The New Observer
December 13, 2015
The Home Office report, titled “Operation of police powers under the Terrorism Act 2000 and subsequent legislation: Arrests, outcomes, and stop and search, Great Britain, quarterly update to September 2015,” announced that there had been a total of 315 terrorism-related arrests in the year ending September 2015, an increase of a third compared with the previous year.
Of this number, at least 230 were Muslims, working out to a statistical average of 0.8 per day, or one every two days.
According to the report, the figures were characterized by a dramatic increase in the number of females arrested, from 21 in the year ending September 2014, to 50 arrests in the year ending September 2015.
This is a reflection of the increasing radicalization of Muslim women and their participation in the worldwide jihadi uprising, or as the Home Office report said: “The majority of the increase in the number of women getting arrested has been linked to international-related terrorism.”
The figures also revealed a 31 percent increase in the number of arrests for “international-related terrorism,” and a sharp increase in the number of persons arrested aged “21–24” and “30 and over.”
Some 39 percent of those arrested in the year ending September 2015 have been charged, with a further 22 percent (68) released on bail. Of the remaining, some 37 percent (115 arrestees) were released without charge.
In terms of the number of terrorists convicted and in prison, the figures are even higher:
As of September 30, 2015, of the 137 persons in prison for terrorism-related offences, 131 were Muslims, or just over 95 percent. The report said that 62 percent considered themselves to be of “Asian or Asian British” ethnicity and 76 percent considered themselves to be of “British” nationality. This has increased considerably in recent years. Since September 11, 2001 (when the data collection began), only 56 percent of those arrested were of British, or British dual nationality.
The remainder of the arrests—and the six non-Muslim prisoners—were classified under the “domestic extremists/separatist” category, which, according to the Home Office’s own definition, is made up of “single issue protestors who seek to further their cause through the committing of criminal offences.”
They are most commonly, the Home Office report said, “extremist animal rights groups or are members or associates of far-right groups.”
It is worth pointing out that the only terrorist incident classified as “far right” during the reporting year was that of a clearly mentally deranged individual in north Wales who stabbed a Sikh in a supermarket. It later transpired that he had originally set out to attack a family member, and only attacked the Sikh as an afterthought when he could not find his intended white victim. It is thus therefore dubious that even this incident could be classed as “terrorism.”
Of the other thirty-two “domestic extremism/separatism” prisoners in jail for terrorism-related offenses as of September 30, 2015, twenty considered themselves to be Christian, and seven considered themselves to have no religion. The majority (32) considered themselves to be of “White” ethnicity and of “British” nationality.
At least some of these arrests are likely to be related to ongoing surges of violence in Northern Ireland, where hardline Irish nationalists and British loyalists sill occasionally try to revive the sectarian conflict.