LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron, trying to show toughness in the face of young British Muslims’ going off to fight in Syria and Iraq, proposed legislation on Monday that would give the police the power to seize the passports of Britons suspected of having traveled abroad to fight with militant groups.
Mr. Cameron told Parliament that the government would draft laws to bar people suspected of having fought with radical Islamist groups from returning to Britain, and that the police would be given temporary powers to take passports from Britons suspected of wanting to travel abroad to fight. Police and security officials would be given enhanced powers to monitor suspects who have returned to Britain, Mr. Cameron said.
With a sharply contested general election scheduled for May, the government, a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, has already faced criticism that it is eroding the civil liberties of suspects for essentially political purposes.
But the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has caused real security worries here, made worse by a recent video that appeared to show the beheading of a kidnapped American journalist by a masked Islamist fighter with a British accent.
Officials say that at least 500 Britons have gone to Syria or Iraq to fight, and that perhaps half have returned here.
On Friday, Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe,” one level below the highest, indicating that an attack at home is considered “highly likely.”
Mr. Cameron said on Monday that “adhering to British values is not an option or a choice,” but “a duty for all those who live in these islands.” He added that “we will in the end defeat this extremism, and we will secure our way of life for generations to come.”
The British police have said that in the first half of the year they arrested 69 people linked to fighting in Syria.
A former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown, warned on Sunday that civil liberties could be at risk. “It is always easy to persuade frightened people to part with their liberties,” he wrote in The Observer. “It is always right for politicians who value liberty to resist attempts to increase arbitrary executive powers,” unless justified, he said, “by actual facts.”
Mr. Cameron said, “We have all been shocked and sickened by the barbarism we have witnessed in Iraq this summer,” adding that he was acting “to fill specific gaps in our armory.” He defined those gaps as “preventing suspects from traveling, and dealing decisively with those already here who pose a risk.”
How many pose a risk is unclear. Many of those who go to fight are doing so, they say, to defend Islam in Syria and Iraq, to build an Islamic caliphate with ISIS or to fight the Syrian government, and many say they have no interest in bringing violence home to Britain. At the same time, officials caution, it would take only a few people who bring the war home to do a great deal of damage.
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