Ian Acheson

‘What rhymes with Patsy Gillespie?’ That was the starkest reaction on social media to the recent announcement of the launch of a poetry prize dedicated to Derry IRA commander and former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness. Mr Gillespie, 42, was a cook at the Fort George Army base in Derry city. In October 1990, republican terrorists abducted him from his home in front of his family, taking them hostage. They chained him to the driver’s seat of a van full of explosives and forced him to drive into a permanent army checkpoint on the border where they detonated the 1,200lb bomb, killing him and five soldiers. Gillespie was identified only by a piece of his flesh stuck to a zip.  It’s hard to find any poetry in such sadistic barbarism.

What's it like being locked up during lockdown? The latest statistics on prison safety paint a grim picture of life behind bars, which has been made worse by the pandemic. Even the good news must be caveated. Assaults on staff have reduced quite dramatically, which in any circumstances must be a good thing given a backdrop of record-breaking rates of violence until the virus struck. However, they have reduced mainly as a consequence of an unprecedented lockdown introduced to prevent the spread of Covid-19. This has dramatically reduced the time inmates spend outside their cells; as a consequence, it has rather limited the available opportunities for prisoners to knock seven bells out of prison officers and each other.

Was Reading terrorist Khairi Saadallah radicalised behind bars? What we do know is that locking Saadallah in HMP Bullingdon to develop a ‘close’ relationship with radical cleric Omar Brooks was an extraordinary lapse in operational security. Only 16 days after leaving the prison, the violent, troubled and combat experienced Saadallah launched his murderous attack in Reading. At the very least, it is clear that prison served little purpose in stopping him. Once again, this raises the question of whether Britain's jails are a breeding ground for radicalisation.

It’s slow business for global terrorists these days with all the targets banged up under Covid house arrest. But there’s one place in the United Kingdom where it has been pretty much business as usual for violent extremism. Northern Ireland’s police service has just released its security assessment for 2020. This contains some startling information for a place with roughly the same population as Hampshire. Last year there were 39 shooting incidents and two security related deaths, the same number as in 2019. The number of bombings – which include viable devices defused by the army – actually rose year on year to 17, with 8 happening in Belfast. Imagine this happening in Southampton.

Series four of The Crown begins with the murder of Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore in August 1979. Mountbatten was killed with three others, on the same day 18 British soldiers were ambushed at Warrenpoint. It was a devastating blow for the British establishment. But it held a more intimate horror too. If you listen carefully to the scene in The Crown, you can hear Mountbatten speak to a ‘Paul’ as they prepare his boat, Shadow V, for its fateful journey out of the harbour before being blown to pieces by the IRA.

What is the Equality and Human Rights Commission for? It’s definitely not for the likes of David Goodhart, according to plenty of progressive types reacting to the news of Goodhart's appointment as one of the EHRC's commissioners. 'Appointing the spectacularly ill-suited Goodhart to the EHRC is an awful move from the government,' says the journalist Rachel Shabi. 'The EHRC’s credibility plummets further,' says Corbynista David Rosenberg. Goodhart, it seems, has made the fatal mistake of being out of step with a long-established orthodoxy that has stacked the governance of our public institutions with left-leaning facsimiles.

It ought to be a good day at the office (at last!) for Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State who has outraged the legal profession. He spent most of last weekend on the media rack defending the government’s position that it might break international law to defy an agreement with the EU that it had negotiated.  Today is much more straightforward. His ‘get tough’ sentencing white paper contains a myriad of proposals that will resonate with ordinary people baffled by a justice system ever more remote from the idea of public protection and punishment, lost in abstractions, passing sentences that bear little relationship to the gravity of the crime.

This week saw the publication of an independent review into multi-agency arrangements that manage terrorist offenders released into the community. The report was ordered by the Government following the horrific murders committed by released Islamist extremist, Usman Khan in November of last year who was at the time subject to these arrangements and had convinced professionals he had given up terror. It provided a golden opportunity for radical proposals to overhaul a plainly broken risk management system. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a swing and a miss. Risk assessment and threat management of ideologically motivated offenders is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for criminal justice professionals.

Social media is predictably swamped by the usual well-heeled, left-wheeled liberal rights activists decrying the major changes to terrorism laws introduced by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland this morning. The new Counter Terrorism and Sentencing Bill entering Parliament today delivers swingeing changes to the sentencing, risk assessment and supervision of this countries violent extremists. Fatal defects in the system had become all too apparent in two acts of jihadi terrorism that straddled last Christmas. The murderous rampage of Usman Khan, who killed two young people involved in an educational charity supporting him when on licence from prison, was followed by Sudesh Amman’s dramatic assault.