Terrorism in the United Kingdom
[9] There have been many historically significant terrorist incidents within the United Kingdom, from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605[12][13] to the various attacks related to The Troubles of Northern Ireland.
MI5 says this challenges the idea that terrorists are young Muslim men driven by sexual frustration and lured to "martyrdom" by the promise of beautiful virgins waiting for them in paradise.
[18] On 29 August 2014, the British government launched a raft of counter-terrorism measures as the terrorist threat level was raised to "severe".
Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May warned a terrorist attack was "highly likely", following the coming to prominence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
[19] On 22 May 2017, 23 people were killed after a bombing occurred following a concert by Ariana Grande in the most deadly terrorist attack on British soil since 2005.
[21] By raising the threat level to "critical", Operation Temperer was started, allowing 5,000 soldiers to replace armed police in protecting parts of the country.
No amount of trade with dodgy regimes such as Saudi Arabia is worth putting the safety of the British public at risk, and if May is serious about our security, she would publish the report in full, immediately.
[26] Jihadist material including bomb making instructions and execution videos gets more clicks in the UK than in any other European nation and is spread among a wide range of different domains.
Petraeus noted the technical and other skill of the terrorist websites and added, "It is clear that our counter-extremism efforts and other initiatives to combat extremism online have, until now, been inadequate.
Other than the far-right neo-Nazi National Action, the other fourteen organisations operate (for the most part) in Northern Ireland, and were banned under previous legislation.
[1] Organisations the government has designated as terrorist and banned are:[1] In 2023, 10% of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s live investigations were extreme Right-Wing.
[30] According to political scientist Gilles Kepel, the jihadi violence is rooted in Islamic fundamentalism in the form of Salafism, an ideology that clashes with the values of Western democracies and which entered the United Kingdom when the country gave shelter to radical Islamist leaders from around the world in London.
[32] He has argued that there's no evidence that they go from Salafism to terrorism, noting that Islamic terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud was known to violate religious rules about halal food.
[31] In the 2000s, there was an increase in the number of British Pakistanis traveling to training camps in the Pashtun regions of Pakistan to join Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups.
[35] In October 2020, Islamist terrorism remained the greatest threat to the UK by volume according to Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5.
[37] In July 2023, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, reiterated that Islamic terrorism was the primary domestic threat facing the UK.
[6] The Independent Reviewer for the government's anti-terror programme (Prevent), Sir William Shawcross, has stated that there was a reluctance to investigate Islamist threats due to fears of being labelled Islamophobic or racist.
[7] Trevor Phillips, former Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, argues that the collapse in Islamist referrals from 2019 onwards coincided with a publication of a report from a group of MPs led by Wes Streeting calling for the definition of Islamophobia to be expanded to include "expressions of Muslimness".
However, the number of Islamist referrals collapsed to 1,500 once dozens of local authorities and other bodies, including the Labour Party, adopted the looser definition of Islamophobia.
