Why Britain is safer than France

By Rosemary Righter

Yes, it’s an island. But it’s also better at inter-service teamwork.

LONDON — Is Britain safer than France? The short answer is the French “tout est relatif.” Safer does not mean safe. Evidence has been mounting for months that ISIL calculates that atrocities inflicting mass casualties far from its “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria will not only foment fear of Islam in “infidel” Western societies, but also serve as a recruiting sergeant to lure more young Muslims to its “winning” side.
So London is indubitably a target. As are Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. Just a fortnight before the Paris massacres, Andrew Parker, the director general of Britain’s internal security service MI5, said that the agency and its partners had thwarted six terrorist attacks in the U.K. in the past year and several plots overseas. Speaking at a press conference at the G20 meeting in Turkey on Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed seven attacks have been foiled.

Still, the answer is probably yes, Britain is safer than France; and for a number of solid reasons.
They include, but are not confined to, the obvious: Britain is an island, outside the Schengen agreement, and therefore potentially better able to police its frontiers. Its large Muslim community is somewhat better integrated than France’s, and, being mainly from South Asia (the Indian sub-continent), culturally more remote from the Middle East than France’s largely North African cohort.

The threats posed by the Irish Republican Army forced MI5 to establish a dedicated counter-terrorism branch back in 1984, a time when most equivalent services were still in Cold War mode.

Britain also has strict and rigorously enforced gun control laws, although the police readily concede that since organized crime still gets hold of weapons, terrorists could too. Then there is Britain’s electronic surveillance of ordinary life, on a scale unparalleled in Europe. Nearly six million CCTV cameras, one for every 11 citizens, watch its streets, shops and public spaces — and most people are not only quite used to these electronic Big Brothers, however irritating their use to record motoring offences may be, they feel safer because of them.

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The cardinal distinction is that the U.K.’s counter-terrorism skills are widely reckoned to be streets ahead of other Europeans’ — and its operations far better coordinated at all levels: detection, prevention and emergency response.
In France, the DGSI internal security service is only now shifting from concentrating on police work to an intelligence-led strategy, and its counter-terrorism operations are badly hampered by the fact that the DGSE, the external service which controls all electronic surveillance and intercepts, still engages little with domestic security and does relatively little domestic monitoring.
Britain has had a long, bloody, apprenticeship from which to learn the critical importance of inter-service teamwork.
The threats posed by the Irish Republican Army forced MI5 to establish a dedicated counter-terrorism branch back in 1984, a time when most equivalent services were still in Cold War mode and the global image of British intelligence was defined by the James Bond movies. London in those years had some of the air of a city under siege: The cockeyed optimists among us joked about how easy it suddenly became to book tables beside restaurants’ windows. My own Islington flat’s windows were blown out by the IRA bombing in Bishopsgate, nearly a mile away, and I had just left the shirts department in Harrods when a bomb went off there.

Almost every time a would-be jihadist heads south, their families issue anguished appeals to get them back.

Defeating the IRA terror campaign required a major recalibration of intelligence and policing, closely dovetailing the work of police forces, MI5, the external security service MI6, special reconnaissance units of the military and GCHQ, the body that intercepts and monitors communications. It was vastly improved intelligence, backed by public readiness to feed snippets of information to the authorities, which eventually saw off the IRA, not a change of heart by the Provisionals, the IRA’s political wing.
Following Al Qaeda’s 9/11 atrocities, British counter-terrorism strategy was again revamped. It is based on four Ps: prepare for attacks; protect the public; pursue attackers; and prevent their radicalization.
It wasn’t 100 percent effective; in July 2005, attacks on London tubes and buses by British-born Islamist terrorists killed 52 and injured more than 700. The “prevent” element was ratcheted up in response, with millions poured into thousands of schemes engaging schools, community groups, local authorities, prisons and mosques. Persons flagged as at risk of radicalization can be referred to counseling by social workers, psychologists and religious experts.
There has been a massive effort to build trust among Muslim communities and, although some 700 Britons have headed to Syria and there is no sign that ISIL’s sinister appeal is abating, senior police officers say that, particularly over the past year, anxiety about losing their children to terrorism has produced a “fantastic” flow of information. Almost every time a would-be jihadist heads south, their families issue anguished appeals to get them back.
Yet even in the U.K., there is increasing concern in the intelligence community that the battle is shifting in favor of the terrorists.
Quite aside from the difficulty of intelligence-gathering in the deadly environments of Syria and northern Iraq, the ever more sophisticated use by ISIL and other terrorist organizations of heavy encryption is seriously hampering the interception of their communications. In MI5 chief Parker’s words, “the conversations of our adversaries are happening on a bewildering array of devices and digital platforms, often provided by companies overseas. And an increasing proportion of such conversations are now beyond our reach.”
British laws on surveillance are in no shape to meet the challenge. They are complex, overlapping, and, critically, have failed to keep pace with the technologies of online and encrypted apps.
In 2013, the British government tried to address this problem, but the proposed law was blocked by the Liberal Democrats, then the Conservatives’ coalition partner, who denounced it as a “snooper’s charter.” At the time, Edward Snowden’s denunciation of the bulk collection of data by the U.S. National Security Agency and by the British GCHQ had set the chattering classes off on a righteous rant about the invasion of individual privacy.
Far more consequentially, Snowden’s leaks of highly classified intelligence gave terrorist organizations detailed insights into what Western intelligence could read, what channels to avoid, and how — with the help of new encryption apps helpfully provided by Google and other mainly U.S. providers — they could evade detection.
The Investigatory Powers Bill, a new version of the 2013 law with built-in judicial safeguards and exemptions for “sensitive” professions such as doctors, lawyers and journalists, is scheduled to come before the British parliament. It will require Internet providers to retain customer data for 12 months — which poses questions of enforceability as the big providers are overwhelmingly U.S.-based.
It will empower GCHQ and MI5 to bulk-collect communications data (traffic, not content, making it little different in practice to an itemized telephone bill) and — with ministerial warrants subject to judicial safeguards — require communications providers to assist intelligence and police services to hack into suspects’ cell phones and other electronic devices, to eavesdrop, and to remotely control devices.
This law is essential to restore capabilities that Snowden helped to destroy, and to include communications technologies that existing powers do not cover. It is the essential complement to Cameron’s decision, post-Paris, to increase the strength of the SAS and SBS special forces, at present no more than 450 combined in number, and to recruit 1,900 intelligence personnel across MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
But communications monitoring remains hugely controversial, so much so that the government has pledged to allow ample parliamentary time for debate and, if the case is made, amendments. At this rate, the law could take until the end of 2017 to get on the statute books, when the massacres in Paris demonstrate how badly it is needed right now. Polls show that most Brits are in favor: Apparently they trust the security services more than most MPs do.

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One of the hallmarks of ISIL is the speed at which it radicalizes adherents online; another is its use of what is known as “the dark web” to plan attacks and issue orders, unseen.
This is about tracking, and also about silencing, a terrorist organization that — with perplexing success — uses what amount to snuff videos to recruit adherents in the heart of Europe. Norman Tebbit, the veteran politician whose wife has been wheelchair-bound ever since the IRA bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel in 1984, during the Conservative Party conference, puts it starkly. “The human right to privacy is important, but the dead have no human rights at all.”