For the Record

by David Cameron

  By the next morning I had been told the identity of the victim. Fusilier Lee Rigby of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers came from Middleton, Greater Manchester and had served in Cyprus, Germany and Afghanistan. He was twenty-five and had a two-year-old son.

  After a COBR meeting and a statement outside Downing Street, I travelled to Woolwich, where I met the local MP and former Labour minister Nick Raynsford, and members of the community. Some of the people who had guarded the soldier’s body at the scene were dubbed the Angels of Woolwich. The story of one of them, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, touched me deeply. She had leapt off a bus to help in what she thought was the aftermath of a car accident. When she realised it was an attack, she bravely engaged one of the terrorists in conversation in order to distract him. He said he wanted a war. She said he’d lose. ‘It’s only you versus many,’ she told him.

  I went to Fusilier Rigby’s barracks and met his comrades. They were shocked but stoic; they had served in Afghanistan, and understood more than most the worldwide phenomenon of Islamist extremism, the poisoning of young minds and where it could lead. And they were fiercely proud of the job they did and the uniform they wore.

  The day before, Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, had decreed that following the attack, soldiers should not wear uniform in public. Unusually for him, this was a stupid response: we shouldn’t be asking our armed forces to hide away. To do so would be a victory for the terrorists. Fusilier Rigby hadn’t been wearing uniform anyway; he was wearing a Help for Heroes hoodie. So I overturned the decree immediately.

  Back in central London, I walked through the ornate archway of Thames House, the home of MI5. As you wander around the operations rooms, each with large screens showing live pictures, you realise how much surveillance is going on at any one time. The sea of faces at the computer screens was a microcosm of our nation: black, white, male, female, young, old – but mainly young. You could tell from the juice cartons and sandwich packets that these people worked night and day.

  I stood in front of one of the big screens and spoke to the assembled staff. By this point it was clear that the two attackers had been on MI5’s radar. I knew they would come in for criticism, and that there would have to be an investigation. But I also knew something else: there is such a large number of people who potentially want to do us harm that you simply cannot follow all of them all the time. The job of MI5 is to prioritise, but they are not omniscient. I wanted them to understand that I understood that. I told them they had my full support.

  I had spent a long time working out what I thought about the rise of Islamist extremism. It created the defining events of my early years in Parliament – 9/11 happened during my first year as an MP; 7/7 the year I became party leader.

  First and foremost, I thought the poisonous ideology that linked the atrocities of the attacks on New York on 11 September 2001, the Bali bombings of 2002, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Mumbai in 2008 and more was, and remains, the gravest threat we face. I also believed that, so far, the challenge had been met with muddled and messy thinking.

  The criticism from many on the left was that it had nothing at all to do with Islam. It was instead the result of grievances against Western actions, and issues such as poverty, in Muslim countries. Meanwhile, there were those on the right who believed that the problem was entirely with Islam itself, that there was an inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’ between Muslims and Christians.

  I certainly didn’t believe the problem was the religion of Islam itself – over a billion people follow it peacefully, and the vast majority of them completely reject extreme Islamist ideology.

  But nor was extremism simply the result of Western actions abroad. 9/11 happened before we intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, British armed forces and aid workers were defending and saving Muslim lives around the world. And while the poverty of parts of the Muslim world is undeniable, many of the terrorists came from middle-class families and were well-educated.

  The problem was, predominantly, the ideology of Islamist extremism. Hate preachers had twisted and perverted the religion of Islam and turned it into a dogma of hatred, division and ultimately violence.

  I became obsessed with the barriers that prevented us from dealing with Islamist extremism. Since 2005 the UK had been trying to deport the radical preacher Abu Qatada. He was wanted in Jordan on terrorism charges, but the European Court of Human Rights and Court of Appeal repeatedly blocked his deportation because he might face an unfair trial there.

  Another radical preacher, Abu Hamza, was wanted in the US, but we were caught in a legal wrangle, and unable to extradite him. I once talked about ‘human wrongs under the banner of human rights’, and there was no greater example than Britain being stuck with these dangerous men because the law considered the principle of their individual comfort as more important than the reality of our national security.

  A key part of dealing with the ideology was how to respond to it as a society. Early in my premiership I decided to make a speech setting out my stall on the subject, and the Munich Security Conference in February 2011 was the ideal moment. As so often, it was during the speechwriting process, this time led by Ameet Gill, that the policy approach was properly forged.

  ‘Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism,’ I said. ‘A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more: it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things.’

  When Lee Rigby was murdered in May 2013, so much of what we knew to be wrong, so much of what I had railed against in my Munich speech, had been present in the murderers’ journey to jihad.

