A new political landscape: reconfiguring security.
| Author | Gearty, Conor |
| Position | Features |
The appointment of Gordon Brown as prime minister marks a major and possibly once-off opportunity for the Labour government to reconfigure its approach to security, in a way that promises to be better both for the Party's internal sense of itself and for the safety of the country as a whole. The signs are that such a change is possible, though it will require not only a shift in attitudes at the top but also more open-mindedness about government across civil society as a whole. More on the first of these later, but the second (less often remarked on or noticed) needs attention as well.
First there is the need to resist easy, Blair-based abuse. The former prime minister lost the country's trust when he was found to have been (at best) reckless with the truth about the underlying basis for the invasion of Iraq. This mistrust was then compounded by his later persistent characterisation of the threat of terrorism in the apocalyptic terms of American neo-conservatism. Branding Brown with the 'war on terror' rhetoric and Iraq debacles simply because he was in government at the time might suit those who have long seen Labour as irredeemably authoritarian but for supporters of the Party it is an unnecessary and cheap shot which writes off the new regime before it gets properly underway.
Second, the fact of a threat of large-scale criminal violence from a small group of highly committed and politicised elements within the Moslem faith community cannot be denied. This is not a threat to civilisation as we know it, but nor is it no threat at all. The important issues relate to the scale of the danger, and the best/least counter-productive ways of addressing it. I happen to believe that the state, led I would guess by the security services and police intelligence--but led on as well by an unquestioning, over-excitable political class--has allowed official estimates of the danger of such violence to be pushed upwards, to the point where there is disproportionate anxiety about its likelihood. But this is not a different way of saying that the authorities have made it all up, a temptation to which civil libertarians and other critiques of anti-terrorism laws sometimes appear to succumb. Once they do, they lose all audiences outside their own narrow circle.
Third, if the civil libertarians are to win the argument with Brown's administration, the public debate on security and civil liberties needs to ratchet down its rhetoric several notches. Close to the end of Blair's premiership, we had almost reached the point where assertions that the then prime minister had destroyed British freedom or that the country was now close to being a police state were allowed to go almost without question. Certainly there have been illiberal laws, and these have been illiberally interpreted from time to time. Some such laws, such as the stop and search powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, are being routinely over-deployed by the police and should be repealed. But the other side of the ledger contains important legislation such as the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act. It also reveals a police service that has striven under law officer pressure to deploy the criminal law in a fair-minded and non-prejudicial way. The judicial branch likewise has been remarkably vigilant (by its historically...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
