The Brittle Society
Alarmists, like Naomi Wolf, have been exaggerating the degree to which the US, and by implication the UK, have been slipping towards a police state. The evidence for true tyranny in either country is weak. However, since it came to power in 1997, it might be reasonably argued(1) that New Labour has brought the United Kingdom one third of the way towards a ‘tyranny’ if we look closely at what the Blair Government has actually done since 2001 and then measure it against Wolf’s ten steps to dictatorship.(2)
In the strange amalgam of New Labour and state that emerged in 1997, one fundamental political purpose has been to ensure that a culture of security can emerge that can match its continental counterparts in powers and tools. The European project requires a ‘Frenchification’ of our security culture by people who are instinctive Republicans. It is not that New Labour wants an illiberal regime per se. New Labour is not fascist – unless we think European republicanism is inherently fascist – it is merely indifferent to liberal individualism.
In Europe, it is normal to limit free speech (as in the ban on Holocaust denial) or to engage in some surprisingly arbitrary actions in order to preserve the state as guarantor of the mixed economy, the rule of law and democracy. This attitude has not been the norm in the UK since the age of Castlereagh, but New Labour and its social democratic supporters feel that the loss of traditional British freedoms and the construction of an appropriate culture of internal security is a very small price to play for the creation of a European ‘liberal democracy with social characteristics’.
New Labour ideology sees, as do other continental Liberals, a variety of threats coming from national interest socialism, corporatism, nationalist protectionism and anarchy as much as from the insurgencies that are growing out of resistance to neo-imperialist adventures. The government, in its own eyes, merely wants illiberal methods to be available to protect the liberal democratic state.
The resultant ‘one third tyranny’ is a compromise between liberal democratic certainties and the need to deal with ‘unknown unknowns’. We should certainly not oversimplify policy discussions into some black and white conflict between extreme positions, but the ideology underpinning the need for increased executive authority has become absolutely integral to the New Labour project.
Recent Moves
There has been an unholy hurry since the beginning of 2007 to establish a framework for a new internal security regime before Blair’s departure. It is almost as if John Reid is more valuable to the ‘Project’ in his role as Home Secretary than he could ever be as Prime Minister. An internal security regime is being bureaucratically pre-fixed for a new Prime Minister. This means that it is going to be hard to unravel by any Tory successor. It is an approach that caps a wider shift to intelligence-based policing in which the subjects of the intelligence-gathering are ourselves, our dissidents and our underclass in equal measure.
Blair and Reid have now centralised counter-terrorism activity by having the Prime Minister (as office rather than person) chair a new committee on terrorism and security. Functions were being shuffled, as I write, from the Home Office to the new Ministry of Justice. Blair was expected to resign or at least give a fixed date for resignation on May 9th/10th. As the Mafia notoriously say, ‘things change’ but it looked, by May Day, that deadlines were being set.
Blair has set a framework for terrorism and security that Brown might well adapt to his requirements but is unlikely to change fundamentally. Intelligence-based policing, the framework for an eventual introduction of investigating judges, a culture of surveillance (such as identity cards) and the centralisation of all aspects of internal security will be in position for wider implementation. Ordinary citizens are going to be stopped, questioned and watched more regularly.
What this means on the ground
Even if the Prime Minister at the centre controls overall policy, whoever runs the Home Office will, under the proposals, accrue increasing power over terrorism policy and its implementation at the expense of more liberal voices. The current incumbent (May 2007) plans a research, information and communication department within the Home Office that is tantamount to a cold war-style political warfare unit, only (this time) primarily directed at internal enemies and their foreign friends. Ruth Kelly, the Communities Minister, was said to be reluctant to pass over her ‘hearts and minds’ programmes to the dark lords of the Home Office. Kelly has none of Reid’s authority and might be expected to lose even what she has when the Prime Minister goes. Perhaps Brownites can look on this cynically enough as a squabble between Blairites that they can sort out later. Perhaps they do not care.
