It's not like we've ever really been safe anywhere in the world ever and certainly here for the last 30+ years. I live in sunny Warrington, we've been bombed by the IRA, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, London, Glasgow all have too and there are rumours the movement is on the way back to major attacks again. Since the Iraq war the whole of Europe has been on alert due to the ISIS fools. You're not safe anywhere at any time, there are more than enough maniacs even outside of those terrorist groups who are capable of murdering you. The chronic lack of mental health funding and facilities mean there are a lot of people walking around that cannot cope and are potentially dangerous.

You've just got to take life as it comes, try to appreciate it as much as possible and not worry too much. It's not like we're living in an online game of Grand Theft Auto just yet.

We could start, as in WW1 & 2 by interning potential threats. Start with those 'known' to the security services, their extended families and associates. There are lots of other practical things that could be done, rather than just talking. Until our government starts taking this threat as seriously as the perpetrators take their war / terrorism this will keep happening.

You can't do that in 2017 though can you? It wouldn't work anyway. The terrorists these days use the internet mainly to spread their filth. The large corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp etc are still resisting Government snooping and protecting extremists in the name of tree hugging human rights nonsense. Until they and the ISPs start shopping people to the Police who look at naughty material, how do they ever find these people? Not all of them book flights to Syria for a training camp package holiday and come back with a new comedy name, then sign up for training visits to Belguim and sign up for an account with a chemical or fertilizer wholesaler. Not all of them (If any) visit their Mosque and boast about their desire to commit atrocities.

You talk about interning the extended families of known suspects. Totally immoral and goes against everything this country stands for. They can do their best to prevent terror, you can't eliminate it, it's not possible.

The only way to stop any further attacks is for senior muslim clerics to sort out the problem within the Muslim community.
Regretfully large sections of this community will not intergrate with mainstream life in this country. Also we have for years tolerated some of these clerics at various mosques preaching hatred. We are now seeing the results of failure to prosecute or deport these people. I genuinely fear for the future of our country and also certain well meaning European countries who have tried in good spirit to accommodate Muslim immigrants.
For example Sweden and Germany, crime rates in Sweden especially have gone through the roof. I note from today's press up to a million migrants will attempt to move up to Europe from Libya and turkey this summer.
This is virtually an invasion as most of these people are migrants not refugees. Things are becoming that desperate the eu are threatening sanctions against Poland and Hungary who have refused point blank to join in this madness.

I would suggest you change your news source.

Turkey has done more for migrants than any other. If it weren't for Turkey many more would be heading for Europe.

Internment may have worked in WW2 but it certainly wouldn't work now for reasons already stated. Terrorism isn't new to the UK as has already been stated. You've got more chance of being killed in a car crash than by a terrorist. People need to stop making irrational calls for the government to do something and get some perspective. Threats can be mitigated using all the methods already in place via the government's CONTEST strategy. It's already helped foil many attacks and probably prevented many others.

Making far reaching decisions on impulse immediately after an incident is usually a bad idea. Better to consider the evidence soberly and act on reason rather than instinct.

I am more than happy with my news sources. Government and eu migrant statistics show one million three hundred thousand migrants applied for asylum in the Europe area in 2015. Germany alone over the last few years have absorbed one million migrants. Are you suggesting this human tidal wave has stopped. I have not even factored in the vast amount of migrants in camps in turkey.
I note that the Manchester bomber is from a family of Libyan refugees. He was also given the chance of higher education which he decided against. His gratitude for this humanitarian gesture was to blow up a group of sweet young and innocent children.
Certain politicians of recent years need to beg the forgiveness of the British public for creating this situation.
Just think about what we are witnessing today, armed police on the streets of Britain protecting the British population at large from attacks from its own citizens. My father fought for his country and spent years in a prison camp , to see this would break his heart.

What were your views when the IRA were carrying out bombings in England ?

Although it's not palatable, at some point there will need to be dialogue with the leaders of ISIS and their ilk to find a long term solution, assuming that there may be one.
At the moment, everyone is rightly outraged but, that wont stop a repeat of this, either in the UK or, elsewhere.
The aspect of this that disgusts me most is that it is being done in the name of religion and perhaps if the religious leaders of all faiths started preaching a slightly different message, we may actually have a better world to live in.

I’m not sure a dialogue with so called IS would achieve anything since their aims are so incompatible with civilised values. We didn’t negotiate with the Nazis so why negotiate with so called IS? Who do they speak for? They don’t represent any population. They are a death cult.

With long term policies to fight them and to simultaneously alleviate the conditions that brought them about they can be defeated - just like many other extremist groups in the past e.g. Kymer Rouge.

Negotiate with isis, think you would end up minus your head. The absolute stated aims of isis is to bring down western civilization by any means possible. That includes extreme violence .
Not certain why you introduce the ira into the debate. Obviously a political settlement was reached with them. A situation which is impossible with isis.

But you can do it if there is a will. We stood for greater decency at the time of WW2 and did it. Families and associates do generally know or suspect these things. Also, the criminals need to show their actions / intentions have wider consequences than just to them (after all if somebody is content to blow themselves up there is little to gain from just affecting them).

You talk about going against what we stand for. What nonsense. Terrorism has affected our everyday lives enormously - surveillance, bag checks, snooping on internet usage, army on streets, etc, etc. What would help us restore our way of life is to deal with these people harshly - remove their freedom and rights for the benefit of the vast majority. Anything else just erodes everybody's liberty over time. The only way to uphold values is to be tough on those who seek to undermine them. Nothing else can work.

It is not the only way. It is one strand but to believe these people are wholly influenced by clerics is naïve.

I despair.

