"Our state and legal structures are failing us. A good number of our senior politicians appear to live in a parallel, fantasy universe. They say the darkest hours are just before the dawn. I hope that’s true because it’s hard to see how things can get much darker." Read the latest column by PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood. 

The Prime Minister was right to say yesterday that the 'Global Intifada' has become a call for terrorism. This ideology has successfully been globalised, and it is now poisoning our streets.

While the courts must determine the specific motives behind the horrific alleged attempted murder of two Jewish citizens in Golders Green on Wednesday, we must not shy away from analysing the wider policy implications for the government and our failing state structures.

I must confess I wasn’t shocked by the incident. Shock entails surprise—and in the current climate of unchecked extremism, there was absolutely nothing surprising about this.

Usually, I am loath to draw wider policy conclusions from a single incident involving an individual with reported severe mental health issues. The state cannot be expected to eradicate violence and murder entirely; the most we can hope for is that it uses the tools at its disposal to bear down as best it can on the level of incidents.

But the reported incident in North London is different. Although details of the suspect’s background and motives remain incomplete, there are grave concerns that must be addressed regarding a series of miserable state failures, as well as some damning indictments of our ruling political class.

First, there are serious questions regarding the suspect's reported history and mental health. Specifically, we need to know whether he was already known to the authorities as a potential threat, as some reports suggest. If someone is flagged as a danger to public safety, the public deserves to know the basis upon which they are permitted to remain at liberty.

Second, the suspect was already known to the authorities through the Prevent programme, yet his file was closed. It is true that we are always destined to notice Prevent’s failures rather than its successes, but a wearying and dangerous pattern is beginning to emerge. We have seen a string of instances where individuals were previously flagged to the security services, only for the authorities to conclude they no longer posed a threat. When "known wolves" are repeatedly permitted to slip back into the shadows of the community, we must question whether the programme is actually mitigating risk or simply documenting it before it manifests in tragedy.

Away from any current or past cases, there is a wider question about the extent to which Prevent is spending its resources combatting far-right extremism (which is real but not especially substantial) compared to the reported threat of Islamist antisemitic extremism—an ideology which appears to be both real and very substantial.

Third, we need to revisit the question of whether those with severe mental health issues can always be safely cared for in the community. Giving the state powers to detain and institutionalise those deemed a severe psychiatric risk to the public needs to be approached with caution, but we do appear to have given enormous weight to the rights and liberties of patients in such cases and insufficient weight to the safety of the wider community.

Fourth, the reports regarding the suspect’s background—suggesting he has lived in the UK for decades rather than arriving recently on a small boat—only highlight the depth of the systemic failure. This is not a case of an unknown entity slipping through the cracks; it appears to be an individual who was already allegedly embedded in our society and known to the state. We must urgently scrutinise the pathway to citizenship that is afforded in such cases. There is a profound difference between granting a person leave to remain under strict conditions and awarding full citizenship, which is notoriously difficult to revoke and often renders deportation a legal impossibility. We must ask why the state has been so apparently liberal in awarding a status that effectively grants permanent immunity from removal, regardless of the threat eventually posed to the public.

In addition to the need to revisit specific legal approaches in light of the Golders Green attacks and other similar incidents, we should also reflect on the behaviour of our leading politicians, not least our Prime Minister.

Only now has Keir Starmer reached the conclusion that calls to “globalise the Intifada” are incitements to antisemitic violence. How on Earth have the scales only fallen from his eyes in the last couple of days?

It is difficult to draw a straight line of cause and effect from the regular hate marches we have seen on our city streets and the two cases of alleged attempted murder in Golders Green this week. But we have clearly allowed the build-up of a political movement which implausibly purports merely to have concerns about the behaviour of the Israeli government into something truly hideous and racist.

Freedom of speech must not be thrown under a bus, but neither can we allow mobs to incite violence. We have been far too permissive.

Thankfully, we seem to have reached the point at which public figures are beginning to realise that issuing statements of meaningless word salad simply isn’t going to cut it. Saying, “We stand with the Jewish community” is almost becoming offensive because it has become so hollow and meaningless—as is issuing a whole list of things you won’t tolerate while simultaneously and quite obviously tolerating them.

Sir Mark Rowley, the chief of the Met, was heckled as he stood on the streets of Golders Green and informed us that London is a “diverse and inclusive city.” What does this even mean? It seems evident to me that the city in which I live is diverse and divided as well as being increasingly dangerous. In any event, isn’t the aspiration to be “diverse and exclusive” rather than “diverse and inclusive”? By this I mean that we have a metropolis in which folk of different colours and creeds can rub along together nicely but are united in agreeing what is unacceptable and thus excluded from society?

Perhaps the lowest point of all was Zack Polanski’s idiotic reposting of a truly moronic take. Apparently, one of the big lessons of the Golders Green incident is that we should be mightily concerned that footage shows police officers kicking the suspect in the head.

Words pretty much fail me here. What do we expect two unarmed police officers, confronted by a suspect reported to be armed and posing an immediate threat, to do exactly?

Our state and legal structures are failing us. A good number of our senior politicians appear to live in a parallel, fantasy universe. They say the darkest hours are just before the dawn. I hope that’s true because it’s hard to see how things can get much darker.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!