It appears that both the government and the Conservative party have seized upon the case of Kamel Bourgass, Al-Qaeda suspect and killer of DC Stephen Oake, to make political capital in the run up to the election.
Tory leader Michael Howard has said Tony Blair’s failure over asylum led to ricin plotter Kamel Bourgass being able to commit his crimes.
Mr Howard said Bourgass should not have been in the UK and said the case showed “the chaos in our asylum system”.
Does this extreme case indicate the general failings in the British asylum system or should we take a broader picture and examine many cases before judging if the system is in chaos. Mr. Howard’s statement would appear to be little more than an implication that asylum seekers are a danger to our society.
I think that the Conservatives have taken the wrong tack with their efforts to focus their campaign on immigration and may well have been led astray by focus groups. Immigration is an issue that I think most people are actually less concerned about than they say they are. It is an issue that has been fuelled by the tabloids which makes the average bloke in the street feel he should have an opinion on when really he couldn’t give a toss.
The Labour government have also seized upon the case for their own ends.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke earlier insisted: “Things like identity cards, stronger borders to deal with migration issues, the kinds of anti-terrorism legislation that we passed in the last Parliament are all necessary.”
Perhaps if Bourgass’ plot to poison thousands had succeeded and the reason he wasn’t stopped was due to the fact that the Police and security services were unable to identify him then there might be a case to argue for ID cards but none of this happened.
He was identified and tracked and was arrested along with many other individuals who had some connection to him so therefore the present system worked perfectly. The only problem was that his arrest was bungled which led to him having an opportunity to try to escape and then kill DC Stephen Oake in the process.
In addition it was played up at the time that it was a terrorist cell plotting a Ricin attack that had been stopped. It is now known that he was a loner and all the other individuals that had been arrested at the same time have been released having had the charges against them dropped or the court cases abandoned. Yet the Home Secretary in giving his opinion on the verdict still used the term terrorist organisations.
The Guardian: Police killer gets 17 years for poison plot. Charles Clarke, the home secretary, expressed his satisfaction with the verdict. “What the case showed was that there are terrorist organisations which seek to challenge us in this country and challenge our basic freedom,” he said.
The case clearly did not show that at all, there may well be terrorists seeking to disrupt our society but only the government is seeking to curtail our basic freedom. There appears to be very little evidence that Kamel Bourgass was organised in his plot let alone part of a larger organisation.
I wonder what happened to the Blitz mentality of ‘business as usual’ whilst we were suffering the equivalent of a 9/11 every week now we seem to be in a period of ‘hysteria as usual’ precipitated I feel by the government.
It’s all scaremongering for the sake of winning an election, coercion through fear for political reasons in effect ‘electoral terrorism’.
