When it transpired that the Islamic State (IS) executioner dubbed “Jihadi John” was a British Muslim named Mohammed Emwazi, the UK campaigning organization, Cage, declared that it had known him as a “kind and beautiful young person” who was hounded and antagonized by British Intelligence.
True or not, this was a PR debacle, an open invitation to politicians and commentators to revile Cage as apologists for terrorism. Yet doubts about the modus operandi of MI5 are not confined to Muslim advocacy groups. From the political right comes an excoriating, if very different, critique. In an extraordinary outburst, the leading Conservative MP, David Davis, has accused MI5 of letting Emwazi slip through the net — just as, he maintains, they did with one of the 7/7 London bombers and one of the men who hacked to death the British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street. Alleging a broader pattern of tactical ineptitude, Davis contends that they ought to aim to “prosecute, convict and imprison” terrorists, instead of seeking to “disrupt and manage” them.
It also worries Davis that the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the body meant to hold Britain’s counter-terrorism agencies to account, is handicapped by timidity. (At present, it is suffering the fundamental handicap of being leaderless following the departure of its chairman, Sir. Malcolm Rifkind, who was exposed by a newspaper as ready to sell to private bidders the knowledge he had amassed as a public servant.)
Davis believes that Emwazi will not be the last failure of British security if “outdated” methods persist. Seldom has a politician delivered such a scathing indictment of the covert operations of the British state. Some may wish that this candid working-class politician had been chosen as leader of the Conservative Party, which Davis aspired to be. The party opted instead to be led by the patrician David Cameron, who became Britain’s prime minister in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government formed in 2010. The smooth-tongued, establishment-minded Cameron would never speak so bluntly about the performance of British Intelligence.
Yet even if David Davis’ criticisms are warranted, the broader, altogether more challenging question remains unanswered: How to explain the chilling frequency with which radicalized British Muslims are looming large in international news bulletins? Why has “Jihadi John” been competing for media attention with three Muslim girls from East London who have traveled to Syria with the evident intention of joining IS?
What goes unmentioned amid national agonizing about “radicalization” is the parlous condition of British society at large. With a general election approaching on May 7, David Cameron boasts that his government has done much to fix the economic crisis his government inherited. The stark reality is, however, that government is now a sideshow in a Britain effectively ruled by the free market, with massive resultant inequality and the collapse of public services into catastrophic disarray.
The erosion of Britain as a social democracy is being experienced with especial severity by UK youth. It is not just that many are bereft of work and purpose; it is that they are living in country defined by institutional breakdown, social fragmentation and rampant moral disorder. If rising numbers of young people are alienated and disturbed and liable to do violence to themselves or others, it is little wonder. In the bleaker sections of British society, gangsterism vies with suicide as a career option.
The great danger is that the undeniable threat of militancy will increasingly be exploited to mask Britain’s extreme social pathology, with its potential to spawn all manner of aberrant behavior. In the 1960s and 70s, there was much hand-wringing about the “British disease.” The free market revolution spearheaded in the 1980s by David Cameron’s heroine, then Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was held to have restored Britain to health. Thirty years on, it appears not only that the disease endures but that it is manifesting a new malignancy. On a bad day, Britain can seem like a brutalized dystopia dedicated to nothing except acquisitive individualism.
Radical thought is not the only scourge that afflicts the dubiously named United Kingdom. It may be that it can only be eradicated as part of a systematic effort to rebuild British civil society.
