The Somali origin savage, Ali Harbi Ali, who murdered the Conservative MP Sir David Amess in a brutal Jihad attack has finally been convicted and sentenced. With Mr Justice Sweeney sentencing this murderous Muslim to a whole life tariff prison term, the legal and investigative aspect of this case is now over. However this case will never be truly over for Sir David’s family and friends. They will live with the constant grief for the loss, in truly horrific circumstances, of a much loved father, husband and friend. They also face a whole life sentence but of a very different nature of loss and grief and sadness.

For the rest of us, as well as the shock, disgust and anger that many feel because the nation has yet again been assailed by violent Islamic extremists, our role or rather our ‘sentence’ if you want to put it that way will be to pay for Ali’s incarceration. According to figures published by the National Offender Management Service in 2015, if Ali is classified as Category A and therefore the most dangerous type of prisoner, then he will cost the taxpayer £1135 per week if he is placed in a male dispersal prison. With rising costs it’s likely that Ali Harby Ali will ending up costing much more than £1135 per week to keep during his sentence. If Ali does indeed serve a whole life sentence and dies in prison after serving 40 years then this worthless, unwanted and dangerous savage would have cost the taxpayer £2.3 million to house, feed, guard and monitor and that’s at 2015 prices. By the time that this individual shuffles off this mortal coil I suspect that he will end up costing a whole lot more than £2.3 million. A lifetime of dishing out to Ali three taxpayer funded Halal meals per day and escorted trips to the prison mosque along with gaining hero status among other Muslim prisoners incarcerated with him looks to me like a bad deal for the taxpayer. In a way it might have been better if this savage had been shot dead by police when they first arrived on the scene of Sir David’s murder. That way not only would the nation been spared the costs of incarcerating him in gaol but we would not be facing the prospect of Ali becoming influential among the many Muslims that are kept, because of various crimes, on the prison estate.

As someone who has, while I was a court reporter, sat in on dozens of murder trials and who has an academic interest in how and why people sink into moral depravity to such an extent that they kill without reason, I have to say that I’ve rarely encountered a case where there are no mitigating factors as I have observed in the case of Ali Harby Ali. In a lot of murder cases it’s possible to see that there might have been things possibly things outside of the person’s control that helped them become destroyers of life, but that’s not the case with this jihad murderer. Ali was not under any social or financial stress, he was not forced in to criminality, he wasn’t being abused in any way that could have influenced his decision making. With Ali there were no psychological or personality disorder factors in his decision to kill as there was in the case of the serial killer Joanna Dennehy and he doesn’t seem to have had the sort of screwed up background and lifestyle that led Thomas Mair to embrace violent extremism and murder the MP Jo Cox. Ali made a cold and calculated decision to murder a British MP. He researched the backgrounds and movements of MP’s in order to find one that he could kill. It could have been any MP that he chose to murder and to murder in the name of Islam, it’s just that he chose an MP who he knew he could get access to relatively easily and sadly that MP was Sir David Amess.

As I said earlier, this case is unusual in that there are not even the tiniest amount of mitigating factors regarding Ali. He’s worse in some ways than some nonce case murderers as at least with them it’s sometimes possible to point to abuse the murderer received in childhood as being both a transition point between them changing from being a normal human being into a monster and a reason for their departure from humanity. Ali doesn’t even have that very limited and wispy excuse for his actions as the vast majority of those who were abused in childhood do not turn out to be monsters. Ali chose evil he did not have evil thrust upon him by circumstance or because of some fault within him. Ali is not mad, he’s been proven sane but bad. He had a reasonably comfortable upbringing, especially when compared to life in Somalia, in a Britain that had welcomed his father in as a refugee. He could have chosen a very different path he could have been a decent man but instead he chose an ideology that whilst woefully misnamed as a ‘religion of peace’ is closely linked to despicable horrors worldwide when this ideology is expressed in its fundamental form.

The key thing about this case is choice. Ali made a calculated choice, a choice heavily influenced by his decision to embrace a religio-political ideology that is inextricably linked to religious violence, to commit murder.

It is because of Ali’s active and sane choice to commit this dreadful murder that I believe that this is one of those cases where, if it was still available, capital punishment would be justified. There are no mitigating factors in this case that could be employed to show that such a punishment is not deserved.

Whilst I can understand, but not wholly agree with, the arguments put forward by libertarians that the state cannot be trusted to take lives via executions, because the state cannot be trusted per se, this argument breaks down when faced with the case of Ali Harby Ali. First of all there is the active and sane decision of Ali to kill and the fact that he was searching for potential targets. He made a choice to kill, there is obvious malice within him. Secondly there is not the slightest shadow of doubt over Ali’s guilt either about his actual actions or about whether or not he made the decision to kill when he was of sound mind. Finally there is whether or not there is any prospect of reform or redemption for this character. Of course it’s possible but based on what I’ve read about Ali any chance of reform is as remote as the Moon. I doubt that this man can be redeemed, at least not in this life. I believe that even Myra Hindley stood a better chance of reform and redemption than Ali as at least Hindley, beast as she was, could point to the malign influence of Ian Brady on her life and crimes. If ever there was a prisoner who should be executed then it is Ali. He chose, of his own free will and in a state of sanity, to murder in order to advance his ideology an ideology that is implacably opposed to our own culture and society.

