Evening Standard comment: Far-Right hate has no place in our open city; New cancer treatments; Playing islands in the sun

23 January 2019

Terrorism takes many forms. For three decades it was conflict in Northern Ireland that kept our security services on edge: the age of the Armalite rifle and the coded warning which brought horror to many lives and the sound of detonations to London’s streets. Attacks such as the bomb at Bishopsgate in 1993 and Docklands in 1996 are only half-remembered now but pictures recall their destructive scale.

Then the enemy changed: the new and awful threat to life came from terrorists claiming to fight for groups such as al Qaeda and Islamic State.

They have caused great suffering, including in this city, and containing them is still a huge task for those charged with keeping us safe: 700 terror investigations are now under way, many linked to Islamist groups.

But as Neil Basu, assistant commissioner for specialist operations at the Met, points out, there is another growing potential threat too. He describes a “far-Right drift into extreme Right-wing terrorism”.

Of the 18 terror plots foiled in Britain since 2017, he says, four came from the far-Right. Primary school children are among those being targeted.

What can have caused this upsurge in hatred and division?

The consequences of a Brexit vote that has forced anger to the extremes is the unavoidable answer. “We saw a spike in hate crime after the referendum, that’s never really receded,” Mr Basu says.

You can see it now in the nastiness of online scorn. You can see it outside Westminster, where yellow-jacketed thugs shouted abuse at MPs such as the Remainer Anna Soubry, something to which the police were slow to respond.

As Mr Basu now says, “We were too passive. We needed to be more assertive, we’ve put that in place.”

There’s a vital difference, of course, between fair political passion and violent hate, but something has going wrong when MPs get death threats online for expressing reasonable concern about the consequences of the way Brexit is working out.

We shouldn’t tolerate this slide into a new form of hatred and the police are right to warn about it.

It would be tragic if far-Right violence gained a foothold in a capital that is recognised around the world for its tolerance, diversity and resilience.

New cancer treatments

We often hear about the challenges faced by the NHS. So it is right to recognise the successes, too. Such as news today that a new treatment is being offered by a London hospital to patients with a common and aggressive form of brain tumour known as glioblastoma.

The cancer, which was the type suffered by Labour politician Tessa Jowell before her death last year, is now being tackled at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Bloomsbury, with the trial of a new drug that can help the body’s immune system respond.

Ms Jowell campaigned for people to be given greater access to such innovative therapies, which can cost thousands of pounds when given privately.

They offer hope to those most in need of it.

Playing islands in the sun

The Ashes get the glory but Test cricket against the West Indies is part of what, in the eyes of those who love it, makes the game more glorious than any other sport.

It has produced the most elegiac writing — the Trinidadian C L R James’s magnificent memoir Beyond a Boundary is a book about life, not just cricket — and, of course, many of the finest players.

Today, as the 155th Test between England and the West Indies begins in Barbados, one of the greats of West Indies cricket, Everton Weekes, tells the Evening Standard about the passion for the game on the island which led the world’s 13th-smallest country to produce 87 Test players.

The days when the likes of Barbadians Gordon Greenidge, Malcolm Marshall and Joel Garner dominated world cricket have sadly gone, but there are signs of a revival in the West Indies game.

Let’s cheer it on — and England, too, of course.