Politics
Make the computers work first!
Published 01 October 2001
War on Terror: Civil Liberties - Anti-terrorist laws nearly always scoop up the innocent and the harmless. Nick Cohen argues that there are simpler ways to improve our security
Tony Blair grasped the hand of Rudy Giuliani in a devastated New York and told him of the historical justification for Britain's unalloyed support for the US."My father's generation knew what it was like. They went through the Blitz . . . There was one country and one people that stood by us at that time. That country was America, and the people was the American people. As you stood side by side with us then, we stand side by side with you now."
The Blitz was in 1940. The United States didn't enter the Second World War until 1941. Britain didn't stand "side by side" with America in the Blitz, but stood alone until it was joined by the late Soviet Union. The Prime Minister should have known this (or had aides to hand who knew on his behalf), but no one questioned the cod-Churchillian sentiment. Jack Straw warned of repeating the mistakes of the appeasers. Hillary Clinton said she had been "thinking a lot over the last few days about the Battle of Britain". Mayor Giuliani found nothing "more inspiring than the speeches and reflections of Winston Churchill" during his city's misery.
The appeal of a tidied-up 1940 lies in its exoneration of extraordinary measures. If the United States and Britain are standing alone against a pitiless foe and pusillanimous Europe, then it is defensible, indeed essential, to suspend enfeebling civil liberties. George Bush responded to the kamikaze attacks by demanding unconstrained powers to tap the internet and detain immigrants. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said British citizens should carry identity cards. If truth is the first casualty of war, freedom is not far behind.
Blunkett erupts when his assaults on liberty prompt accusations of gesture politics. The assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were far more telling, killing twice as many people in 30 minutes as were murdered in 30 years in Northern Ireland. You do not need to be a fantasist to imagine a nuclear attack following, particularly when Bush is prepared to abandon an agreement with Russia that would have decommissioned enough plutonium to make 17,000 crude nuclear weapons.
In these grim circumstances, Blunkett's anger with his critics is understandable. It is the responsibility of government to take all steps to preserve public safety - and to damn the lawyers and judges if necessary. But the charge of gesture politics cannot be easily ducked, however terrible the atrocities in the US or fears for the future. The record of the Home Office and MI5 that Blunkett has the ill luck to represent is not the brightest and best.
The Gulf war began with predictions of violent reprisals against Britain. MI5 confirmed the worst suspicions when it ordered the detention without charge of 90 Arabs. I remember the triumphant headlines announcing that Iraqi soldiers and Palestinian sleepers had been trapped by the ever-vigilant security services. The soldiers turned out to be students whose names had been given to the Home Office by the Iraqi ambassador, along with a request that they be looked after during the hostilities. The sinister Palestinians included a junior manager, whose crime was to marry a woman whose sister married a man whose uncle was Abu Nidal, the Bin Laden of his day. The Home Office admitted at the end of the war that every last one was blameless, and allowed them to carry on studying and working in Britain as before.
This autumn's crisis was anticipated when parliament was hauled back from its 1998 summer break to pass emergency legislation. "A message" had to be sent after the bombing of Omagh and the American embassies in east Africa. "There are few more important challenges to democracy, and therefore to this House, than terrorism in all its forms," cried Blair. "We must fight it vigorously wherever it appears." His preferred method was to allow alleged members of the Real IRA to be interned on the word of a police officer or secret agent. Hyperventilating MPs agreed to give the government the power to impose what was, in effect, martial law in Northern Ireland after an insultingly short debate. That power has never been used. The alleged Omagh bombers remain free despite the protests of the victims' relatives because London and Dublin realised, on reflection, that internment without fair trial is the best means of recruiting and training future enemies.
There is a consoling argument - very popular in the broadcast media, in my experience - that there is nothing wrong with gesture politics. To be sure, it runs, parliament made a fool of itself after Omagh, and may well do so again after the attacks on the US. That's politicians for you. We can have a laugh at their overwrought posturing while seeing, from our superior vantage point, that no real harm is done when Arabs suffer the inconvenience of temporary detention, and when internment is promised but not delivered. We always muddle on in our quintessentially English way, whatever happens. There's no reason to worry about what Blair might do.
