Not A Terrorist

A twenty-year-old has been jailed for two years for assembling a nail bomb in his bedroom. Doubtless Chris Graybeing will do everything in his power to deprive him of education, company and meaningful activity, in order to ensure that the sentence is not a soft option and that he re-emerges as a useful and responsible citizen. His family has been in the army for five generations and his mother gave him English Defence League regalia for his eighteenth birthday, so self-evidently family values are not the problem. He is not a member of the EDL, but is interested in them and other far-right groups because he disapproves of "mass immigration", a position shared by the entire mainstream of British politics; so self-evidently the mainstream of British politics is not the problem, although mass immigration may well be part of it. He was a loner, a serving soldier and a non-Muslim, so the prosecution accepted his plea that he never intended to let off his bomb, since self-evidently he is not a terrorist.