David Anderson (QC)
David Anderson QC is a British lawyer who was the UK government's 'Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation' until 2016.
Contents
Activities
In December 2017 Anderson released his independent review into the UK response to the Westminster, Manchester, London Bridge, and Finsbury Park attacks.
His key recommendations urged UK security officials to get tougher on the rising threat of right-wing extremism and to treat it in the same way as they would Islamist terror threats. Security authorities should, he wrote, implement an 'equivalence of processes in analysing and dealing with all kinds of terrorism, irrespective of the ideology that inspires them'.
Anderson's 61-page report noted that in the 12 months leading up to October 2017, there were 'instances of attack-planning' from far-right extremists, including 'the construction of viable explosive devices and the acquisition of firearms'. However, he noted that it was difficult to quantify exactly how many attacks had been thwarted 'in part because of uncertainty as to whether a lone actor was actually planning an attack and, if so, whether it would have crossed the threshold from hate crime to terrorism'.
Anderson's report was published just five days after US president Donald Trump had retweeted fake Twitter videos posted by the far-right Britain First co-leader Jayda Fransen.[1]
Contact
- Twitter:David Anderson QC (@bricksilk)
Resources
Notes
- ↑ Alex Ma, The British government was just told to get tougher on the rising threat of far-right terror, Business Insider
