After publication of the third and final volume of the Manchester Arena Inquiry, Mark Rowe reflects.
The three volumes total hundreds of thousands of words, and add the witness hearings, the Inquiry runs into the millions of words; ultimately, about one moment, at 10.31pm on Monday, May 22, 2017, when a suicide bomber ‘detonated the device’ in the words of the timeline at the back of volume three at an entrance to the Manchester Arena concert venue, next door to Manchester Victoria rail and tram station (pictured).
The Inquiry, while a legal process, was also about, in the words of Inquiry chair Sir John Saunders in his preface to volume three, the ‘wish to understand’, ‘a vital part of all our humanity’ and something that he had borne in mind at all times. Volume three unavoidably has open and closed parts, in the name of national security, as it covers the Security Service MI5, and counter-terror policing.
While much of the reporting about volume three was about the ‘preventability’, how MI5 was ‘profoundly sorry‘ that it might have and did not prevent the attack, volume three was also about the bomber’s radicalisation and planning and preparation. Sir John in his remarks yesterday unveiling the report said that it is important that we understand as much as we can about the radicalisation of the suicide bomber, ‘so that similar signs can be recognised and appropriate action taken’.
Hence the volume covers the bomber’s past: his family; his friends and associates; his use of the internet and social media; his education; and the mosques that he and his family attended. How to understand the ‘warped mindset of violent extremism’, when the bomber is dead, and if those around him are unwilling to cooperate with the Inquiry (a brother is ‘out of the country’, according to volume three, the parents are, Sir John said yesterday, ‘out of the jurisdiction’). How to understand the worldview of someone radicalised, ‘how the world is and how to behave in it’; does one have a trigger, when one begins life as a radicalised person – does one even define oneself like that?
Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence, the poet Auden wrote in his poem September 1, 1939. Yet without a window into a man’s soul, questions abound. The Inquiry heard words to describe the future bomber at school and college like lazy, mediocre and rude, and no higher praise than he ‘did not engage in any behaviour that stood out as being unusually bad’. How could this person get a place at the University of Salford to take a course in business management? By January 2017 when he last engaged with the university – attending an exam, perhaps only so he got more of a student loan – according to volume three it’s ‘likely that he had already disengaged entirely from his studies by then and had committed to the path of violent extremism’.
As with anyone who turns murderous, what is a free society to do – while the person is law-abiding, they don’t say or do things to justify being reported to the authorities, who have (as volume three acknowledged) ‘finite resources’. The three volumes have shown that resources matter, but are not everything. At least the stewards were there, at the Arena; the British Transport Police on duty on the evening of the bomb infamously went miles for kebabs; volume three noted ‘inadequate staffing numbers and counter-extremism training and support for prison officers’. The Security Service has to make judgements; use discretion, in deciding who to investigate and how much.
The Security Service in the Manchester, north west region in the year before the Arena bomb ‘had to make hard decisions about where it was to focus its resources’. An unnamed Security Service witness termed this ‘unacceptable’; a peculiar word, often used by those in authority to show disapproval of a state of affairs. Surely it was acceptable, otherwise it would not have been allowed? As for where responsibility lies, it’s not with those on the front line who have to do the work regardless. If they devise a work-around – whether writing a computer password beside the device, because the IT department isn’t answering the phone; or managing a queue for the security screening at an airport, because to keep to the proper processes with not enough staff and screening arches only causes overlong queues – those on the front line get blamed for a situation made by those above.
In a free society an adult is at liberty to be who they are (volume three noted the ‘self-directed nature of university studies’) so long as they do not harm the liberty of others. Once the future criminal becomes ‘disengaged’, they may drop out of society; become outright secretive. Volume three found that Didsbury Mosque in Manchester where the future bomber went had ‘a form of wilful blindness’, that the report put down to ‘weak leadership’, that ‘did not pay sufficient attention to what went on at its premises and did not have policies in place that were robust enough to prevent the politicisation of its premises’ by Libyans. As the mosque has charitable status, the ‘Charity Commission is best placed to reach its own judgement’, Sir John wrote.
The future bomber visited a man who had fought in Libya and who had ‘a hero status among impressionable young men’ while that man was on remand for terrorism offences; and then visited in another prison after conviction. The prisoner contacted the future bomber ‘using an illicit mobile phone while he was serving his sentence at HMP Altcourse’. The prisoner ‘had an important role in radicalising’ the future bomber, a young man of (in Sir John’s words unveiling volume three) ‘limited intelligence and abilities’. As Sir John added, that implied the bomber had help.
Prisons, schools and further education, mosques, then, in volume three; stewarding and venue private security in volume one; the emergency services in volume two; no occupation or agency has come away from the Inquiry without flaws or omissions raised. How the three differ is how upstream they were of the attack, in terms of (to use an Inquiry phrase) ‘preventability’. A wise security consultant said to me after the 7-7 terror attacks in 2005 something that is true still: if a terrorist were to go to a London venue (it would be wrong to name one; you can think of one) with a gun, ‘it’s too late’. He meant that whatever private security or passers-by do – whatever motivates the gunman meaning harm – damage will be done. It is for agents of the state, upstream of the act, to prevent.
Some things each of us are responsible for: if I do not lock my car door, or my house’s back door, the state will not do it for me. Some things the state is entirely responsible for: if I fly to Moscow to try to do diplomacy with President Putin, the Foreign Office will not thank me. In between, all is inconstant. The proposed Protect Duty, by asking more of private business, is a re-setting of the responsibilities of the state to protect citizens from terrorism.
In his remarks to unveil volume three, as with volume two, Sir John used the same word, poignant after all the words, and expense; ‘hope’. He does not have power to enforce; he can only hope that the Inquiry was worth it, whether to publicly add to the understanding of the bereaved, why their loved ones died; or to actually remedy anything. He was in charge of a legal, not a scholarly, Inquiry; a legal process like an inquest; no-one was on trial, although it may have felt like it at times. When teenage stewards were giving evidence in front of the well-paid, middle-aged Inquiry, it felt uncomfortably like working-class men being told by First World War generals in chateaux and chauffeured cars to walk into barbed wire and machine-gun fire.
“I can only hope that we achieve something by our efforts,” Sir John said. “This will only happen if those away from this Inquiry can share in the desires of those who have taken part in it to make things better. Inevitably some of the changes that are needed will require money which is in short supply but protecting the lives of the people of this country must be a high priority for any Government.”
