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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The Home Secretary is chairing a meeting of thegovernment’s emergency committee COBRA this morning to discuss the UK’sresponse to the Paris attacks.  Policesay they have stepped up security measures with reports this morning that anSAS unit has been set up to counter the threat of a gun attack.  I am joined now by John Gerson from King’sCollege London, he is professor of National Security Studies there, KevinHurley beside him is a former Met Police officer and now the Police and CrimeCommissioner for Surrey and from Salford is Hazel Blears, the formerCommunities Secretary of course who helped lead the government’s counter extremismstrategy, Prevent, a very good morning to you all. 

I wantto bring in Hazel Blears, right upstream into stopping people attempting carryingout these in the first place, because they don’t want to, because they’ve been toldjust how plain stupid an idea it is, that’s the Prevent strategy in a nutshell –it doesn’t seem to be having a major effect.   

HAZEL BLEARS: Well having been the Minister at the time of the Londonbombings, the first thing I want to say is obviously all of our thoughts are withthe families and friends of the victims of this terrible carnage that has happenedand this ought to give us the energy and the commitment to redouble our effortsto tackle this extremist ideology, to expose the medieval nature of trying to imposea caliphate across the world with the brutality and wickedness that ISIS are engagedin and this latest demonstration in Paris of 129 people murdered and 350 peoplein terrible injury and pain is illustration of what happens if we do not tacklethis ideology.  Now we’re ten years onfrom 7/7 and in this country our intelligence agencies as you said have done abrilliant job but if you look at the Adebolajo and Adebuwale killings ofFusilier Lee Rigby, we knew about those two who perpetrated that murder butthey were on the fringes of various plots against us and they were not a highenough priority.  The people who did 7/7,again we knew about them but they were not a high enough priority and when I hearabout this young man in France, Mostefai, who again was on a watch list, not ahigh enough priority.  The agencies areunder immense pressure, thousands of people have gone out to Syria, hundreds ofthem have come back and now they are not only consumed by the ideology but theyhave been taught to use weapons and to murder people and that’s why we have gotto work here in our communities, redouble our efforts, working with the Muslim communityto say this is not my religion, this is a perverted view of Islam and to stopour young people particularly being groomed and drawn in to this kind ofradicalisation and extremism because this is where it ends.  It can seem attractive, it can seemglamorous, it can seem that you are going to change the world but where it endsis the murder and slaughter of innocent people.