Steve Hewitt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The British War on Terror: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism on the Home Front since 9/11.
"Enough is enough," British Prime Minister Theresa May announced from a podium in front of 10 Downing Street. For the third time in just over two months – and the second time in less than two weeks – she was addressing the British public after a terrorist attack. Undoubtedly, her words were designed to reassure an anxious British public and to look resolute in the face of terrorism, especially with a general election only days away. The reality is, however, that due to the nature of the threat and its scale, there is little that can be done to ensure that she will be the last prime minister to have to make the same address.
After all, the United Kingdom is a country with decades of counter-terrorism experience that predates the current Islamist violence. In the case of Irish Republicanism, violence continued until a peace agreement. No similar ending to the current threat is imaginable.
Nor is it a matter of new laws. Going back to 2000, a few months before September 11, 2001, various British governments of different political perspectives have brought in a series of new laws to address the threat of terrorism. These have included measures to criminalize the glorification of terrorism, possessing terrorism-related materials such as a bomb-making manual, and attending terrorism training camps.
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Questions will be raised about resources and, undoubtedly, more money will be directed toward counter-terrorism. Criticism has been made during the election campaign about cuts to policing numbers, but counter-terrorism remains protected in the United Kingdom. And additional resources are no panacea. In the aftermath of the July 7, 2005, bombings, a British parliamentary committee estimated that to monitor around the clock all potential terrorism suspects, then pegged at 2,000, the Security Service (MI5) would need 200,000 members instead of the approximately 4,000 it currently has. The 2,000 figure is now at 3,000 and it was recently reported that more than 20,000 may have some jihadist leanings.
Then there is the question of radicalization. The U.K. has been at the forefront of attempting to deter young people vulnerable to violent extremism from following that path. The Prevent program created in the last few years has been rolled out to cover schools, the health system, and universities. Academics in the U.K., such as myself, now have a legal duty to report on signs of extremism on the part of students.
One idea gaining increasing traction in the U.K., especially after the brutal Manchester bombing, is internment. Besides undermining democratic principles in a much more fundamental way than acts of terrorism do, interment would make the U.K. less safe than it is. This is because as even MI5 has admitted, there is no clear pathway to explain why an individual will engage in extremist violence. In other words, determining who is a threat is not an exact science. Rounding up people in the thousands merely because they are suspected of holding extreme views will inevitably lead, as it did in Northern Ireland, to the radicalization of many more. Imagine the reaction of friends and families and wider communities who see loved ones locked away without charge. Internment will be used by terrorist groups to recruit members. And, eventually, those wrongly interned, and undoubtedly embittered by the experience, will be released back into society.
In the end, there is little that can be done on a short-term basis. In the longer run, profound discussions about the root causes of terrorism including alienation, interpretations of Islam, Islamophobia, western foreign policy, problems around integration, and many others will need to occur.
What is needed at the moment is not rhetoric about ending terrorism, no matter how satisfying that may sound, since that is impossible. Instead, there needs to be more of an emphasis on resiliency. The United Kingdom has survived far worse dangers. More than 40,000 died in the U.K. during the Second World War as a result of German aerial bombing. More than 3,000 died as result of the violence in Northern Ireland, including nearly 500 in 1972 alone. The U.K. bested these threats; it can survive the current terrorism without resorting to extreme and ineffective measures.