets Mossad, and the Muslim Safety Forum, which is the interface for “British” Muslims with the police.  But the worrying possibility exists that it signals the start of an aggressive police campaign against Nationalists.  We shall see.

Personally, I suspect that it might have more to do with the criticisms that are being levelled at the Met after the debacle of the G20 Summit.  And then there is the spectre of budget cuts, given extra impetus by the usual departmental competition:

Counter-terrorism police are facing their first budget cuts since the emergence of the Islamist extremist threat in the UK, the country’s most senior anti-terror officer warned today.

Assistant commissioner John Yates said that after five years of generous growth, his unit faced making cuts in the year before London hosts the 2012 Olympic games.

He expressed concerns that the public were growing tired of the fight against terrorism and by the use of control orders, which the House of Lords said last month contravened the European convention on human rights.

Speaking at the Association of Chief Police Officers conference in Manchester, Yates said he would be “naive” to believe the fight against al-Qaida would escape the recession and the impact of a £90bn hole in public finances.

“We are going to have to robustly look at where we can make savings, he said. “We are already pretty lean but the pressure will be on and I cannot imagine counter-terrorism funding is not going to be affected. If things are not seen to be happening then people will say: ‘Do you really need the money?’”

... With the prospect of a static budget in 2011, he said cuts would have to be made to backroom staff initially. Anti-terror police would also be fighting for funds with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca). Organised crime is responsible for laundering £15bn of criminal profits through the economy, putting 30 tonnes of heroin on the streets each year, organising the trafficking of women and children for sexual purposes, carrying out fraud to the tune of £20bn a year and importing illegal firearms. But the budget for Soca is about £400m, compared with the £2.5bn a year designated for the fight against terrorism, leading to accusations it is not being taken seriously.

As I say, suspicion is all that any of us seem to have left.  The certainties we once knew, including the certainty that our own police understand and trust Englishmen better than Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Arabs and Africans, were incinerated in those railway carriages and on that bus four long years ago.  It will take a genuine political revolution to fix that.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 07:22 PM in Far Right
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