Alex at The Yorkshire Ranter and I have been having an ongoing debate over the last couple of months on the general subject of capital to labour ratios in British terrorism. The motivating question’s a quite important one, with a lot of implications for what sort of public policy one might want to support; how much of a danger to us all are radical Muslim organisations and internet bulletin boards? If we take as given[1] the popularly held belief that there are organisations at work in British society which radicalise disaffected youths from the Asian community and persuade them to become supporters of jihadism and terrorism, then well, obviously that’s bad. But how much actual harm does it do – given that the only way of doing anything about these organisations is to impose some quite draconian reductions in overall civil liberties, what’s the trade-off between liberty and security that we’re looking at here?

As I say, I think this question basically comes down to capital/labour ratios.
[click to continue…]