The Media and Government: Hand in Velvet Glove Against Terrorism.

One of the reasons May is able to push through these snooping laws and advance the power of the authoritarian national security state is because journalists are not doing their job in holding its power to account as and when it immediately matters. In particular, the media accepts government claims of 'terrorist attacks'.

With regard the Westminster Bridge Attack, there is very little evidence is was a 'terrorist attack' and more that Khalid Masood was simply a deracinated drifter with a history of drug addiction and violence who branded himself a foot soldier of jihad simply in order to have a cause that he could die for instead of living for nothing.

The fact IS claims those such as Masood a one of its own and that May's surveillance and security state claims that too is quite convenient if the aim is to use what would be remembered as 'a summer of terrorism' to claim amplified powers to monitor all forms of 'extremism', depending on what's 'extreme'.

The danger is that 'extremism' could be extended down in a sliding scale to those considered enemies for questioning government media narratives designed to 'shape perceptions' and augment unaccountable power so as to 'keep us safe'. The surveillance would be extended to investigative journalists and truth activists.

As regards Masood, he spent five years in Saudi Arabia and yet no media organisation nor the government appeared to ask questions as to what he might have been doing there apart from teaching English. Flowers were laid, the usual bizarre grief cult was put into action, with vigils and printed posters deployed.

Then it was, as the old Blairite refrain went 'time to move on'. Until the Manchester terrorist attack, one which heightened surveillance powers were claimed might have prevented but which was actually far more of a 7/7 attack and connected to jihadi networks that reached from Manchester into Libya.

Media attention on that then, after May fumed at the US leaks, went down the Orwellian memory hole once the government sought to reshape the narrative once more in claiming Abedi would seem to have acted alone. The emphasis shifted to him as more on a 'lone actor' despite the weight of evidence to the contrary.

The claim for heightened surveillance powers is a sinister one made by authoritarians such as May and that could be pushed not for reasons purely of domestic security but because of reason's of state that are not to be mentioned openly, such as , perhaps, knowledge that foreign policy and Saudi connections are a factor in terrorism.