Nice idea if only ISIS had a cause other than destruction of Western society.

You have on the simplest solution though. Offer 'ISIS' (whatever it is) a tract of desert in the Middle East to establish their caliphate. Sign it up with international formalities. Encourage others of their radical ilk to go to live there and then 100% destroy the caliphate by miliarty means.

And how did we do it? Total war - nobody talked the Nazis out of their beliefs.

Not that I'm advocating that of course - we've tried bombing these people, and that's probably one of the single biggest causal factors in the rise of fundamentalist Islamist ideologies; every religion has an element of nutjobbery, but very few have the fuel that international policy in the Middle East has provided.

And just for clarity - the decision to raise the threat level to 'critical' is entirely separate from the decision to put the Army on the streets; the latter is nothing to do with JTAC - it's a government decision, and one which conveniently helps to disguise the fact that the police are unable to respond appropriately due to lack of resources - because the Home Secretary (Mrs May) slashed their budgets to ribbons and took 20,000 police officers off the streets.

Good argument, well made.

True enough, but certain clerics facilitate platforms for some of these jihadist speakers.

no chance of this happening police are watching but the terrorists have human rights pity the victims dont

Dialogue with ISIS? And lefties wonder why they're labelled 'loony'.



ISIS don't want dialogue. They want us (the West) dead. All of us. FFS, they want all non-ISIS conforming Muslims dead, so we're not in line for any cosy chats any time soon.

They want to re-establish the Caliphate and spread it across Europe, and eventually the world, under strict Sharia rule. They will kill anyone standing in their way (by a variety of gruesome means, and all on video). They celebrate setting off shrapnel bombs amongst crowds of young girls. Be under no illusion: this is their goal.

Unfortunately the Western liberal mindset is wholly incapable of dealing with this, and of acknowledging the fact our policies of open borders, aggressive political correctness and 'tolerance' are allowing these extremist mindsets to flourish right in our communities, while we're at war with them elsewhere.

I'm a Mancunian. 3 of the victims were local to me. I've felt incredibly sad and heartbroken since the attack - but I'm also angry. And let's be honest, all this 'Love Manchester' stuff is great, but it doesn't actually achieve anything. A vigil, a poem, a few pictures of Muslims smiling with Police officers, people handing out drinks, cafes offering free brews - all very nice and perhaps necessary at this moment, but there's a huge undercurrent of anger being ignored by the press.

Do whatever is necessary. If someone is found to have ISIS training manuals on their PC, lock them up or deport them. If someone is posting pro-ISIS views or flying ISIS flags, the same applies. If the law needs changing, change it. I've said it since 7/7: stop being so nice when so many people want to kill us. Given what we know about Salman Abedi, he should never, ever have been walking the streets of the UK.

And another thing: if I see or hear someone else declaring 'this is nothing to do with Islam', I might huff testily. ISIS follow Wahhabi Sunni Islam, and they are far from alone in this. Everything is carried out in the name of Allah, and there is plenty of support for any attacks on the West. 'This has nothing to do with most Muslims' is more accurate. I don't blame the wider Muslim community, I blame the attackers first and foremost, and I blame us and our politicians for not being willing to take the hard, unpopular decisions at home, while having made some terrible decisions across the Middle East.

You should try listening to what people actually say. JTAC made their decision based on intelligence, and the Met subsequently requested implementation of part a plan called Operation Temperer, in which army personnel replace numbers of armed police in mainly guarding duties, freeing those armed police to operate elsewhere while the response continues. All of this has been confirmed by various individuals, including Cressida Dick and Mark Rowley.

So, for clarity - it was a Met decision and it's an entirely sensible response.

Thank you for your excellent summary. To think that the Manchester bomber and his family were welcomed into our country and given a house and education . The thanks we got was this dreadful atrocity.

Removing Gadaffi and leaving a vacuum behind to be filled by jihadis has worked really well for Libya and the rest of us.

Cameron was eager to act as the international statesman when he was supporting airstrikes. Where is he now?

Shades of Iraq.

When you create these failed states you create opportunists for extremists.

Because the police don't have the resource to respond appropriately; Mrs May was warned directly of this by the Police Fed conference in 2013 - where an officer she had previously presented the Community Police Officer of the Year award to, stood up and said he had since resigned, because her cuts had decimated community policing, meaning that they weren't able to gather intelligence from local communities about activities like this, because there weren't enough of them.

Spin it however you like, but deploying the army is not an inevitable result of the threat level being raised to critical; that's happened twice before, without the army being used to replaced police - it's happened because our Tory austerity police force can't respond.

Every now and again the Police get stretched so we supplement them with the Army. Big deal. Why pay over the top for coppers we don't need day to day, plus it was an opportunity to drive out the dead wood As a result, tests taken by the Metropolitan Police in 2011 found that just 25 per cent of male officers and staff were of normal weight, with 52 per cent overweight, 22 per cent obese and 1 per cent morbidly obese. Of the women surveyed, 50 per cent were of normal weight with 32 per cent overweight, 16 per cent obese and 2 per cent morbidly obese. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... tests.html Typical poorly managed public sector organisation

Every now and again the Police get stretched so we supplement them with the Army. Big deal. Why pay over the top for coppers we don't need day to day, plus it was an opportunity to drive out the dead wood As a result, tests taken by the Metropolitan Police in 2011 found that just 25 per cent of male officers and staff were of normal weight, with 52 per cent overweight, 22 per cent obese and 1 per cent morbidly obese. Of the women surveyed, 50 per cent were of normal weight with 32 per cent overweight, 16 per cent obese and 2 per cent morbidly obese. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... tests.html Typical poorly managed public sector organisation