The real question will be whether they reappoint or appoint a hard right-winger, a Labour Movement Sarkozy, who will be granted the delegation of these growing powers. Such a person will have immense political power in their hands, rivalling the Chancellor and increasingly eclipsing the Foreign Secretary. We are thus seeing a politicisation of state security that is beginning to irritate senior policemen as well as many lawyers.
In April, Head of Counter-Terrorism, Peter Clarke, complained about the damage being done to counter-terrorism efforts by politically inspired leaks of operations by unnamed sources. Blair backed him, but the issue was particularly contentious if only because two persons, including a civil servant, were simultaneously being tried for leaks associated with the Iraq war. Leaking is a political act and the operational leaking appeared to be directed by one part of government at the expense of operational efficiency by the government’s own agents on the ground.
The reasons for state panic
Despite all the talk of terrorism, close analysis of news reports about the ‘reforms’ suggested that Reid was directing his efforts equally at two other key issues of importance that obsess the international security elite – organised crime and mass immigration. These are political concerns at state level across the West. Organised crime sits alongside terrorism as a major challenge to state authority. Mass immigration is in danger of fuelling political insurgency against the established political system in many countries.
What is not being considered with the same sense of urgency is the fight against social dislocation, petty crime and community degradation. These domestic problems are the very fruits of modernisation but they do not result in serious direct challenges to state authority. If they are put on the back-burner, we have to ask what the reasoning behind this may be. Is it that the authorities believe they can do something at the macro-level but not at the micro-level or that there are no micro-level solutions without a macro-level solution?
In this context, much of the concern about security is not about terrorism at all. Of course, terrorism is a threat – only a fool would think otherwise. It is probable that we are all becoming far too complacent. But what the government does not want us to see is how the micro-level problems are solvable only through massive macro-policy changes that would undercut the raison d’etre of the ideology that sustains government. Because certain neo-liberal policies are not negotiable, emphasis has to shift to what remains – the assertion of authority through executive power,
In the case of terrorism, the blow back of foreign policy into our migrant communities means that nothing meaningful can be said. Terrorism raises questions of policy and competence that have already irretrievably damaged the ‘legacy’ of New Labour and which must be continuously swept under the carpet. But the real concern remains the potential for a much more widespread collapse of internal order.
The Sunday Times (24 December) revealed a ‘secret memo’ from the government that expressed what can only be described as sheer panic on the part of the authorities at the expectation of a rise in the crime rate. The memo, from a government strategy unit, blamed the police. It suggested a series of hysterical and over the top measures: enforced heroin vaccinations, alcohol rationing, chemical castration, ID chip implants, public shaming of offenders, use of bounty hunters and enforced parenting classes. Was it a hoax? It appeared not!
Interestingly, the supply side of heroin seemed not to be mentioned in the top line of the ‘secret memo’, or only incidentally, indicating the maintenance of one taboo: that a link not be drawn between the many dumb decisions of a dumb ally in the wake of 9/11 and social collapse in the UK inner cities. Yet drugs and other illicit trades and the massive accumulation of capital in the hands of organised crime are absolutely central to the collapse of social order – second only, that is, to the Government’s inability to persuade the public that higher taxes are necessary and would be spent wisely.
Of course, the status of such documents is far from high but, seen with the nonsensical second-rate ruminations of the Ministry of Defence on threats to the UK,(3) it indicates a most remarkable panic amongst Government-financed ‘intellectuals’ about the world that the Government is expected to ‘manage’ in the twenty-first century.
Theorising and Reality
We have had equally ridiculous national panics about climate change, healthcare and migration. Their common denominator is that government has lost the ability to govern. It hopes to mobilise change in behaviour and culture through waves of Diana-like emotion rather than through collaborative policies built on community and trust. New Labour, if we listen to the speeches of Jack Straw and others, seems to wants its theoretical ideology of rights and duties to develop into something like the ‘republican virtue’ of the European Left.
