Nothing will change after Mike Freer stands down

Nothing will change in the wake of Mike Freer’s decision to stand down. That a Member of Parliament says he is leaving politics because of intimidation from Islamists is troubling enough, but Freer is a government minister. If the state cannot protect him, can it protect any of us?

In a letter to his local constituency association, the Conservative MP says he has received ‘several serious threats to my personal safety’ during his 14 years representing Finchley and Golders Green. He cited ‘attacks by Muslims Against Crusades, Ali Harbi Ali and the recent arson attack (where the motives remain unclear)’ for motivating his decision.

Everyone will agree that something must be done, and then proceed to do nothing

Freer claims that Muslims Against Crusades, an Islamist organisation, first issued him with a death threat in 2011, telling him ‘let Stephen Timms be a warning to you’. Timms, the Labour MP for East Ham, had been stabbed the year before in an attempted assassination by an Islamist. Supporters of Muslims Against Crusades would go on to storm a Finchley mosque where Freer was holding an event and shout that he was a ‘Jewish homosexual pig’ and was ‘defiling the house of Allah’. The group was later proscribed by Home Secretary Theresa May.

Ali Harbi Ali is the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess over the MP’s support for air strikes against the Islamic State and membership of Conservative Friends of Israel. Freer was, along with Michael Gove, one of two alternative targets Ali researched. In his sentencing remarks following conviction, Mr Justice Sweeney noted that Ali ‘carried out reconnaissance in the vicinity of Mr Freer’s constituency premises in Finchley’ one month before his assassination of Amess. Freer wasn’t in his office that day by a matter of pure chance: then prime minister Boris Johnson had summoned him to No.