A million- MUTTI Fleeing pound BOUNCES the hell of wedding BACK North Korea TALKING BEST EUROPEAN LAST WORD P52 POINTS P20 ARTICLES P14 27TH MAY 2017 | ISSUE 1126 | £3.30 EWTHE BEST OF THE BRITISHEEK AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA Manchester’s agony Page 2 ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS www.theweek.co.uk 2 NEWS The main stories… The deadly assault on Manchester The UK terror threat was raised to its “a nostalgia for an earlier kind of highest level of “critical” this week after terrorist”, said George Kassimeris in The a suicide bomber killed at least 22 people, Independent. In the old days, groups such and injured more than 60 others, in as the Red Army Faction and Italian Red Manchester. The bomber – identified as Brigades issued communiqués explaining Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old born in the their political agendas. Their targets were city to Libyan refugees – detonated his “specific and comprehensible”, and their device on Monday night in the foyer of the attacks were primarily acts of theatre. Manchester Arena, one of Europe’s largest What they wanted, in the oft-cited words indoor venues, as thousands of young fans of the terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, was were streaming out of a concert by the “a lot of people watching and a lot of American pop star Ariana Grande. The people listening and not a lot of people blast sent a devastating wave of shrapnel dead”. Now, as we saw in Manchester, through the crowd, unleashing a panicked “things are very different”: terrorists are stampede. Among the dead were an eight- setting out to kill as many people as year-old girl, an off-duty policewoman and possible, driven by a religious fanaticism a Polish couple who had arrived to collect that recognises no boundaries. their two daughters. Indeed, that young people, even children, There were reports of parents turning up A vigil outside Manchester’s town hall were killed was almost certainly part of the to search for their children and staying to plan, said Haras Rafiq in The Daily comfort wounded strangers, and of numerous other acts of Telegraph. In Istanbul, Paris and Orlando, terrorists have hit kindness by members of the public: a homeless man ran to the nightclubs and other entertainment venues that, in the warped scene and held an injured woman in his arms as she died; local view of jihadists, represent Western decadence. The fact that taxi drivers gave free rides to concertgoers trying to get away; Monday’s attack came just before the start of the Islamic holy residents opened their homes; month of Ramadan was also and scores of people queued to no coincidence. Isis and its kin give blood. The next day, “Our best defence is maintaining the absolute, have often encouraged thousands gathered for a vigil impassive insistence that this violence will followers to ramp up their in Manchester’s Albert Square. attacks during this time. It opened with tributes to the never move us, will never change us” “Likewise, the jihadists’ fetish emergency services – which for anniversaries should not go prompted thunderous applause. Earlier, hundreds of people unnoticed, this moment of barbarity arriving four years to the had donated a total of £11,000 to put behind the bar of a pub day after Drummer Lee Rigby’s murder at the hands of near Manchester’s Royal Infirmary, to buy food and drinks terrorists.” We all need to step up our response to this threat. for all the medics working around the clock to help the British Muslims need to do more to root out “the malaise that wounded, some of whom lost limbs in the blast. is seeping through our community”. The next government, meanwhile, should seek to emulate the best counterterrorism Every terrorist killing is an atrocity, said Sophie Gilbert in strategies from abroad. It could learn a lot from the Dutch The Atlantic. But there is something “uniquely cowardly and prison system, from Canadian models of integration and from especially cruel” about attacking a venue filled with Scandinavian deradicalisation programmes. youngsters, many of whom would have been attending their first ever pop concert. To randomly kill these innocents, who We can pull out all the stops to forestall future attacks, said only moments before had been Daniel Finkelstein in The giddily united in music and fun, A nation on high alert Times, but these measures can and were looking for their Monday’s attack was the deadliest terrorist incident in only achieve so much. Our best parents to take them home, is the UK since July 2005, when 52 people were killed in defence, in the end, is “outrage piled upon outrage”, “maintaining the absolute, coordinated attacks on the London transport network. said Howard Jacobson in The impassive insistence that this New York Times. Manchester, Abedi – formerly a student at the University of Salford violence