Most of us can no longer take this hysteria very seriously. New Labour, and the state with which it is so intertwined, is clearly intellectually bankrupt. The instinctive common sense of the British helps explain both why the Conservatives were some 5-8 points ahead of the polls by the Spring of 2007 and why they remain equally suspicious of Cameron. Women, who have a very much finer sense of what is real and what is not than many male intellectuals, were disproportionately polling for Cameron if not necessarily with enthusiasm.
But all the theorising by think tanks about threats in the future is so much flim-flam. Threats to the state are in the future but threats to the people are in the present. Problems have to be seen by the security services, by their very nature, not in terms of protection of the people but in terms of protection of the state. This raises the important issue, as much as it did in the days of Castlereagh, whether we, the people, own the state or whether it or some faction owns us.
Clear and present dangers to the people have emerged precisely because of political decisions over the last twenty five years that the political establishment cannot face head on, for fear of undermining their own legitimacy. These include policies that emphasise the primacy of economic growth over social cohesion, the massive centralisation of power in all fields of life, the removal of the right of any form of national redress in the face of globalisation and the attempts to solve the problems that emerge from neo-liberalism with under-resourced and ill-considered interventions overseas.
The Terror Threat
As for terrorism, there has recently been a major trial indicating a serious bomb plot yet still no major incident in 2007. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the 2003 Election, I was a strong critic of attempts to talk up the threat from terrorism. This was not because I was convinced that some extremists would not undertake periodic attacks on the public for political reasons but because such attacks, though painful, were not comparable to war and that attempts were being made to use fear to introduce a ‘one third tyranny’.
Now I suggest that we have the opposite problem. The authorities, by using fear to create tools for the state to impose controls to a much greater degree than terrorism has warranted, have lost public trust. We are now becoming complacent. This complacency partly arises from the government’s own refusal to own up to the real reasons why we are all at threat – its asinine liberal interventionism overseas.
I, for one, am persuaded that insurgents are beginning to make serious headway across the Islamic world. The Palestine issue is not going to be solved within the necessary time frame, Iraq is not responding to ‘surge’ and is likely to see increased intervention by neighbouring powers, Turkey and Pakistan are going through a period of domestic instability and the West is trying to provoke a similar instability in Iran. Meanwhile, the intervention in Somalia has simply dispersed Islamist radicals, increasing Islamism in Eastern Africa and Northern Nigeria. The catalogue could go on.
Most truly insurgent groups are small and localised but the mood ‘out there’ is one of a worthy cause that is managing to do something that has been prayed for by young Arab and Muslim intellectuals since the early days of the Wafd in Egypt – the expulsion of the West from their lands, Caliphate or not. It is only a matter of time before Muslim insurgency brings the war into our territory if only to assert that Arab and Pathan civilians are not the only ones being dismembered by high explosive.
Ideological battles within the government
This is the context for the Financial Times report (17 January) that the series of blunders surrounding the Home Office (by then, being reported on a near-daily basis) had cost the Home Office the opportunity to co-ordinate all aspects of counter-terrorism. This was not quite how things were about to turn out, but it was clear that the spin had emerged because of the intense opposition to centralisation from most other depart-ments of state at that time. A primary objection was that a department within the Home Office would crowd out ‘hearts and minds’ operations domestically and overseas. In other words, this was turning into a very real struggle between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, even if John Reid was to deny this interpretation three months later.
But, if there was an ideological battle, it was fundamentally between a ‘French’ model of counter-terrorism based on policing and prosecuting authority and the traditional ‘British’ model of community integration. The Home Office was regarded as weak, demoralised and out of control – MI5 was clearly not regarded as much better. All this was positioned in the context of a history of simplistic propaganda that London had become a haven for Islamic extremists – the trite nonsense exemplified by Melanie Phillips’ too easy adoption of the French propaganda term ‘Londonistan’.
John Reid, Home Secretary, confirmed that a major shake-up of the Home Office was on the cards later in January. Within a couple of weeks, there was another round of anti-terror arrests. The latest arrests were interesting because they did not suggest a bomb plot against the public but an extension of the Iraq insurgency. They were allegedly centred on a plot to capture and kill for Internet distribution one or more Muslim-British soldiers on British soil. Later, it was the spin on this particular case that was to trigger the ire of the head of Counter-Terrorism.
