Britain needs to be more robust in dealing with terror

Terrorists incidents provoke thought and questioning. If only there were a simple route from questions to answers. Emotion is simpler, which is natural. A mother murdered on her way to pick up her young children: heart-rending. A salt-of-the-earth pensioner struck down, as was a salt-of-the-earth copper. Before joining the police, he had been a soldier. So a lifetime of service was brutally cut short, leaving a family bereft. Then there was the American tourist, on a silver-wedding holiday of a lifetime – words that suddenly took on a terrible double meaning. In her response, the Prime Minister was good; as good as Margaret Thatcher would have been, and there could be no higher praise. In these circumstances, female PMs may have an advantage. They can convey a hint of Elizabeth 1 at Tilbury, on the eve of the Armada.

Yet there is a danger of going too far, in both grief and honours. Tobias Ellwood and Ben Wallace are excellent men: proper people. Both of them served in the colours. We need more fellows like that in the Commons. Both are fully worthy to be Privy Councillors. “Right Honourable”: so they are, and it is surprising that they were still waiting for the recognition, which had already been fully justified. But two PCs for one small incident: for in the broader context, it was a small incident. The army would not have awarded two Distinguished Service Orders after a similar operation.

Forget the warped loner who committed the murders. There is a risk that we might send the wrong signals to more formidable foes. They will be unmoved by lamentations, unimpressed by honours. They might well conclude that we are not the people we once were. We love life, they embrace death. We give ourselves over to pleasure and decadence. They draw on the example of the warrior poets who rode out of Arabia on camels, to conquer and convert. In the education of the young, it helps if one can thwart the Lefties and draw on reasons for national pride. In the case of young Muslims, that is not always easy. There are not enough stirring recent examples. So there is a temptation to fall back on earlier history, when Caliphs were heroes. This leads to an obvious conclusion: the need for a new Caliphate.

Those who think like that may well conclude that if we reacted so emotionally to four deaths, what would happen if the figure were forty – or four hundred? They might also have noticed the obsequies for Martin McGuinness, the worst mass-murderer in modern British history. In his case, a true charge-sheet would have had well over four hundred names. Yet in death, he was treated as a hero and a statesman. Might our enemies not conclude that if you stand up to the British, they will back down? That is a gross misrepresentation of our national character, but it could take a lot of deaths to refute it.

So what can we do? There is no obvious solution. I suspect that the secret services have already saved us from a number of crimes. We do not know what they have been doing, nor should we. Yet they cannot protect everything and everyone. In Baldwin’s chilling words: “the bomber will always get through.” But there are a couple of practical measures which we could take. Prisons are often an expensive way of making bad men worse. Although that is not easy to rectify, it should surely be possible to prevent them from becoming seminaries for fanatics. In that task, one would hope that moderate Muslims could offer assistance. Even if they are poor, British Muslims usually have one advantage which ought to prevent them from sliding into the underclass. Muslims have communities and live in families. That creates moral resources; surely they could be mobilised?

Andy Street, the Tory candidate for the West Midlands mayoral election, has spoken of the need to alleviate poverty. While it is clearly undesirable that there should be a British equivalent of the French banlieues full of angry, workless Muslims, economics is only part of the problem. The young men responsible for 9/11 were not poor and they had prospects. Post-religious in their cultural outlook, many Englishmen are vulgar Marxists, did they but know it. But economics does not always determine religious outcomes. We have to find Muslim interlocutors with the prestige to turn their young away from Jihadism. Such elders in the community are unlikely to be among the noisiest so-called Muslim spokesmen. The quieter voices may turn out to be the wisest.

These are palliatives. Although there is  nothing wrong with that, much more will be needed. For the rest of this century and beyond, the West’s engagement with the Islamic world will dominate foreign policy debates. It must be conceded that over the past hundred years, Western interventions have had – at best – a mixed success rate. Not everything has gone wrong. Because of the Hashemite monarchs – also proper people – Jordan has survived despite its numerous vulnerabilities. So the Sykes-Picot settlement did not always end in failure. From Kuwait to Oman, the Gulf Monarchies have prospered, thanks largely to oil. Saudi Arabia’s rapid evolution from a tribal kingdom to an oilfield to a modern polity seems implausible. But it might yet work. As for the rest, the attempt to turn failed states into modernising democratic allies has only yielded bitter fruit. The neo-Conservatives who planned the overthrow of Saddam thought that democracy was the political equivalent of penicillin. In geo-politics, antibiotics can turn into poisons.

When we invaded Iraq, the neo-Cons, including Tony Blair, believed that they were going to drain the political equivalent of a fever-ridden swamp. Still undrained, its capacity to generate noxious infections is greater than ever. Scarred by the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq, the West’s powers of resistance are weaker than ever. Equally, and although it would be fatuous to blame Israel for all the problems of the region, a two-state solution in Palestine seems further away than ever. It is not clear that there is an alternative.

In coping with all of this, we will have to gird our loins. We will need courage, resolution, cunning – and luck. If our opponents underestimate us, we will have to prove them wrong. At a difficult period – for him – in the Civil War, that brave bad man Cromwell sought to rally his Ironsides: “Your danger is as you have seen. But I wish it to cause no despondency; as truly I think it will not; for we are Englishmen.” Substitute “British” for English, and that is the spirit.