Patel is equating refugees with terrorists to appeal to the Conservative base

The home secretary knows exactly what she is doing by commenting on the Liverpool case, argues Sean O’Grady

Ms Patel is not keen, understandably, to be held responsible for failings in a system she has presided over, but she is doing so by appearing to prejudge the conclusions of the criminal justice system (PA)

Home secretaries, by convention, are supposed to be wary of speaking out about sensitive cases, even where it involves a dead suicide bomber. Investigations into the declared terrorist incident in Liverpool are continuing, and the orderly process of justice requires that politicians should keep their views to themselves. Priti Patel, you might say, doesn’t think these old political rules quite apply to her. She is certain about where blames lies.

Speaking to journalists on a flight to Washington, she expressed the view that the attack was a reflection of Britain’s “dysfunctional” asylum system and took aim at a “whole professional legal services industry that has based itself on rights of appeal”.

In the home secretary’s considered view: “It’s a complete merry-go-round and it has been exploited – a whole sort of professional legal services industry has based itself on rights of appeal, going to the courts day in, day out, at the expense of the taxpayers through legal aid … There’s a whole industry that thinks it’s right to defend these individuals that cause the most appalling crimes against British citizens, devastating their lives, blighting communities – and that is completely wrong.”

Such is the politics of terrorism when you are a leading member of a governing party that has been in office, one way or another, for the past 11 years (and is arguably showing signs of fatigue). Whether what Ms Patel would like to do with the asylum system is wise or not, she and her colleagues have had more than a decade to implement some improvements to the system – and the Conservatives have made much of the urgency of the problem. Indeed, looking at the poor state of the some of the accommodation available to refugees, the slow pace at which cases are determined, and the continuing flow of desperate refugees making their way across the Channel, there are obvious steps that could be taken to make the system less “dysfunctional”. They haven’t been, not even in the two years Ms Patel has held office.

Ms Patel is not keen, understandably, to be held responsible for failings in a system she has presided over, but she is doing so by appearing to prejudge the conclusions of the criminal justice system. It may, in fact, turn out to be impossible to prove what the bomber’s motivations might have been with any precision, given the circumstances. In speaking so loosely, she leaves herself open for further criticism in due course about why officials failed to deport the bomber after an asylum application failed, and how security services failed to spot at least seven months of bomb-making preparations. It all comes under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, which is long-standing and well understood. Or mostly.

Ms Patel, not for the first time, seems to want to encourage the view that if there were no asylum seekers there would be no, or less, terror: the incidence of “home grown” terror across a variety of extremist causes suggests that is an erroneous as well as an insidious assumption. Yet, it has to be faced, there is a constituency, especially in Conservative circles, that is all too ready to equate refugees with terrorism (despite them actually escaping terror and persecution), and will be all too happy to support a Conservative home secretary attacking lawyers, asylum seekers and civil servants, three of their least favourite groups of people. Ms Patel knows what she’s doing.