It is hard not to draw the conclusion that someone somewhere wanted MPs and the public to be terrified of the Islamist threat as new changes were about to be announced. The authorities (in fact, the ‘leakers’) were also keen to spin that the terrorists (bar the use of video) were analogous to the IRA (again, in order to get the Iraq insurgents to be seen as enemies of the people on terms the people would understand). The real conclusion, which no one in government dare make, should have been that the war was being brought home.
Definitions of the terror threat
The bottom line here is the actual definition of terrorism. The distinction, not so fine, is between acts of terror designed to bring the Caliphate to the UK and those extending a classic war of occupation and liberation back to what is perceived to be an occupying power. The two models are being deliberately confused by government with the collusion of the media. In the end, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the two will merge again in the eyes of the perpetrators themselves.
In effect, what was happening was that local police management of ‘extremism’ (in fact, mostly nothing more than political dissent but with the admitted potential to radicalise into violence) had been displaced by something closer to a ‘secret state’ police operation that had a far more ambiguous relationship to political decision-making. The arrests apparently uncovered a serious and violent plot (assuming what we are told is true; which is by no means certain). If so, the operations effectively admitted that ‘insurgency’ as a result of foreign policy was being imported into the marginalised communities of the UK.
Those arrested were indigenous and all came from East Birmingham. This area is radicalising rapidly, albeit only in pockets, not only in relation to the British state but also in the context of interethnic clashes with (perceived to be largely Christian) blacks. Friends from Birmingham politics were warning me of this radicalism and its potential for violence in the late 1990s – and added that there was a collusive conspiracy of silence between local media and the authorities to down play incidents for fear of ‘upsetting race relations’. The ‘hawks’ therefore have a point that ‘doves’ have been trying to wish the problem away through pretending that it is not taking place. The real establishment fear is of a localised version of the faith-based clashes take place along the Sahel – only in a British inner city. This is not so far-fetched. No-go areas between Muslim, Sikh and poor white gangster enclaves are a real security concern because drugs, fraud and people trafficking creates an economic base for a black economy dominated by gangsters, supported by electoral fraud and the will to violence necessary to enforce authority.
The odd bomb to warn the middle classes to stay out of the enclaves is the point of real breakdown. If such enclaves become ideologically cohesive, just as the IRA brought together urban Catholics in Northern Ireland, then you have something very serious indeed. This may be Blair’s malign legacy, that he opened Pandora’s Box in Britain’s inner cities with his ignorant foreign policy.
The Brittle Society
As a sign of the potential brittleness of British society, a letter bomb was received earlier this year at leading and controversial outsourcing company Capita. It was then revealed that there had been other such bombs, perhaps seven in total in three weeks, previously undisclosed. Two bombs had hit other public sector-related sites where major IT projects impact on the public, including the Driver Vehicle Licensing Centre. These were not very sophisticated devices. In the event, an alleged perpetrator was soon captured, the crisis ended and the bombs probably related to personal grievance; but the suspicion arose that there was an undercurrent of class rage that might be emerging in resentment at specific effects of public sector modernisation. Capita is involved in so many government projects (sometimes not always with competence) that the list of possible suspects had been extensive.
The incident should not be taken too seriously – any more than the Unabomber in the US – but it adds to a general sense that the government is losing control of the civil order agenda. Recent raids on animal rights activists indicate a small community alleged to be considering violence as a normal route to policy change. The numbers of ‘extremist’ radicals being monitored rose recently from 1,600 to 2,000. All this is relatively small beer compared to something that may be more disturbing – the widespread resentment of Government and the construction of quasi-gangster politics in neglected communities.
The Government’s periodic waves of terror arrests also suggest unease about whether it knows what it is doing about civil disorder. It is fishing. As the facts come out, they often seem to fit into the standard pattern of poor intelligence and some mistreatment of those arrested. We remain convinced that miscarriages of justice are likely in this mismanaged chaos. We have noted the signs of a systemic tension between the police who are simply trying to do their job, based on intelligence received, and a political community that is undertaking ‘lurid’ briefings for political reasons.