  The hate preachers were there – a key feature in the radicalisation of both of these young men. One had even been filmed at a rally with Anjem Choudary, a notorious British cleric who peddled the sort of extremism I had talked about in Munich: a brand of bile – anti-British, pro-Sharia – that just kept on the right side of the law while inspiring volatile, vulnerable youths to push it to its logical, violent conclusion.

  The online radicalisation was there. Much of the hate preachers’ material had been accessed by the pair on the internet – indeed, this is where the two of them had been communicating and concocting their plan.

  The broken society was there – a mixture of educational failure, petty crime and gang membership. Both attackers had done spells in prison. And, as I had said in Munich, while the lack of integration was a factor, poverty didn’t really come into it: both of them had benefited from good upbringings. It was almost as if Islamist extremism was the ultimate gang to belong to, the most sadistic and uncompromising of them all.

  The identity issue was clearly there, but it was complex. The two young men were born in Britain to Nigerian Christian parents. Yet they found no sense of belonging in any of that hinterland, instead forging an allegiance to a global ‘Ummah’, or community, of Muslims. When one of the attackers said ‘our lands’ on that phone footage, he didn’t mean the country that had given him every opportunity in life; he meant a region of the world he’d never even visited.

  Yet in spite of setting out my thinking early on, our response to Lee Rigby’s murder was not quite right. It was a little too gentle.

  Yes, ‘the perversion of a peaceful religion’ that I had spoken about was clearly there. Indeed, the fact that such a high proportion of Islamist extremists are not born Muslims suggests that jihadists tend to have a poor grasp of the faith. Because – the gentler argument goes – if they actually understood the religion, they would know that there was nothing in it
that justified this.

  But is that really true? Is there really nothing in Islam to justify such dreadful acts? That was what I said in my speech in Downing Street after the murder of Fusilier Rigby. It was what I said again in Parliament when I gave a statement the following week. But I look back now, and think my words were not entirely consistent with the clear and strong argument in the Munich speech. There clearly is something in Islam, otherwise these extremists across the Islamist spectrum wouldn’t quote its scriptures and honour its God.

  That doesn’t mean they were right to do so, but they were finding something in it to twist and manipulate and distort into a widely held world view (as is true of sects in many religions, including Christianity). This is not a war between Islam and the West, but a war within Islam, between the moderates and the extremists. Our job is to help the moderates in that conflict – and denying that any of this has anything to do with Islam doesn’t help. The right answer is to state clearly that Islam must, and can, and often does assert itself as a religion of peace, but also to acknowledge the direct line the extremists draw from Islam to Islamist extremism and to violence.

  I talked on tape a couple of days after the attack about how I wanted to see government policy reflect this position. I said: ‘The sort of argument that’s been made by the Lib Dems, former governments and a lot of Whitehall is there is a difference between violent extremism and extremism and you must concentrate on the violent extremists. That’s crap. We’ve got to do more to go after the radical preachers, the radical mosques, the radicalisation on campus. The swamp in which these people swim has got to be drained more effectively.’

  Pretty quickly I decided against holding a public inquiry into the murder of Fusilier Rigby. We needed answers urgently; there simply wasn’t time for a judicial procedure to drag on and on. Instead, on 3 June 2013 I appointed the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), led by former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, to conduct a special report into events.

  I also launched the first-ever Extremism Task Force.

  Whenever there was even a hint of a specific type of threat, the intelligence machine would kick into action and try to work out how to prevent it from happening, and how to handle it if it did. We were, for example, hugely well prepared for a multi-gun attack as happened in Mumbai in November 2008.

  In dozens of meetings of COBR I ordered a thorough testing of all our systems, more armed police, more and better body armour for the emergency services, and any number of technical improvements. All of this was critical to national resilience when five terrible attacks slipped through the net in 2017.

  But after this lone-wolf attack in Woolwich, it was clear that we needed to look again at whether we were doing everything we possibly could to prevent not just terrorism but extremism in every form.

  The good thing about the task force was that it drove policy from the centre, with me as chair, and covered all types of extremism, including the far right. Two years earlier, a far-right nationalist had murdered dozens of people, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a youth camp in Norway. Just a month before the Woolwich killing, an eighty-two-year-old Muslim grandfather from Birmingham was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian who was plotting to blow up several mosques around the Midlands. There was also the English Defence League (EDL) manipulating events and inciting hatred against people of all races and backgrounds. As far as I was concerned, you were an enemy of Britain whether you were Anjem Choudary or Tommy Robinson, the EDL’s leader.

  A number of measures were proposed by the task force when it reported at the end of 2013. One bold move was to agree a definition of Islamist extremism. Were you an extremist if you said women were inferior to men? Or did you have to promote violence against women? What about believing in loyalty to the Ummah over your own nation state? Or saying that, while terrorism is wrong, the terrorists do have a point?

