Theresa May has promised additional police resources to protect mosques in the run-up to Eid, following a van attack on pedestrians near Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. The Prime Minister visited the scene on Monday and spoke with community and faith leaders, praising what she called “community coming together, all faiths united in one desire to see extremism and hatred of all sorts driven out of our society”.
Mrs May’s response was notably quicker than her handling of the Grenfell Tower fire, which was widely criticised as sluggish. After chairing a meeting of the government’s Cobra emergency committee, she travelled to the area and was pictured at the mosque, a few hundred metres from where the attack took place. She was heckled by one passer-by as she left, but avoided the chaotic scenes seen during her earlier visit to a Grenfell community centre.
Speaking outside Downing Street after the Cobra meeting, the Prime Minister said: “Extra police resources have already been deployed to reassure communities, and the police will continue to assess the security needs of mosques and provide any additional resources needed.” She described the attack as “an evil borne out of hatred” and pledged to tackle anti-Islam extremism, adding that there had been “far too much tolerance of extremism in our country over many years – and that means extremism of any kind, including Islamophobia”.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose constituency includes the attack site, visited the scene twice on Monday. He said: “This is a very multi-faith community. Christians, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, all live around here. This is a microcosm of a community working together. An attack on a mosque, an attack on a synagogue, an attack on a church, is actually an attack on all of us.”
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan called the incident “a truly horrific terrorist attack on our city, deliberately targeting innocent Londoners”, while Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron described it as “senseless barbarism”. The attack came immediately after the weekend’s Great Get Together events, which celebrated community cohesion.
