David Cameron: Britain is a nation united in shock and in grief.

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David Cameron

Britain is a nation united in shock and in grief. As the names and identities of the victims in Tunisia emerge – and the horror of what they faced becomes clear – those feelings grow. Everyone is asking the same thing: how can a day at the beach for families and friends have turned into a scene of such horror?

The man who did this, the smiling gunman with a Kalashnikov hidden in a parasol, demonstrates the level of evil we are dealing with. It’s an evil we’ve seen on Mount Sinjar in Iraq and in shopping malls in Kenya; at magazine offices in Paris and in schools in Pakistan.

On the same day as the holidaymakers in Tunisia came under attack, workers near Lyon and worshippers in Kuwait fell victim to this evil, as did over 100 Syrians, who were executed in their homes in Kobane by ISIL.

But we will not be cowed. To our shock and grief we must add another word: resolve. Unshakeable resolve. We will stand up for our way of life. So ours must be a full-spectrum response – a response at home and abroad; in the immediate aftermath and far into the future.

The first thing we must do is everything we can to help the victims of this attack. Our consular crisis centre has been running 24/7. We now have a team of over 50 consular staff, police officers and experts from the Red Cross on the ground in Sousse.

Hundreds of police officers are now working on this operation both in Tunisia and here at home – providing vital support to families; helping the Tunisians to identify those that were murdered; and launching an investigation into what happened.

We are doing everything necessary to get people home and to help the injured, including sending a team of military medical liaison officers out to Sousse to assist with medevac as required.

And in the coming days we will do all we can to bring home those who lost their lives as quickly as possible. I have been speaking to President Essebsi to thank the Tunisian authorities for their assistance, and we’ve been discussing what more we can do.

Across the world, we must do more to work together and build our capacity to deal with terrorism. ISIL may use ancient barbarism in its methods of killing, but it is modern in its propaganda techniques, using social media as its primary weapon.

That is why we must give our police and security services the tools they need to root out this poison. And we must look at how we can work with countries like Tunisia to counter this online propaganda.

We must also deal with it at its source, in places like Syria, Iraq and Libya, from where ISIL is peddling and plotting its death cult. That means supporting governments to strengthen weak political institutions and tackle political instability.

These ungoverned spaces are the areas in which the terrorist groups thrive. British aircraft are already delivering the second largest number of airstrikes over Iraq, where ISIL has taken hold.

Our airborne intelligence and surveillance assets are assisting other countries with their operations over Syria. And we are working with the UN, our EU and US partners to support the formation of a Government of National Accord in Libya. And we will continue to work with our partners in the region.

The third thing, perhaps the most important thing, is confronting the poisonous ideology that is driving terrible actions like those we saw on Friday.

That ideology stems from an extremist narrative, which hijacks the religion of Islam. It says that the West is bad and freedom is wrong. It says that women are inferior and homosexuality is evil. It tells people that religious rule trumps the rule of law, that Caliphate trumps nation state.

To defeat this poisonous ideology, we must be clear about why it is so wrong. We must expose and defeat what it is that persuades young people, from Tunisia to Kuwait, from Belgium to Britain, to join ISIL.

When the gunman attacked innocent people spending time with their families on the beach, he was attacking the very things we stand for.

We must be stronger at standing up for our values – of peace, democracy, tolerance, freedom. We must be more intolerant of intolerance – rejecting anyone whose views condone the Islamist extremist narrative and create the conditions for it to flourish.
We must strengthen our institutions that put our values into practice: our democracy, our rule of law, the rights of minorities, our free media, our law enforcements – all the things the terrorists hate.

To carry out an attack in the month when millions of Muslims are observing the holy month of Ramadan and to do so in the name of that faith is an insult to all Muslims worldwide.

We stand in solidarity with all communities who are affected and outraged by these events, and remain united in our determination not to let them divide us.

After all, this is not the war between Islam and the West that ISIL want people believe. It’s between the extremists who want hatred to flourish and the rest of the world who want freedom to prosper. They will kill anyone that doesn’t adhere to their warped worldview – Muslim and non-Muslim. They demonstrate that day in, day out.

We have something the terrorists don’t. We have the great British spirit that triumphs in the face of adversity.

It’s the spirit we have always shown when we faced threats to our nation in our history. It's the spirit that saw London rebound after the 7/7 attacks, whose 10th anniversary we mark next month. It’s the spirit we saw as British tourists went to the beach in Tunisia this weekend, determined not to be cowed by the terrorists.
We are the people who stand up to hatred. They are the cowards who murder defenceless people on a beach. They stand for oppression; we stand for freedom, and a peaceful, tolerant way of life.

The flag flies at half-mast above Downing Street today. That reflects our sympathy with the victims and their families. Our hearts go out to them. But it also represents our resolve to protect our very way of life – and that is exactly what we must act upon.