Election choice 'starker' after Corbyn said Manchester bombing 'our own fault', claims Theresa May

‘Jeremy Corbyn has said that terror attacks in Britain are our own fault,’ Prime Minister alleges

once againTheresa May has accused Jeremy Corbyn of believing the Manchester bombing was “our own fault”, putting the terror threat at the heart of the election campaign.

The Prime Minister seized on the Labour leader pointing to a link between terror attacks and Britain’s foreign wars to argue the choice at the ballot box had “just become starker”.

“Jeremy Corbyn has said that terror attacks in Britain are our own fault,” Ms May claimed, at a press conference at the G7 summit in Sicily.

“And has chosen to do that just few days after one of the worst terrorist atrocities we have experienced in the United Kingdom.”

The Prime Minister insisted there could never be any excuse for terrorism, “no excuse for what happened in Manchester”.

“The choice that people face at the general election has just become starker,” she said.

“It’s a choice between me working constantly to protect the national interest and protect our security and Jeremy Corbyn who, frankly, is not up to the job.”

The comments will infuriate Labour, after Mr Corbyn – in his speech today – insisted “no actions of any government can remotely excuse, or even adequately explain outrages like this week’s massacre”.

A spokesman for the Labour leader said: "Once again, Theresa May is not telling the truth. In his speech, Jeremy said: "Protecting this country requires us to be both strong against terrorism and strong against the causes of terrorism. The blame is with the terrorists, but if we are to protect our people we must be honest about what threatens our security."

During the press conference, the Prime Minister also faced tough questions about her record as Home Secretary, both funding the police and tackling jihadists.

She has been accused of undermining the fight against terror by slashing police numbers and of failing to prevent 400 extremists returning to Britain from foreign battlefields.

But, on funding, Ms May insisted: “We have protected counter terrorism police funding, we have increased funding for our security and intelligence agencies.”

And, on whether she had “dropped the ball” on jihadists, she argued: “I excluded more hate preachers from the United Kingdom than any Home Secretary has ever done.”

But the Prime Minister ducked a question about whether the Libya mission to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi had been a “success”, after the Manchester bomber’s links to the country.

Earlier, she said that connection “shines a light on that largely ungoverned space on the edge of Europe”, arguing a negotiated solution to Libya’s turmoil was vital.

Ms May also refused to say whether Donald Trump had “apologised” for what the US admitted were the “terrible” leaks of intelligence information about the Manchester bomb, passed by Britain.

Before leaving the summit early, the Prime Minister warned that the threat from the Islamic State terror group is moving “from the battlefield to the internet”.

In the wake of the suicide bomb, the leaders of the world’s leading industrial states issued a joint demand for tech giants to take down terrorist content.

And they backed Mrs May’s call for more pressure to be put on internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to target extremist messages online, including by developing technology which automatically identifies and removes messages that incite violence.

Ms May said: “We agreed that the threat from Daesh [Isis] is evolving rather than disappearing. As they lose ground in Iraq and Syria, foreign fighters are returning and the group’s hateful ideology is spreading online.

“Make no mistake, the fight is moving from the battlefield to the internet.”

The UK was “already working with social media companies to halt the spread of extremist material and hateful propaganda that is warping young minds,” she argued.

“We want companies to develop tools to identify and remove harmful materials automatically and, in particular, I want to see them report this vile content to the authorities and block the users who spread it, Ms May said.