In 1871 the governments of Europe were horrified by the Paris Commune, the world’s first socialist rebellion, and sought to stamp on the thinkers who inspired revolution. The German ambassador to London urged Lord Granville, the home secretary of the day, to arrest the worst of the lot: a shabby-genteel scholar who was living in exile in London.
The rulers of Spain, France and the Austro-Hungarian empire agreed with Germany that Karl Marx’s “menaces to life and property” were perilous. After consulting with the queen, Granville dismissed them with the magnificent disdain of a high-Victorian Liberal. There would be no coalition against terror with those excitable Continentals, he declared. Foreigners living in England were as entitled to enjoy the freedoms of this country as British subjects. As for Marx’s inflammatory doctrines, the home secretary had been informed that British trade unionists had the good sense to ignore them. “Extreme socialist opinions are not believed to have gained any hold upon the working men of this country,” he opined, and sent the fuming ambassadors away.
Underlying Granville’s insouciance were three related assumptions about Britain and the British:
1) We had freedom of speech and no place for a thought police.
2) A British citizen, or an immigrant to Britain, was not obliged to swear loyalty to any idea or constitution, nor could he be called to account by some prototype of the House Un-American Activities Committee if he failed to believe in the nation’s principles.
3) Because the British were a level-headed lot who ignored dangerous loudmouths, such freedoms could not endanger security.
All three propositions have been under attack for years. They have been wounded, perhaps fatally wounded, by the Islamist atrocities in London on 7 July.
It’s not that Granville was wrong then or would be wrong today. According to Marx’s doctrines, Britain was the most advanced capitalist society and therefore should have been among the first to experience a socialist revolution. His Lordship understood the working class better than the dialectician voted “greatest philosopher of all time” by Radio 4 listeners. British Marxism was always a tiny force, stronger in the senior common room than among the common people.
The same applies to Bin Ladenism. Estimates of the number of British Muslims who have trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan are obviously guesses, but they cannot all be wildly wide of the mark and in all cases the numbers involved are once again tiny. But it is here that the comparison breaks down. There were communists who were spies, such as Kim Philby, and fellow-travelling Labour MPs who represented the interests of Stalin better than those of their constituents, such as D N Pritt. Yet, however many tens of millions were murdered in Marx’s name in the 20th century, British communists never slaughtered their neighbours. They couldn’t have changed Britain without the support of millions of people, but it takes only a handful of psychopaths to take thousands of lives. The trouble with Islamism is, it doesn’t need to recruit very many fanatics to transform a society.
There is a small mercy in the timing of the attack. Charles Clarke has shown himself to be the first home secretary in 15 years who can be relied on not to panic in a crisis. His predecessors would have had an emergency bill halfway to Royal Assent by now. Clarke published his plans for legislation in the autumn only after chivvying from Downing Street which, as always, wanted an eye-catching initiative and wanted it fast. The temptation, when looking at what is going to change, is to concentrate on its contents rather than to remember that the government has had anti-terror legislation before parliament in 1998, 2000, 2001 and again earlier this year. Put all this together, and you have what looks like a country under martial law. Internment, whether in prison or under house arrest, has been reintroduced, and every manner of contact with and support for very broadly defined “terrorist organisations” has been outlawed. In practice, however, the emergency powers have been used rarely. It’s not so much what new laws the government wants from parliament that matter, as what it does with the powers it already has.
The first thing they will be used to limit is freedom of speech. The government is steaming ahead with its woefully unwise plans to outlaw incitement to religious hatred – a measure which will strengthen the very fruitcakes who want to kill us – and is planning to introduce the odd crime of “indirect incitement to terrorism”. Just as important, Lord Granville’s and Marx’s belief that refugees could come to Britain and speak their minds won’t last.
