Is Britain ready for a Mumbai-style terror attack?

While commandos were still fighting against terrorists in Mumbai Peter Clarke, former head of Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command, from the pages of The Sunday Telegraph warns: “our enemies have not gone away. They are determined, resilient and utterly murderous”.

 Is Britain prepared?  According to what Mr. Clarke points out no, not at all.

In his opinion an India-style terror attack would cause in London a massacre and turn the city into a temporary war zone.

What makes Britain particularly vulnerable in the event of such an attack is that the country doesn’t have an armed conventional police.

Moreover the armed police is trained to deal with armed criminals, but wouldn’t be able to cope with a multi-site, mobile terroristic incident like the one in Mumbai.

Probably the relevant point here is not whether the police is well-trained or not, but if we even need a military force to deal with the terroristic threat.

As the last events in Mumbai showed, the police were not prepared for an attack of this magnitude. The police anti-terrorist squad even lost their chief early in the day. The police seem underfunded and underequipped for something of this magnitude.

On the contrary police forces seem to be confident enough.

Jamie Johnson, a Metropolitan Police officer, in a conference at the University of Westminster  when asked about this possible scenario said that police receive an intensive training in order to be able to face a broad range of terror attacks, included chemical and gas attacks.  

Stephen Tankel, expert on conflict and security studies at King’s College of London told Bury the Lead “an attack like this is obviously very difficult to deal with, but my presumption is that most of the people who are in charge of keeping us safe should have probably anticipated something like this if they had done their jobs. Every time there is a spectacular attack like this, like 9/11, or in Mumbai, it’s quite normal to feel as though  this is something that is entirely new and we would be unprepared for. I think an attack of this magnitude would be difficult for any security service to handle anywhere in the world”.

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