Executing Ali would be one of those justified killings that are the exception to the commandment to ‘do not murder’. Ali is one of those who have a specific and observable intention to kill and who will always be, in one form or another, a threat as long as he lives. Ali is like a robber or a cross border invader who by choosing to act violently or unjustly did must know or understand that there was a strong chance that there would be response to his actions that would result in their death. In Ali’s case he committed murder with the expectation that he would then be killed by police, a death that I must say would have been deserved. I see no moral difference between the police killing Ali when attempting an arrest and Ali being executed and either would have been better than having to pay for this savage to be a continual thorn in the side of society and a rallying point for Left and Islamic extremists.

There will be some who will say that executing someone like Ali is counterproductive as all that will happen is that fellow Islamic extremists will treat him as a martyr and rally round his name and create yet more extremists. But I disagree with that position. Whilst those who wish to avoid creating martyrs do have a point it might be better in the long term where there is a clear cut case of guilt freely chosen as in the case of Ali that execution might be preferable to letting him live. If executed Ali would of course be treated as a martyr by Islamic extremists but the danger of that might be less than having him in gaol for forty years promoting religious extremism to other prisoners. Prison life will see him treated by Muslim prisoners as a figure of admiration for the next few decades, something that might not be the case had Britain not abandoned capital punishment for cases like these. Better he go quickly than become a long term source of radicalisation and danger within Her Majesty’s Prison system. I do wonder just how many Muslims in British prisons will end up becoming influenced into violent religious extremism by Ali and those like him? Personally I’d rather have a few Islamic nutcases and their far Left mates whining about the execution of someone like Ali than have Ali and similar Islamic murderers with similar backstories that show no mitigation whatsoever, helping to churn out thousands upon thousands of new Islamic extremists from the cohort of Muslims incarcerated for non-terrorist offences and who are subsequently released from imprisonment and back into the community.

Although it was Ali and Ali alone who murdered Sir David Amess it should not be forgotten that Ali Harbi Ali was the product of a lot of failures often failures by those who govern us and of whom we should expect much more of. Ali came from the failed state of Somalia and came to Britain by way of a failed immigration and asylum system that, because of the policies of successive governments that promoted multiculturalism, did not demand anything of Ali by way of integration with British society or an acceptance of our values. He was allowed to live and fester in an Islamic ghetto that is sometimes physical and sometimes mental without any expectation from either the State or society that he abandon the more bestial parts of the ideology with which he was brought up and live in harmony with others.

Multiculturalist policies permitted to Ali to cleave to Islam and to cleave to it without any challenge to the more troublesome parts of the ideology of Islam from the wider society or the government and eventually allowed him to come to despise the people who gave him and his family a place to live. A policy that tells people like Ali that they don’t need to integrate or accept Western values, along with a failure by governments to control borders or properly assess those who are given asylum in Britain were the rails that Ali ran on towards the point which became doom for Sir David Amess.

Ali is also the product of another major failure, that of the Government’s anti-terrorism and extremism programme PREVENT. Back in 2014 when Ali was attending an educational establishment he was referred not just to PREVENT but also to CHANNEL the part of the PREVENT programme that dealt with those who were more ‘hard core’ in their beliefs. Sadly this referral to CHANNEL did not work and he was discharged from it. According to a Guardian news report from late 2021, Ali self referred to CHANNEL when it was noticed that he was an extremist but those in charge of the programme didn’t believe that he was an immediate danger and let him go. In hindsight it most certainly looks as if the self referral to CHANNEL by Ali was some sort of feint, a way for Ali to convince the authorities that he was willing and able to engage with anti-extremism activities. If this referral was some form of plot to get the authorities to leave him alone by convincing people that he didn’t want to be an extremist any more then it certainly seems to be one that has worked. He was released from the CHANNEL programme and released to eventually kill.

Ali Harbi Ali and indeed his entire family should never ever have been given asylum in the UK. That was the first and biggest error that was made by government officials that should have put the safety and security of Britons first and not last. He was allowed to wallow in extreme forms of Islam without challenge and the main line of defence against Islamic extremism, the PREVENT and CHANNEL programmes failed yet again to divert yet another violent Muslim from religious extremism.

Although the only person who murdered Sir David Amess was Ali Harbi Ali himself, we should not forget that there are other guilty parties here. These other guilty parties are those who failed to keep out of Britain a family who the country should have been much more wary about allowing in, who mistakenly treated Islam as a ‘religion of peace’ and who failed to make any meaningful steps to deradicalise him. It’s highly unlikely that the political class who let this bastards family settle I the UK and who created the conditions where a monster like Ali could survive and thrive, will face any legal sanction but we should remember their part in creating the environment that let Ali become more and more radical and eventually murder a good and decent man for no other reason that he was a British MP, whenever we enter the polling station and instead of voting for the current crop of failures, vote instead for those who will change our currently awful situation with regards to Islamic extremism.