  There were all sorts of cabinet arguments over the wording. Theresa May wanted a narrower definition; she was cautious about criminalising people simply for holding unpopular views. Michael Gove advocated a wider definition that included anyone at odds with British values. Their row over this issue was to rear its head several years later. We managed to come up with an agreed form of words. It summed up Islamist extremism as an ideology which seeks to impose a global Islamic state based on Sharia law, rejects liberal values such as democracy, the rule of law and equality, and is distinct from the faith of Islam.

  Another bold move was shifting the responsibility for dealing with extremism from government alone to society more widely. The onus was on everyone – schools, universities, the Charity Commission, prisons, councils – to actively intervene in stopping this (now defined) Islamist extremist ideology from flourishing in their institutions.

  During one meeting in March 2015 with Nick Clegg, he and I clashed over the implications for universities. He saw them vetting their speakers as an affront to free speech. I saw it as a sensible and reasonable requirement to prevent young minds being brainwashed by speakers who had been given the credibility of a campus platform.

  Yet there were other bold proposals that should have been acted upon more quickly. One excellent idea was for an Extremism Analysis Unit that would monitor which bodies and individuals the public sector should and should not engage with. During the Cold War, we would never have caught a communist spy without having a picture of all the different far-left groups out there. The unit was announced in March 2015.

  This was far too slow, and I should have pushed harder. The power to prevent public bodies being infiltrated by extremists was needed urgently – as we were to see in some Birmingham schools later on. Also too slow was the investigation into the application of Sharia law in England and Wales, which was announced as part of the Extremism Task Force. The Home Office sat on it, and failed to launch it until May 2016.

  A year after the task force wound up I was given the ISC report. It found that the intelligence agencies were not in a position to prevent the murder of Fusilier Rigby. While it did identify processes that needed to be improved – for example, there were delays in granting surveillance of one of the attackers – there was no evidence that this would have provided advance warning of the attack.

  However, it did identify one thing that could have been decisive. Months before the attack, the killers were speaking on social media, and one wrote about his desire to kill a soldier. Though the internet company automatically shut down the accounts he used on the grounds of terrorism, it did not notify the authorities that it had done so. The report said that ‘This is the single issue which – had it been known at the time – might have enabled MI5 to prevent the attack.’

  Technological transformation was a big feature of my period in office. For decades our intelligence services had fought threats to our national security on two fronts – international and domestic. But now there was a third domain, a vast, ungoverned space: the internet. And it seemed to me there were three types of adversaries using that tool to do us harm in various different ways.

  The first was extremists using it to communicate with one another, indoctrinate others and plan atrocities. It was clear we needed to go further and faster on interception and potentially blocking such communications. Simple telephone data was no longer enough: the internet led to the proliferation of different ways for people to contact each other. So our first big move was to compel companies to retain email and mobile phone contact data for twelve months.

  But that alone wasn’t enough. We needed these companies to keep records of each user’s internet browsing activity, email correspondence, voice calls, internet gaming and mobile phone messaging services. We developed this into the draft Communications Data Bill.

  That was where we ran into problems. The civil liberties lobby stood ready to resist anything that could be remotely spun as an invasion of individuals’ privacy. The political wing of that lobby, the Liberal Democrat P
arty, catchily branded the Bill a ‘snoopers’ charter’. Without parliamentary support, it was dead in the water. Our security services would have to wait until after the election to get the powers they needed to keep us safe.

  We also had to counter the extremists’ propaganda. So we supercharged the Home Office’s existing Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU).

  The second way the internet was being misused was the depraved criminals and paedophiles using it to share images of child abuse. I was sickened to learn that searching online for child pornography was neither blocked nor automatically reported. On 22 July 2013 I went public with my dissatisfaction, saying in a speech that while Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were going some way to address the problem – blocking images of abuse when they were reported – they were being purely reactive. Left unreported, those images – those crime scenes – were still out there, and nothing was being done to stop people getting to them. There needed to be a blacklist of terms that would offer no returns on search engines. It was their moral duty.

  A meeting I’d had the previous week made me even more determined. Tia Sharp and April Jones were two little girls who had been abused and murdered by paedophiles. It was discovered in both cases that online images of child abuse had played a part in influencing their killers. I sat with their brave and grieving families, all of us incredulous that anyone could type this sort of thing into a computer and get away with it.

  The tech companies were still arguing that they were just platforms, not content providers. So I said that I was willing to carry out one of these searches publicly, from his platform, to show how bad matters were.

  By November there was a breakthrough. Google and Microsoft, which between them owned 95 per cent of the search-engine market, agreed that up to 100,000 search terms would return no results, except a warning that child abuse imagery is illegal. It was a huge success – and it was only the beginning. An organisation called WePROTECT was set up to broaden this work. It is currently bringing together eighty-five countries to tackle the scourge of child abuse online.