Half of Britons would support drone strike on terrorists

MORE than half of the British public would support the UK government helping in a drone missile strike if it were to target a known terrorist, according to research.

But people are far less supportive if innocent people are likely to be injured, according to a joint study from the University of Surrey’s Centre for International Intervention (cii) and think-tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which was carried out in collaboration with YouGov.

The findings feature in a report, Hitting the Target? How New Capabilities are Shaping International Intervention, which looks at the debate on drones and how much is known or understand about them by the public.

The YouGov study examined to what extent the British public support or oppose the UK government assisting in a drone strike and gathered information from six surveys between 27 February and 8 March, including a poll of 1,966 British adults, and several survey experiments looking at different scenarios, involving at least 700 respondents in each case.

Respondents were first shown the text: “It was recently reported that the UK government might be passing information to US authorities to help them carry out missile strikes from unmanned aircraft called ‘drones’ to kill known terrorists overseas in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.”

The study found 55 per cent would support the government helping in a drone strike to kill a known terrorist overseas, with support rising to 67 per cent if it could be guaranteed no innocent civilians would be killed.

But support dropped steadily as the risk to civilians got higher – to 43 per cent if two or three innocent people might be killed, with opposition from 41 per cent.