For the past fortnight, people have been laying into the intelligence services for allowing the creation of Beirut-on-the-Thames in London. It was true that in the early 1990s there seemed to be no limit to the number of Islamists who could find a home here, and their arrival was accompanied by a cowardly calculation that their presence would spare Britain. But that policy died years ago. The government’s difficulty is that the courts have been in the way of enforcing a harder line. Tony Blair’s frustration was evident long before 11 September 2001. We know precisely what the Prime Minister was thinking as early as 1999, because his private memos were made public when the case of Hani Youssef came to court. Youssef was allegedly a member of Islamic Jihad, which, in addition to organising atrocities, had declared that it was the duty of Muslims to kill Jews, Americans and their military and civilian allies – including, presumably, British troops and civilians. The security services said he shouldn’t be granted asylum. He had no right to be here and his deportation to Egypt seemed inevitable.
Yet the courts allowed Youssef to stay because of the possibility that he would be tortured when he returned home. The Foreign Office tried to get all kinds of assurances from the Egyptians about his access to lawyers and the nature of the trial he would face. As the list of conditions needed to remove him grew, Blair scrawled in the margins of the official papers: “This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?” The diplomats negotiated, the Red Cross intervened and the fluttering lawyers inserted ever more caveats, and the Prime Minister’s bemusement turned to rage as he cried: “This is crazy. Why can’t we press on?” The Foreign Office couldn’t, because it could not prove that Youssef would not be mistreated. He was released, allowed to stay, and given compensation for the injustice he had suffered.
This used to be a very courteous country. It is becoming a ruder place and Clarke has already deported Rachid Ramda to France for his alleged role in the 1995 Paris Metro bombings. I don’t think the judges will stop him if he wants to deport others. Judicial independence is a bit of a myth, as the judiciary tends to move with public opinion. In a time of peace it will impose all kinds of conditions. My guess is that, when London comes under attack, the judiciary will be a little less picky. Even if it isn’t, Britain is, in the end, a democracy, not a judgocracy. If parliament votes to override the courts, then they will be overridden.
Youssef and Ramda were fighting extradition to face criminal charges, but what about Islamists who merely express an opinion? As far as we know, the secret case that sent Abu Qatada to Belmarsh Prison after the 11 September attacks was not that he organised terrorist outrages or was likely to do so. Rather, he was imprisoned because his preaching inspired suicidal killers including the 9/11 hijackers. Similarly Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the favourite bigot of Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, doesn’t organise bombings. He just defends the murder of Israeli civilians by suicide bombers and suggests that homosexuals should meet the same fate, while also expressing a tolerance for wife-beating and female circumcision.
A large part of the liberal left is so anxious not to appear judgemental, that it won’t condemn him or Livingstone, and is throwing away its democratic, feminist and secular values in a headlong rush to the right. They meet Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal as “a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel”. Yet even that part of the left which is prepared to stick up for itself and stand by its comrades in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere has to accept that deporting Abu Qatada or banning al-Qaradawi would be as much a suppression of free expression as deporting Karl Marx to a Prussian prison or imprisoning him in an English one.
If not for the ordinary Islamist refugees from Egypt and Algeria, then for the leading Islamist thinkers, residence in Britain is becoming dependent on belief: on what you say and what you don’t. This restriction ought to be opposed. But there is a difference between the Marxists who killed no one in Britain and those Islamists who do and will, and it changes everything. It’s all very well saying you’re for freedom of speech, even freedom of speech for fascists . . . but for fascists who approve of suicide bombers? Defend that freedom and you may have blood on your hands, maybe your own blood.
Whether any of the government’s restrictions will stop the bombers is another matter. At the time of going to press we do not know if those “nice” boys from Leeds had a mentor who had taught them in Britain, or if they were instructed at a Pakis-tani madrasa. Whichever is the case, new Labour cannot ban visits to Pakistan, nor can it ban access to the internet or visits to the bookshops of the religious right.
Yet it can change the country. You can feel the shift in the citizenship classes for schoolchildren and for immigrants, which insist that being British requires the learning of British values; in the near-universal acceptance of armed police on the streets and security cameras on every corner; and in the sad feeling that we’re closer to the superstitions of the Middle Ages than to Lord Granville’s Victorian self-confidence.
Nick Cohen will be writing more on criminal justice in a special supplement published with next week’s NS
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