Gaza vote highlights security fears in parliament

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Good morning. A political row is brewing about the UK, counterterror measures and legitimate protest — with a new government-commissioned report expected to recommend further restrictions on protesting outside democratic institutions as a result. This is going to be a major story for much of the year, I think, but for now, an important bit of personal context to understand is how the two significant sources of UK terrorism are experienced by MPs on a daily basis.

Fear and loathing in Westminster

Terrorism in Great Britain has two significant sources: Islamist terror, which has made up about 67 per cent of attacks since 2018, about three-quarters of MI5’s caseload, and was the motivation for 64 per cent of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences. Almost all of the remainder were driven by extreme rightwing terrorism, which made up 22 per cent of attacks since 2018, about a quarter of MI5 caseload and 28 per cent of those in custody.

(In terms of terrorism across the UK, it is a different picture: statistics for Northern Ireland are collected by the Northern Ireland Office, not the Home Office, in a way that makes comparisons less easy to make than I would like, but for a sense of the relative scale, there were 51 convictions for terror-related offences across Great Britain in 2022 and 36 in Northern Ireland. But it is what drives terrorism in Great Britain that will shape the political debates that Westminster will inevitably have over the coming weeks and months.)

Both Islamists and the extreme far right have been the source of both successful and unsuccessful plots to kill MPs in the past decade. Islamist “lone wolf” attacks were behind the assassination of Sir…