Faith leaders pose for pictures during an event to promote religious unity in central London yesterday, as Britain prepares to mark the 10-year anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings in which 52 people were killed. (From left to right) Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, Imam Qari Asim, 7/7 survivor Gill Hicks and Reverend Bertrand Olivier.

Reuters/London

A decade after four Britons carried out suicide bombings in London, the government is planning new anti-terror laws that critics say are an assault on freedoms and will not work.
Prime Minister David Cameron’s government wants to ramp up powers this year to ban “extremist” groups, stop extremist broadcasts and give police and intelligence services broader powers to monitor communications.
Ministers say those powers are urgently needed to address threats posed by organisations such as Islamic State and to prevent another attack on the scale of the July 7, 2005 bombings when four Britons killed 52 people on three trains and a bus.
Last month’s attack in Tunisia in which 30 Britons were killed emphasised the need for measures Cameron promised to bring forward after winning an election in May, ministers say.
But the proposals face widespread opposition.
“Only by engaging with extremist views, opposing them and defeating them through debate can we hope to deal with the threat of extremism,” said lawmaker David Davis, who Cameron defeated to become Conservative Party leader in 2005.
“The lesson of centuries of British history is that the best defence of freedom is freedom itself, and the last thing we should do in trying to defeat the enemies of Western civilisation is throw away our strongest weapon, free speech.”
Britain is now on its second-highest alert level of “severe”, meaning an attack in considered high likely.
Cameron said last Monday that at least four plots had been thwarted in recent months, while police said terrorism-related arrests were up by a third.
Islamist State militants who have taken over vast areas of Syria and Iraq pose the greatest threat, the government says, and some 700 Britons have travelled to join them, lured by what Cameron said was a poisonous ideology.
“We must give our police and security services the tools they need to root out this poison,” he told parliament.
His plans involve tackling extremism and extending surveillance.
Security chiefs have said the latter is vital, but in the wake of disclosures by former US spy contractor Edward Snowden, many are sceptical and even the country’s terrorism watchdog said the government had failed to make the case for the most controversial extra powers
“My question to the government will be this: is what you are introducing going to help the fight against extremism, or is it going to alienate the very communities that we need in the front line?” Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a former minister under Cameron and the first Muslim to serve in a British cabinet.
Instead of trying to ban extremists, critics argue their arguments should be taken on and debunked. “If we cut ourselves off from talking to some people whose views we do not like but to whom millions of young people listen, that’s a very difficult issue for us,” Ian Blair, who was in charge of London police when the 7/7 bombings took place, told the BBC.


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