Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the London bombings, when 52 people were killed and many more injured after four Yorkshire Muslim suicide bombers exploded bombs on the underground and on a bus.

To coincide with the anniversary, the London-based think tank, the Centre For Social Cohesion, has published a report focusing on the British connections to Islamist terrorism.

The nub of this document is that al Qaida-inspired terrorism remains the biggest threat to the UK’s national security, with 127 Islamic extremist terrorist convictions and attacks in the past ten years.

Professor Paul Rogers, from Bradford University’s peace studies department, looked through the 500-page report’s executive summary. He said most of the report was a collation of media reports, especially those relating to radical Islam, over the past ten years.

“The whole of the Yorkshire and Humber region has fewer than one in ten of the 127 reported convictions. Most of them are London-based. That’s a surprise for a region with one of the largest concentrations of Pakistani Muslims in the country.

“A lot of the convictions do not come under anti-terrorism legislation; they are to do with fraud and identity, with sentences of about four years. The report does not say those 127 cases are all to do with suicide bombers and terrorists.

“The week after the 7/7 bombings in London, when it became clear that three of the bombers came from Beeston and one from Dewsbury, local Muslim people interviewed by the media said the bombers were not proper Muslims, but added, ‘What about Iraq?’ where up to 100,000 Muslims had been killed.

“There is no doubt in my mind that there has been a connection with Iraq and more recently with Afghanistan; but the report does not deal with that. “A huge number of things have been done on both sides to improve things in the past five years – the Programme For A Peaceful City, in Bradford, is an example of that,” he said.

Ishtiaq Ahmed, spokesman for the Bradford Council For Mosques, accepts the report is a useful guard against complacency. While everyone should do what was necessary to thwart the ambitions of terrorist cells, groups and individuals, the problem needed to be put into context.

He said: “Our difficulty with any piece of research in this area is that it needs to put the potential threat into context, in the context that in the wider community, the majority of people are law-abiding and peaceful.

“So you’re talking about a small minority, but at the same time, it doesn’t take a lot of people – even one person can do a lot of damage and cause a real threat to people’s lives and property.

“So we need to be alert and informed and not be complacent, but we have to accept that it is the minority who may be motivated for their own evil designs or trying to cause havoc to the day-to-day life of people in this country.

“The last major incident in this country was five years ago and there’s a tendency for people to be complacent and to feel it’s not going to happen again, so it keeps our mind focused. In this context, I think the report is valuable.”

But does it tell us anything we didn’t know since MI5 announced several years ago that up to 2,000 al Qaida sympathisers were in the UK?

Professor Rogers said: “This report has been brought out pending the fifth anniversary of 7/7; but it does not take us further forward.”

Dr Philip Lewis, interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said while violent extremism remained an issue, looking at it only through the lens of national security could be misleading.

He said: “It’s the same challenge we had in the 1970s. After the IRA atrocities, the entire Irish Catholic community in Britain was under suspicion. There are individuals, of course there will be, and they will be the proper target of security surveillance.

“Government, churches, mosques and other organisations have not sat on their hands. Let’s look at the number of constructive developments within the Muslim community in the past five years. Does the report look at this?”

He referred to a recent House of Commons report: Preventing Violent Extremism, which had been compiled after extensive consultations with many different communities.

This report, published on behalf of the Communities and Local Government Committee, has 27 recommendations. The 25th states that building stronger, more unified communities should play more of a role for the CLG than counter-terrorism.

Attention should be on disadvantage and exclusion – not a single religious, cultural group.

The Centre For Social Cohesion report appears to be at variance with this recommendation.