Unfortunately, the inflation in anti- terrorist rhetoric of the past fortnight gives every reason to fret. Instead of concentrating on the real danger of civilian casualties, Britain and the rest of the European Union have responded by expanding the definition of terrorism to cover every kind of rowdy political discourse and minor offence. Energy is being diverted to pursue principled or trivial opponents of the status quo, while overdue but unglamorous reforms are ignored.
Blunkett could have sat through the meeting of European interior ministers on the slaughter of 11 September without saying a word. For a quarter of a century, Britain has given the police ferocious powers to interrogate alleged terrorists and extract confessions, true or otherwise. The 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act was, like so much inept legislation, rushed through parliament in the aftermath of a massacre: in this case, the Birmingham pub bombings. Roy Jenkins, home secretary at the time, described its provisions to hold suspects without charge as "draconian" and promised they would be dropped within a year. They were still on the statute book in 1999. Jenkins deemed that a terrorist was anyone connected to international or Irish violence. This definition would cover all those in Britain today who may be part of the Bin Laden network, but was not wide enough for the present government.
Last year, the Home Office gave us a new and capacious definition. Terrorism was deemed to be "the use or threat of action . . . for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; action which involves serious violence against a person or serious damage to a property, endangers a person's life . . . or creates a serious risk to the health and safety of the public or a section of the public".
This, too, would cover Bin Laden. It would also cover anyone the authorities decided "threatened" violence, or who was a "risk" to the public but was not, when you got down to the detail, actually violent. Property, you will notice, was given moral equivalence with human life. Damage to it, or the threat to damage it, was another mark of the terrorist. For good measure, the Home Office decided that all citizens dedicated to the overthrow of "any government de facto or de jure" should join the terrorist club. If the laptop generals of the Mail and Telegraph were to be confined for plotting the overthrow of the Taliban and Iraq, the law would at least boost support for prison reform in Fleet Street. Alas, this is a capricious measure, aimed only at the opponents of those tyrannies to which Whitehall sells arms.
It is hard to imagine that the state could go further. The assaults of 11 September, however, produced bureaucratic hysteria in European capitals. The EU agreed to Europe-wide arrest warrants for terrorists and fast and simple extradition between member states. All of which sounds reasonable in the circumstances, until you read the small print and find that the new terrorist is someone who aims to "seriously alter the political, economic or social structure". All terrorists want to do that, but so does every peaceful radical, from Tories who want to leave the EU to socialists who want to redistribute wealth. Terrorists, the new agreement continued, not only "endanger people and property", but "animals and the environment". That covers hunt saboteurs and protesters who cut the fences at the US's bases, along with (if reduced to absurdity) Big Mac eaters and the petrochemical industry.
The net has been cast with such energy that Blunkett and his colleagues concluded that punishment for "terrorists" could "for instance include community service". Either the protectors of law and order are concentrating on the moderate wing of blood-crazed fundamentalism in these dark days, or they are using the World Trade Center to settle other scores and hoard reserve powers against anyone who challenges them.
The proposal for identity cards is as shockingly irrelevant as the asinine libels of honourable protesters. ID cards may help the police pick up under-age drinkers in pubs. They will allow harassment of the law-abiding by the officious and hasten the integration of Britain into the rest of the EU. But they do not stop determined criminals, who can always buy forgeries. The first charges from the World Trade Center are against Herbert Villalobos, who helped provide the hijackers with fake IDs.
It might help if the Home Office admitted it hasn't much of an idea who is in Britain because its immigration computers have not worked since 1996. Blunkett could add that the state's criminal records are as hopelessly inaccurate, while the turf wars between MI5, MI6 and the Special Branch are a public menace.
Concentrating on these basics, however, doesn't sound very Churchillian. Try to imagine Blair beside Bush on the White House lawn proclaiming "We vow to stand shoulder to shoulder with America by improving the performance of our information technology!" and appreciate the political distaste for the mundane.
Rather than make what it has work, Whitehall prefers to tear up freedoms in dramatic gestures that look bold, but are little more than a bureaucratic exploitation of fear and sympathy. The liberties won't be suspended for the duration of the war - for who but appeasers will be able to say with certainty when the threat of terrorism has passed? - but will vanish for ever in a war without end.
See NS interview with David Blunkett
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