Expert concern at the dangers of the New Labour ‘culture of spin’ has come from a Chatham House report. It commented on the possible use of weapons of mass destruction in a terrorist attack on Britain:
‘A good deal of the effect of a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom using CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear] could prove to be self-inflicted by the victims of the attack – the general public, business leaders and government officials – or magnified by alarmist media…. The United Kingdom might prove to be rather brittle in the face of a CBRN attack – there might be a demoralising sense of defencelessness, particularly if unknown and invisible agents and pollutants are used, and possibly even widespread panic – and it seems reasonable to assume that terrorists might hope for such brittleness in order to expand the effect of their attack.’
Conclusions
The UK is ready to snap in panic at the first serious breakdown in order. Economic success hides enormous cultural and social tensions that a less-than-competent administrative class is failing to manage. Politically, recent polls and reports suggest that the UK model of a liberal economy might well be at the centre of this ‘brittle society’.
There was much concern earlier in the year over one report that showed that British children were the least happy and that Dutch children were the most happy in Europe. It caught a raw nerve in a country that saw a number of US-style teenage deaths from shootings in the week that followed. And this was before the Virginia Tech shootings in the US some weeks later. More to the point, the report indicated to many that no real progress had been made on the social front after nearly a decade of centre-left rule.
As for Reid’s changes in the security structure, the intelligence services will now be quite happy with the final arrangements even if other officials and senior police officers are not so sure. In the event, the security service bosses will keep their little satrapies intact and will not get merged into some British version of a Department of Homeland Security. (4) This alone makes them breathe a sigh of relief. It may even provide some small mercy for civil liberties. The ongoing squabbles between these agencies will at least ensure some small leeway for the public interest to get a word in edgeways.
But one unnamed academic (quoted in the Financial Times) put the concerns of the mainstream establishment quite neatly:
‘In France and Spain ……the Interior Ministries are seen as rather sinister, dubious, bodies because they concentrate an awful lot of security and policing power in the hands of one individual. Some people may have concerns about that.’
Yes, well – ‘nuff said.
So this is where we are today. On the one hand, the government has a political agenda directed at reasserting state authority along European lines in order to deal with social problems largely of its own and the preceding Tory administrations’ own making. On the other, both the professionals in the police, no less committed to public order, and liberal-minded community politicians see that the risks of ‘Europeanisation’ (though they would never talk in these political terms) are enormous. You must make your own decision on what this means for you as a British subject.
Notes
- <http://timinlondon.zaadz.com/blog>
- <www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2063979,00.html>
- <www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2053021,00.html>
- Since drafting this article, John Reid has announced his return to the backbenches, evidently unable to serve a Brown administration in a senior position. This can be interpreted in a number of ways but one that will not be publicly admitted for political reasons is that the ‘project’ can be safeguarded much more effectively from a position where, like Churchill between the wars, a senior and respected figure can ‘constructively criticise’ any deviation from policy by the Prime Minister from the benches than he could from a position in office.In addition, by distancing himself from the Brown administration (while expressing the usual loyal support), John Reid can place himself in a position either to pitch for the leadership after an election defeat or to act as king maker between rival Blairites. He will also gather around himself Blairites who are excluded from office as patronage moves a little to the centre-left in the Party under Brown.
Finally, the new incumbent of the Home Office will have been given some powerful tools but a very difficult situation – whoever gets the job could be made or broken in the role. But Reid is in a win/win situation. If his successor succeeds then it will be according to a framework set by him, but if he or she fails, it will be the man (or woman) and not the office. There is no room now for yet another Home Office ‘reform’ to suit a new arrival.
In my opinion, John Reid is one of the most important and talented politicians of our time and his return to the backbenches is far from the end of his political career. As in France, the emergence of the new national security state is going to be one of the great political themes that will emerge in the next few years.