A bizarre but perhaps unsurprising intervention from former Met police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu who tells The Guardian on the twentieth anniversary of the attacks:
“A driver of the 7/7 attacks was foreign policy and Iraq. That does not excuse in any way what they did. That foreign policy decision has radicalised and made extremists of people who might not have been radicalised or extreme. And if they were on the pathway, it’s pretty much guaranteed… All terrorists will have a freedom fighter story.”
Of course the real driver of the 7/7 attacks was the terrorists themselves. Blaming Western foreign policy is the very same excuse used by terrorists themselves for their murderous actions…
That’s the same Neil Basu who called British policing institutionally racist, alleged Suella Braverman used “horrific” rhetoric about migrants, and said Farage was giving the EDL “succour.” No wonder British policing is in such a dire state after years of this ‘leadership’…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”