will never move us, my home town, has suffered a – was known to the security services, and had recently will never change us, will never terrorist attack before. In 1996, returned from Libya, where Islamic State have be a way to get us to listen or the IRA set off a truck bomb in training camps, but he was not part of an active pay attention or respond”. the city centre. It caused huge investigation or regarded as a high risk. The security History shows that terrorist structural damage, but because services are now trying to establish whether he was violence, whether by Eta, the the terrorists gave advance a member of a network that may be plotting another Red Brigade or the IRA, tends warning of the blast by phone, imminent attack. Given the sophistication of the to “fizzle out” when it becomes nobody died. This bomb was device, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said it was clear to the perpetrators that “another order of catastrophe”. likely that Abedi wasn’t working alone, and four it is getting them nowhere. Consolation, such as there is, people, including his brother, have been arrested Are Islamist terrorists “funda- lies not in the “speeches of since Monday. mentally different”, because of municipal defiance”, but in the This week all parties suspended their election their twisted religious ideas? many stories of courage, campaigns for three days, and the PM activated “I don’t believe they are.” We assistance and solidarity. “All Operation Temperer, a response plan devised in 2015 must remain united, not just is sorrow, but we still have to put thousands of troops on the streets. They will in mourning, but in our kindness and pity.” help guard key sites and major events, such as this determination that violence weekend’s FA Cup final. The Palace of Westminster won’t achieve anything. Modern terrorism has reached was closed to the public indefinitely. “Resistance and defiance until such barbaric levels it induces they stop is all that we have.” THE WEEK 27 May 2017 …and how they were covered NEWS 3 What the commentators said For years, Theresa May has been characterised May wobbles as “risk averse”, said Matthew d’Ancona in The Guardian. One glance at the Tory What happened manifesto proves that the reverse is true: Just four days after the Tories launched their the document amounts to nothing less than election manifesto last week, Theresa May “the most adventurous restatement of executed a spectacular U-turn and ditched a conservatism” since Thatcher overturned the key commitment on the funding of social care. postwar consensus. The manifesto’s pledges Reacting to polls which suggested mounting to close “the gender pay gap”, “the mental disquiet over what Labour dubbed a “dementia health gap” and “the disability gap” are all tax”, the Prime Minister watered down the testament to that. What’s particularly striking manifesto’s insistence that pensioners would is the Tories’ “brazen larceny” in poaching have to meet their entire care costs until left their enemies’ most popular ideas, said with £100,000 in assets. This week, she Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Not long promised to set a cap on the amount the elderly ago, the Tories were the sworn enemies of might be forced to pay towards their care bills May: “mired in chaos”? state intervention, ridiculing the very idea of (see page 4). Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn curbs on executive pay, restrictions on mocked her government for being “mired in chaos”, but May foreign takeovers and an industrial strategy. “By a process insisted that “nothing had changed” in principle. of miraculous alchemy”, they’re now Mayite policies for the mainstream. Other commitments reverse former Tory policies: the manifesto promises to means-test the winter fuel allowance What a shame then, to find that May is so quick to give way and to replace the “triple lock”, which protects the value of in the face of opposition, said Janan Ganesh in the FT. Her state pensions, with a “double lock”. The 88-page document “brave, contentious idea” of making pensioners pay more also states that the Tories would replace free school lunches for their own care was swiftly dumped when it was found to with free breakfasts, cut net immigration to below 100,000 a clash with the “Conservative cult of inheritance”. Just think year, and give their MPs a free vote on hunting. But its most what impression that will have given the EU’s Brexit remarkable feature is its rhetorical tilt to the left. Its foreword negotiators. The lesson they will draw is that May is “strong openly declares opposition to “untrammelled free markets” and stable until you test her”. Actually, there are plenty of and “the cult of selfish individualism”; it deplores “social Tories who would happily see May junk a lot more of the division” and “inequality”, and rejects “dogma and ideology”.