George Osborne gives extra £100m to security services to monitor returned jihadists

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/george-osborne-gives-extra-100m-to-security-services-to-monitor-returned-jihadists-9969227.html

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The security services have been given an extra £100m to monitor potential jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq, George Osborne disclosed today.

The Chancellor promised that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ would get “the support they need” – in terms of resources and powers – as protecting the country was “the national priority”. He was responding to a warning from Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, that the danger from Islamist extremists was growing rapidly and that it was almost inevitable an attack would eventually succeed. He told the BBC: “We have put a huge amount of planning and effort, from the police, from the security services, from the Government, into anticipating what might happen, stopping some of these attacks.

“Of course we have been successful in doing that over the last year. Within the last few weeks we have put extra money – over £100m – into specifically monitoring people who are going to conflicts in Syria and Iraq, these self-starting terrorists who get their ideas off the internet and then want to perpetrate horrendous crimes.”

Mr Osborne added: “We have got to be vigilant; we have got to have the resources there.”

In his speech, which had been planned before the Paris killings, Mr Parker argued for new powers to combat the threat of attacks in Britain.

He warned of a “growing gap between the increasingly challenging threat and the decreasing availability of capabilities to address it”.

The Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed he is to join the French President François Hollande at a national unity rally in Paris on Sunday, which has been called in the wake of the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Leaders of France’s mainstream parties, including the former President Nicolas Sarkozy who now heads the right-of-centre UMP, as well as the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, EU President Donald Tusk, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish President Mariano Rajoy.

“I’ve accepted President Hollande’s invitation to join the unity rally in Paris this Sunday – celebrating the values behind CharlieHebdo,” Mr Cameron said on Twitter.