Britain must begin to fight if we are to win War on Terror

Honourary Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller presented the United Kingdom with a stark realisation last month when she declared that her staff:

Roughly 2,800 of them (an increase of almost 50% since 9/11, 25% under 30, over 6% from ethnic minorities, with 52 languages, with links to well over 100 services worldwide), are working very hard, at some cost to their private lives and in some cases their safety, to do their utmost to collect the intelligence we need.

These are the few, the hard workers who dedicate their lives to protecting their country. However, due to the nature of their work, they often go unnoticed, and, perhaps slightly more worryingly, are the sole intelligence gatherers charged with protecting a nation of 60 million people.

Don’t allow yourself to be disillusioned by Sir Ian Blair and the police force that we are taught to trust with our lives. Because of the legislation in this Country, our police cannot act until they have sufficient evidence to do so. Only MI5’s intelligence, or indeed GCHQ and in certain cases MI6, can provide the police with sufficient reason to arrest a terrorist suspect.

The facts are simple: the biggest threat to our National Security is not Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organisation. We are under threat because of current UK and European legislation. The Labour Government can talk as tough as it likes, but as long as we are restricted by such stupidly strict civil liberties, we are powerless to detain suspected terrorists without extensive and broad-ranging intelligence.

In other words, MI5 may believe that Suspect A is going to blow himself up in Manchester City Centre at 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, but unless they can provide the police with enough evidence, Suspect A will be free to walk into the City Centre and kill tens, possibly even hundreds, of innocent bystanders. All that will have happened beforehand would be the increase in terror threat level and possibly Surveillance.

If MI5 can find enough officers to carry it out.

The point of this post is not that we are our own worst enemy when it comes to the state of National Security, moreover that the ordinary Briton needs to start fighting if they want to live in a safe country. MI5 is expanding rapidly in terms of employees, but, as Honourary Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said:

Even with such rapid growth, we shall not be able to investigate nearly enough of the problem.

So I plea to the Government to devote more of the taxpayer’s hard-spent money on protecting its citizens. Invest more in our Security Services, so that they may increase their resources, including personnel and advertising for personnel, and make Britain’s streets that much safer.