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IF TERRORISM’S success is measured by its disruption of a city’s way of life, the reaction of Richard Angell exposes the fanatics’ failure. “If me having a gin and tonic with my friends and flirting with handsome men…is what offends these people so much, I’m going to do it more, not less,” Mr Angell, an eyewitness to a terrorist attack on June 3rd, defiantly told the BBC.
The details of the attack are grimly familiar. Three men rammed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people in restaurants and bars around nearby Borough Market. Eight minutes after the first call to the emergency services, police shot all three dead, but not before the perpetrators had killed eight and injured dozens more.
It was Britain’s third deadly terrorist attack in as many months. As after a similar incident on Westminster Bridge in March and the bombing of a concert in Manchester in May, Theresa May expressed her outrage. But she went further: the country “must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change.”
One of those things, she said, is that extremism should be curbed online. Violent Islamist ideology should be more readily identified and squashed. And Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy should be reviewed to ensure that law-enforcement agencies have the powers they need, including longer sentences for terrorism offences. She added that this could mean changing human-rights laws to restrict the movements of suspects and ease their deportation (two of the London Bridge plotters were foreign nationals).
