“There has been far too much tolerance of extremism,” declaimed Theresa May, standing outside Downing Street on Monday morning, “… and that means extremism of any kind, including Islamophobia.”

The British prime minister was speaking in the aftermath of a brutal terror attack near a London mosque in which a man drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers. The alleged attacker, according to eyewitnesses, shouted: “I want to kill all Muslims.”

May’s statement was welcomed by a slew of liberals as well as by leading British Muslims, as was her announcement of an official review of security measures at U.K. mosques.

But I have four words to describe the prime minister’s response: too little, too late.

Why did it require a horrific terrorist attack, resulting in the death of an unarmed Muslim man on the streets of London in the midst of Ramadan, to prompt May to decry anti-Muslim hatred as a form of “extremism”? Why did innocent blood have to be spilled in order for the prime minister to utter aloud the word “Islamophobia” for the first time?

And where were her earlier admonitions about the threat posed to the U.K.’s Muslims by far-right extremists? May served as Home Secretary for six years, across two parliaments, in charge of both the police and the security services, yet during that period she made only the odd, passing reference to the “hundreds” of anti-Muslim attacks in the U.K. each year while obsessing over the threat from “Islamist extremism.” Why did she not take seriously the claim made by one of her own Home Office officials to the BBC in 2014 that the government’s emphasis on the “global jihadist agenda” risked ignoring the growing domestic terror threat from the far-right? That particular anonymous official even issued this stark warning: “I wouldn’t want to get to the point where something happens and we look back and think actually, we should have addressed that as well.”

Why in 2014 did she join fellow Conservative ministers in hyperbolically claiming that Muslim extremists were trying to take over schools in Birmingham as part of a so-called “Trojan Horse plot,” when a lengthy investigation by a committee of MPs later concluded that “one incident apart, no evidence of extremism or radicalisation was found… Neither was there any evidence of a sustained plot”?

Why, as home secretary, did she refuse to fully engage, or even formally meet, with the Cross-Government Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group? Academics Chris Allen and Matthew Goodwin, both leading experts on Islamophobia, quit the working group in disgust at the lack of support from the Conservative government and from ministers such as May. The group, wrote Allen in 2014, “had no bite, no influence, no impact.” Goodwin went further in 2015: “During a generally unpleasant four years, the basic message appeared to be that the government was simply not that interested in anti-Muslim hatred.”