Will there be new legislation to combat terror?
Theresa May will attend an early morning meeting of COBRA tomorrow before returning to the campaign trail.
Some in the Labour Party are accusing her of never having left it.
Emily Thornberry, Shadow Foreign Secretary, said the PM had unnecessarily and wilfully strayed into highly political mode in her Downing Street statement this morning. Mrs May talked of there having been too much tolerance of extremism in Britain and said there would be a review of counter-terrorism strategy.
Some of what Mrs May said about what she’d like to do was in the Tory manifesto – the Mirror has helpfully laid out an analysis of that here. It looks like the element of this reform package that is at the top of the PM’s list for action is increasing sentencing for what are currently deemed less serious offences. This could mean longer custodial sentences for individuals who are passing on jihadist propaganda or confecting it. This, it is argued, would have a deterrent effect and would mean that dangerous people could be taken off the streets.
The key phrase in the PM’s statement to read in connection with that is the line about “terrorism breeds terrorism.”
Having lived through a period from the killing of Private Lee Rigby in 2013 up to March this year there were 13 plots foiled in total. In the three months since March there have been 8 plots or planned attacks (5 foiled and 3 carried out).
Extrapolate from those figures and we could, on these trends, have moved from 3 plots a year to, potentially, a rate of 5 times that number this year, a 500% increase.
Some will be foiled. But Theresa May’s point is that we need to have means to stop people rushing out and copying attacks using simple and ready to hand weapons of attack such as cars, trucks or knives. Trying to clampdown on copycat attacks means tightening the legal noose on those who are showing signs of being capable of such acts.
It’s a delicate area to navigate and it’s not clear how much of this could take place with guidelines to judges or new legislation. We’ll hear from Jeremy Corbyn on this later on this evening. Tim Farron said the country must be careful not to trade away long held liberties at this moment.
The PM spoke of too much tolerance of segregation in our communities and mentioned the public sector. This could well be a swipe at universities and claims of gender segregation in certain talks and societies.
Iain Duncan Smith suggested on Radio 4 at lunchtime that the PM shared his concern that the Lib Dems had watered down TPIMS in the Coalition. It’s not clear that the PM has them in her sights though they could easily come into the counter-terrorism “review” which she said today was now needed.
On ABC news in the US it’s been reported that President Trump is thinking of coming to the UK to show his sympathy with recent terrorist attacks and could come later this week. The journalist admitted this idea was in its “infancy” and mentioned it as a stream of possible diversionary activities that President Trump might consider to distract from the former FBI boss’s testimony due later this week.