Leadership Quote by Kenneth Clarke

Clarke’s line is a cool glass of water thrown on the feverish reflex that follows an attack: legislate harder, punish faster, widen the net. The intent is narrowly political but broadly cultural - to stop “security” from becoming a permanent, ever-expanding excuse for the state to do more, watch more, and explain less. By opening with “However,” he positions himself against the expected script: grief must be met with new powers. He’s saying the script is wrong.

The subtext is a rebuke of what post-crisis politics often sells: the idea that violence is primarily a bureaucratic problem, solvable by tightening statutes. Clarke implies that the London bombings (a clear reference to 7/7 and its aftermath) weren’t enabled by gaps in legislation but by factors laws can’t reliably touch - radicalization, intelligence failures, human unpredictability, and the limits of policing in an open society. “Deficiencies in our legal system” is pointedly legalistic language that doubles as a trap: if the law wasn’t deficient, then the push for new laws is about optics, not necessity.

Context matters because the UK already had a thick stack of counterterror measures and a political class under pressure to look decisive. Clarke, a seasoned Conservative with civil libertarian instincts, is staking out an unfashionable position: competence over theatrics. His rhetorical move isn’t to deny danger; it’s to deny the comforting fiction that every tragedy can be prevented by writing broader rules. The line works because it punctures the emotional demand for simple fixes while daring listeners to accept a harder truth: security has tradeoffs, and panic makes bad law.