Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, arrives for the weekly Cabinet meeting last month
This column has long maintained that those who travelled abroad to join Izal should be stripped of both their passports and their citizenship and denied re-entry to this country.
Ideally, they should be put up against a wall and shot through the head in whichever disgusting desert hell-hole they have chosen to make their home.
Failing that they should be blown to Kingdom Come by a drone strike or Hellfire missile.
That’s what I wrote back in October, after the Tory MP Rory Stewart said the only way to deal with home-grown terrorists was to kill them.
It was refreshing to hear a mainstream politician, even if he is only a junior minister, agreeing with me. I’ve been advocating the same hardline approach ever since hundreds of young British citizens flocked to the Middle East to wage holy war.
Fortunately, our new Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson feels the same way. ‘A dead terrorist can’t cause any harm to Britain,’ he told the Mail this week.
Williamson has given his full support to the RAF and special forces who are believed to be working their way through a ‘kill list’ of jihadis before they can bring murder and mayhem back to the streets of Britain.
Reassuringly, he promised: ‘Our job in terms of eliminating them will not stop this year, will not stop next year, it is something we have got to continue to pursue. This is about keeping Britain safe.’
Any who escape with their lives will have their passports taken away to stop them crossing international borders and re-entering this country.
Hallelujah!
At last we’ve got a Defence Secretary who speaks in plain English not just for the Armed Forces, but also for the British people.
Oh, how the old sweats mocked when 41-year-old Williamson, then Chief Whip, was appointed to head the MoD just over a month ago. He’s a wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper, who knows nothing about defence, they grizzled. Now, though, they can choke on their disdain.
In Gavin Williamson, we’ve got a Defence Secretary who speaks in plain English not just for the Armed Forces, but also for the British people, writes Richard Littlejohn
Williamson has already promised a showdown over funding with the Treasury, which would be happy to see the strength of the British Army cut to the bone until it could fit into the back of an armoured personnel carrier — if we’ve got any left.
Spreadsheet Phil, who was Defence Secretary before he became Chancellor, is willing to hand over at least £40 billion (more than Britain’s entire defence budget) to his beloved EU as part of a blackmail — sorry, divorce — payment, while at the same time slashing a further £2 billion from spending on the Armed Forces.
Williamson retaliated by banning Hammond from using the RAF as his own private jet fleet, because the Treasury hasn’t paid the bills.
It might seem petty, but it’s a significant statement of intent. Nothing, repeat nothing, is more vital than the defence of the realm.
Naturally, the hand-wringing yuman rites brigade begs to differ.
Some people will try anything to lose weight. A dinner lady from Ipswich has just been nicked for drink-driving after being caught three times over the limit.
In mitigation she said she had been drinking vodka because she heard the property TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp say it had helped her shed a bit of timber.
Some years ago, I had dinner with the late Jeremy Beadle who was on a crash diet before an upcoming series.
It involved eating a plain baked potato three times a day, washed down with a bottle of vodka.
He lost four days.
Max Hill, a liberal QC from central casting, who was hired to review our anti-terror laws, bleats that home-grown jihadis are guilty of nothing more than ‘naivety’ and should be allowed to come home and be ‘reintegrated’ into society. Hundreds have been able to drift back to Britain already.
It emerged yesterday that MI5 only has the capacity to monitor round the clock 50 or 60 of those considered the greatest threat.
Yet how much safer this country would be if they could all have been killed before they had the chance to ‘reintegrate’ themselves by blowing up a Tube train, mowing down pedestrians in a stolen van or stabbing to death late-night revellers.
The Left are predictably squealing with outrage over Williamson’s remarks. Labour claims that ‘eliminating’ these terrorists is extra-judicial murder and in breach of the Geneva Convention.
But the Geneva Convention was designed for conventional warfare. It should apply only to those who agree to abide by the Geneva Convention. Izal may call itself a ‘state’ and rally behind a fancy flag, but it is little more than a gang of bloodthirsty desperados who get high on torture, rape and mass murder.
Calling them ‘combatants’ is too polite. I don’t even accept they’re ‘British’, even if they were born here and carry British passports.
They could not be further removed from the vast majority of loyal and law-abiding British Muslims living here.
These jihadis are not our ‘fellow citizens’; they’re traitors — our sworn enemies.
Their allegiance is to an international terrorist organisation and their own warped interpretation of a global religion.
As Gavin Williamson says: ‘They hate everything that Britain stands for, hate our values, hate that Britain is a beacon to the world of democracy and tolerance.’
The sooner they are all wiped off the face of the earth, the better.
Orchestral manoeuvres
Having exposed so much ‘inappropriate’ behaviour in politics, entertainment and the media, the torchlit ‘historic’ sex crimes posse have turned their attention to the world of classical music.
James Levine, conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has been suspended following a complaint that he had sexual contact with a teenager in 1986.
Given that where America leads, Britain follows, it can only be a matter of time before the Jimmy Savile squad gets in on the act.
James Levine, conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has been suspended following a complaint that he had sexual contact with a teenager in 1986
How long until we see a senior police officer standing outside the Albert Hall, appealing for ‘victims’ of Sir Henry Wood to come forward?
Soon they’ll be rounding up dozens of violinists, oboe and piccolo players, accused of ‘historic’ offences in the orchestra pit. We’ll have to learn a whole new meaning for the expression ‘fiddler’s elbow’.
An African migrant jailed twice for sex attacks in Britain has been awarded £110,000 compensation after his own country refused to take him back.
Eh? Just run that by me again. In what parallel universe are British taxpayers forced to give a small fortune to a foreign criminal we are trying to kick out of the country? How did that happen?
Aliou Bah, 28, came here from Guinea in 2007 to join his father. He was subsequently convicted of two sexual assaults, for which he was sentenced to 18 months and two years respectively.
Since the end of the second sentence he has been held for 21 months in an immigration detention centre while the authorities tried to deport him. But Guinea said they didn’t want him and simply refused to process his travel documents. It turns out we haven’t been able to deport anyone to Guinea since 2006.
And because he had previously been granted asylum, a court has ruled that he was detained unlawfully. Even the judge thought it was insane, but rules is rules.
I’m assuming that Bah has also received tens of thousands of pounds in legal aid, not just for defending him in the two sex cases, but also to bring his claim for compensation.
Meanwhile, neither of his victims has received a penny and yet he has been released back on to the streets, where he could strike again, with a cheque for 110 grand in his back pocket.
Apparently, there are almost 6,000 convicted foreign criminals free in this country, all of whom have been released despite being candidates for deportation.
We don’t even know where some of them have come from. Hundreds have simply vanished.
Soft-touch Britain? You couldn’t make it up.
One of the unalloyed joys of the freedom of movement has been the way our city centres have been transformed by colourful newcomers, who make such a valuable contribution to our society.
Where would we be without the gangs of exotic Eastern European gypsies who have set up camp here?
Only this week, Roma beggars surrounded Prince and Princess Michael of Kent as they left a Mayfair nightclub. The Prince gave them a tenner, but they kept pestering him.
Mayfair is a popular pitch, where beggars believe there are rich pickings. And it’s not just foreigners, either. My wife and a friend were walking through the area last week, not far from Claridge’s hotel, when they were accosted by a vagrant with a broad Glaswegian accent.
‘Hey, missus. Can ya spare twenty-five thousand pound?’
When they stopped laughing, they gave him a quid.