After Tunisia terror, can Britain win the ideological war?

We should, for now, stop calling Seifeddine Rezgui a ‘lone wolf’.

The 23-year old student behind the Tunisian massacre had the support of accomplices. And the fact that his identity was revealed by social media accounts linked to Islamic State suggests that he was no ‘self-starter’.

Today’s terrorists tend to be low-tech and more difficult to detect than the al-Qaeda militants of old. Friday’s attacker in France – like the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich two years ago – required only a car and a knife.

But in many cases, the internet has replaced the recruiters and terror training camps of yesteryear. Nowadays, the members of an ‘extremist cell’ might only be linked through a Whatsapp group. And in the extremists’ internet communities, of course, there’s no such thing as a ‘lone wolf’.

That’s what makes the fight against modern terrorism so difficult and so vast – ten years after 7/7, one year after IS declared a caliphate. No wonder British security services are so concerned. They’re most worried by the 700-plus British nationals thought to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight.

Yet the Facebook and football-loving Sousse attacker had never left Tunisia. There were few signs, if any, of his plans for a Bloody Friday during the Holy Month. He is unlikely to have ever ‘been on the radar’.

So Britain’s fight against the complex, modern terrorist cannot only be fought from the air in Iraq. The tougher battleground is at home, in the minds of radicalised youngsters. How can the authorities detect and monitor the next Seifeddine Rezgui? Bombs can be dropped, suspects arrested, but coaxing a would-be attacker from the road to radicalism is a far more delicate, difficult business.

David Cameron hinted at that when he promised a “full spectrum response” to the beach massacre. Scotland Yard is throwing resources at the investigation: after all, this was an attack in Tunisia but *on *Britain.

But the Prime Minister offered no new answers on what the government can do to win the ideological war.