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London Attacks

I am grateful to the Prime Minister for giving me advance sight of his statement. I want to begin by paying tribute to him for the calm, resolute and statesmanlike way in which the Government responded to last Thursday’s attack on our capital city, on our citizens and on our way of life. The Prime Minister has movingly articulated the profound sorrow that we all feel following this atrocity. On behalf of all my colleagues, I want to join the Prime Minister in extending our deepest sympathy to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives. Nothing will make up for their loss. We share the grief of those who were nearest and dearest to them and we mourn with them. We feel also for those who have been injured and wish them a full and speedy recovery. I welcome what the Prime Minister said about the help given to the families that have been so dreadfully affected. The faceless killers behind last Thursday’s attack brought death and tragedy to many innocent families. They have tried with the fires of hate to destroy the bonds of love. Yet since their attack, we have seen compassion and self-sacrifice prove themselves stronger than fanaticism and evil. The emergency services, the police, the ambulance service, paramedics, firefighters, doctors and nurses, as well as the bus drivers and the tube workers have all shown quite exemplary dedication. They have been joined by many others in the rescue operation. Those people have had to carry out, and are still carrying out, some dreadful work in what are often horrific conditions and they have responded with a professionalism that has won praise the world over. This single act of evil has inspired numerous acts of private heroism—from the bus drivers who carried on their work on a day of fear and mourning to the charity workers, like the Salvation Army and the others to which the Prime Minister referred, who brought comfort to the grieving and offered a listening ear to the bereaved. Thousands played a notable part in the events of a terrible day. We all have cause to feel pride in the response of our fellow citizens. Any who doubted that, 60 years on, this generation of Britons had retained the resolve to stand united against the threats we face have found their answer. Although those who perpetrated last Thursday’s outrage may think that they succeeded in their aims, they failed to achieve what they would have wanted most. They failed to cause panic in our capital city. Instead, we went about our business, determined to show that we would not be defeated. They failed to undermine the institutions, the democracy and the values of which we are all so justly proud. Instead, our Government, our citizens and our way of life proved once again resilient in the face of evil. And the terrorists failed to divide us, one from another. They failed to incite one group in our national community to blame another. The very society—multifaith and multicultural—that stands as an affront to the warped ideology of the terrorists is a source not of weakness, as they suppose, but of strength. In our great capital city and beyond, the terrorists have united Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, those of all faiths and those of none in our contempt for those who want to destroy that diversity and our democratic and liberal way of life. It is clear that one of the challenges now will be to achieve the right balance between that liberalism and the security that we all want. The security services in Britain are some of the finest in the world. They are, alas, very experienced in dealing with the threat of terrorism. We know that they have thwarted recent attempts to attack our nation, and we appreciate that it is in the nature of their work that we cannot be aware of all they have done to protect us. I should like to pay tribute to the Prime Minister and to the Government for all their efforts since 11 September to safeguard this country from terror. I know how heavy that responsibility is, and I understand the difficulty of the decisions that Ministers must take when they are given information about threats that, by their very nature, cannot be openly broadcast. I assure the Prime Minister that we Conservatives wish to give the Government our full support as they face difficult decisions in future. We wish to play our part by making constructive suggestions that we hope will help establish a durable consensus on the best measures to safeguard us all. Now is not the time for a discussion on detail. What I do hope, however, is that in the weeks ahead we can all gain from a sober assessment of the systems that we have put in place to deal with the terrorist threat. I have no doubt at all that the Prime Minister wishes to learn all the appropriate lessons that can be learned. We emphatically do not believe that after Thursday’s events there is any place for finger pointing or for the allocation of blame. There is only one group of people who should be blamed, and that is the evil terrorists who carried out the deed. We are all in this together. In due course, I believe that we may be able together to identify even better ways of providing the security our citizens deserve. A limited inquiry could in due course provide a calm and dispassionate forum for learning appropriate ideas, helping to quell unhelpful speculation and equipping us to respond even better in future. Its precise form would, rightly, be a judgment for the Government. We have no preconceived ideas about its timing or composition, and of course we recognise that nothing should be done to distract the police or the security services from the immediate task in hand, which is to bring to justice the perpetrators of last week’s atrocity. We wish only to identify how best we can provide our police and our security services with the support they deserve in future. The eyes of the world were on London last Wednesday for the best of reasons. They were drawn to our capital city again on Thursday by scenes of unimaginable horror. But our citizens and our Government have responded in a way of which we can all be proud. In the days ahead, that spirit of defiance, resolution and determination should not be lost. We owe it to the victims of last Thursday’s bombs to remember that terrorists should never profit from their embrace of evil.