IF NOBODY has been tried for treason since Lord Haw-haw was offed in 1946, then I don’t think we ought to start all that again now. The charge has a quaint, medieval ring about it, reminding us of the days when it was equally treasonous to help a foreign enemy, criticise Henry VIII or to steal cattle if you were a Welshman.
But that still leaves us with the problem of what to do about people who seem (in the language of the old statute) to compass or imagine what are, in effect, acts of war against this country. It’s not as if they will usually oblige prosecutors by producing a record of phone calls and speeches in which they call upon those listening to fill their rucksacks with explosives and hurry off to the nearest form of public transport. Instead they just tend to say things that would lead anyone so inclined to believe that blowing up trains was a not unreasonable response to world events.
Until recently these people seemed ridiculous, with their pantomime beards and costume headdresses. Abu Izzadeen, of the groupuscule al-Ghurabaa, told Newsnight that the London bombings were “Mujahidin activity” which would make the British people “wake up and smell the coffee”. On the same programme Abu Uzair, formerly of the now-disbanded (and doubtless reformulated) al-Muhajiroun, informed viewers that: “We don’t live in peace with you any more, which means the covenant of security no longer exists.” And if we hadn’t actually been bombed by people sometimes as silly-sounding and stupid-looking (at least, before their pre-mission shaves) then perhaps we could still laugh at Omar Bakri Mohammed and his pals. Not any more.
Until recently the Home Secretary looked set to cover such activities with a new offence of “indirect incitement to terrorism”, which, it was explained, would cover people who glorified or condoned acts of terrorism. This offence seemed wide enough for George Galloway to joke, during his most recent visit to the Middle East (once again missing out Iraq), that he “could be on trial every day once these new proposals become law”.
For once Galloway had a point, which illustrated the difficulties. Speaking on Syrian TV on July 31, in the way one does, Galloway addressed the Arabs of the world with the observation that: “Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners — Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will.” The foreigners in Jerusalem are, presumably, Israeli Jews and I imagine that the metaphorical “doing as they will” attached to the helpless but alluring female cities, does not refer to them being plied with scones and Earl Grey tea.
Of course Galloway has — unlike the silly sheikhs — condemned the bombings as “a crime in any language, in any religion”. He may even mean it. But it isn’t hard to imagine self-styled Mujahidin listening to George and concluding that a strike at the heart of the daughter-rapist’s capital city is a fair return. So was this, in effect, incitement?
And that was all before Tony Blair’s speech last Friday and his 12 new suggestions. Which, once again, infuriated Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty. “If Friday was intended as Mr Blair’s ‘fight them on the beaches’ moment,” she wrote yesterday, “I am afraid that he blew it.” Great wartime leaders, she implied, don’t mess about with cherished liberties.
Except, of course, that that is exactly what they do do. As David Blunkett likes to point out, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in September 1862 and in 1940 Winston banged up over a thousand Mosleyites under the famous Defence Regulation 18b, their only right of appeal being to an advisory committee, which would rule on the basis of an intelligence assessment that the detainees never saw.
War leaders do this kind of thing partly because they feel they need the powers, and partly to stop the targets of their detention from eventually being lynched. And this is the aspect that civil libertarians sometimes miss. It feels necessary to point out that, just as some young Muslims may be said to be “angry” and therefore prone to do bad things, so may ordinary British people become angered by the threat or reality of being blown up on their own buses. And they too could, if stirred up enough by some newspapers, by some fringe political parties, by populists and by the sight of men such as Bakri Mohammed sticking two fingers up to us, turn nasty. That’s something that Mr Blair knows too.
He knows, because this is what he is good at, that people wonder why the French can take action when we apparently can’t, and yet no one suggests that Paris is at the heart of an authoritarian state. Or that the German interior minister, Otto Schily, can demand whether it is “really unthinkable that they (rogue preachers) should be isolated for a period of time” without being denounced as a born-again totalitarian.
In France foreigners can be thrown out of the country for “inciting discrimination, hatred or violence against a specific person or group of persons”, or convicted of “association with terrorists”, a charge requiring only the suspicions of the intelligence services. Meanwhile Britain has still failed, after a decade, to extradite Rachid Ramda to France on charges of having financed the group behind the 1995 Paris Métro bombing campaign. Imagine how we would feel if the situation were reversed.
This is frustrating and the frustration is dangerous. We can’t send foreign agitators to places where they may be tortured — which is usually just about anywhere. We can’t send them to places where they won’t be tortured, but where (as in the Rachid case) the evidence against them may have been procured under duress. We can’t prosecute them for indirect incitement, because the charge is so wide it might catch George Galloway and (according to Ms Chakrabarti) many dinner parties attended by Guardian readers. In fact there’s not much we in Britain can do about them at all. And that is unsustainable.
The argument above doesn’t imply that I support all the elements of the Prime Minister’s 12-point plan. I look at it quite coldly. There are proposals that may be desirable but that will cause more alienation than they will bring benefit. For that reason I think that Hizb ut-Tahrir should be left alone, just as the fascist BNP is not banned. Al-Muhajiroun is a different story. I am not opposed to the deportation of some of the more extreme agitators back to their own countries, subject to agreement with those states. These people are adults, and they hold the remedy in their own hands.
I am against automatic refusals of asylum, but in favour of allowing the police more time to hold suspects. It seems fine to me to create a list of preachers who may be kept out of the UK, provided it is made clear that non-Muslims are — in principle, at least — subject to the same provision. I don’t believe it is necessary or desirable to amend the Human Rights Act, and I think that it would it be a bad message to send the world. I am quite happy to demand biometric visas from visitors from certain countries.
In fact I am content to pick and mix my liberties and protections so as to maintain a society which tolerates the first and demands the second. Libertarian slogans won’t cut it.
david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk
