In June 2013 the polling company ComRes carried out a poll for BBC Radio 1 asking a thousand young British people about their attitudes towards the world’s major religions. When the results were released three months later they caused a small furore. Of those polled 27 per cent said that they did not trust Muslims and 44 per cent said they thought Muslims did not share the same views as the rest of the population. The BBC and other media in Britain promptly set to work to try to discover what had gone wrong and how Britain could address the fact that so many people thought this way. The overwhelming response to the poll was one of concern that young people should be thinking such thoughts and a debate over how to turn such perceptions around. There were more surprising things about the results, not least the fact that 15 per cent of those polled said they did not trust Jews, 13 per cent said they did not trust Buddhists and 12 per cent said they did not trust Christians. The question of precisely what Buddhists had done in recent months to annoy so many young British people went unaddressed. But rather than run a re-education programme on the nation’s youth, one clue as to why young British people answered as they did may have laid with the timing of the poll. The fieldwork was carried out 7–17 June 2013.4

It had only been a few weeks earlier that Drummer Lee Rigby, a young soldier on leave from Afghanistan, had been hit by a car in broad daylight outside an army barracks in South London. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale got out of the car, dragged their young victim into the middle of the road and hacked at his body with machetes. They attempted to decapitate him, but were unable to completely remove the head. Waiting for armed police to arrive, his hands covered in blood and still holding a machete, Adebolajo railed to a camera about why they had done this deed. After Adebolajo’s arrest police found a letter (by then smeared in blood) on him. It was addressed to his children and provided a justification for his actions. This letter was produced at the subsequent trial. Among other things it said, ‘My beloved children. Know that to fight Allah’s enemies is an obligation.’ It went on ‘Do not spend your days in endless dispute with the cowardly and foolish if it means that it will delay your meeting Allah’s enemies on the battlefield.’ The letter finished with a footnote containing almost two dozen references to passages in the Quran, which Adebolajo obviously intended as scriptural backup to the contents of his letter.5