Looking back over the past astonishing week and weekend I am almost undecided. Has it been the death of British liberty as we know it? Or has there been a minor reinforcement of counter-terrorist policing?
Of one thing there is no doubt. Now the dust in the Westminster village has cleared, the Government has won. It has abandoned habeas corpus. It won detention without trial and without due process of law. Supervision by a single judge of only the most draconian form of house arrest control orders, which the Home Secretary says he is not using, is no legal process. It attaches a judicial leach on the side of an executive decision. There will be no defence lawyers, no revealing of evidence, no cross-examination, no trial. The only concession was that the law will be looked at against next year. Any law can be looked again next year.
The Government, however, did not win the argument. Nobody contested that nasty people were out there on whom the security services needed to keep tabs. While Britain may not be the high profile target of 9/11, or have Spain's Moroccan problem, the shoebomber incidents proved the presence of hotheads ready to kill themselves and others in the cause of general mayhem. Countermeasures are needed and these may push the rule of law close to its limit.
What the Government was never able to indicate, let alone prove, was a scale of threat sufficient to merit the bill as drafted. The IRA exploded dozens of lethal bombs on mainland Britain in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Today's fanatics have yet to explode one. There has been no evidence of new devices, biological, radiological or chemical, though even these have never been shown as causing "mass destruction". The one true WMD, a nuclear bomb, is extremely hard to transport and explode without industrial capability. There is not a shred of evidence of such a threat to Britain. Nothing emerged to justify this bill, beyond vague ministerial statements that "the security services" want it. They always want such things.
There is a greater risk which governments do face, but it is not terrorist, it is political. During the IRA campaign, a "Blitz spirit" applied in Britain. Despite being hit with weekly outrages, the public reacted with business as usual. When a bomb exploded, ministers and police were not blamed. Today the authorities have taken on themselves the principle of zero risk, and therefore the assumption of guilt. Hence the endless flank-covering. Hence the vested interest in constantly warning of an "imminent" attack, so as to prove they were not caught off guard.
This is not good government. Last week ministers pleaded with Parliament that the threat was greater than anything in peacetime so far. London's outgoing police chief, Sir John Stevens, was induced to claim, as he has been doing regularly for two years, that an attack on the capital was inevitable. Tony Blair claimed to know of "hundreds" of terrorists roaming free in Britain, whom he had unaccountably failed to arrest under existing powers. But the proportionality of these threats - as being far greater than the IRA - had to be taken on trust.
Such trust has been sacrificed by crying wolf in the past. Trust was misplaced in the case of the Iraq weapons dossiers and in the case of Britons left languishing in Guantanamo Bay. The intelligence officers on whose evidence Britons are to be detained without trial were shown last week to have no training in Geneva Conventions. The Government has been to the High Court to win permission to use material gathered by torture overseas.
British intelligence has never seemed less reliable. I cannot recall a time when the central institutions of security have been treated with greater scepticism. Last week MPs and peers of all parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory simply did not believe them. Former defence secretaries, former Lord Chancellors, newspaper editors, academics, civil servants did not believed them. Were it not for the Government's payroll vote in the House of Commons, the control order legislation would never have passed.
Britain's extensive counter-terrorism legislation - updated three times in the past decade - already allows for arrest on suspicion and prolonged interrogation. Few observers would object to some strengthening of this, such as wider use of bugging, tagging and monitoring. The IRA terrorism laws included special courts and in camera evidence. Existing laws have been enough to capture and convict the only substantive terrorist cell so far discovered, the shoebombers. This did not need detention without trial. The one time such detention was used in peacetime, against the IRA in the 1970s, it was widely regarded as politically disastrous.
Detention on executive order is now the law of Britain. It was significant that Spain, which this weekend commemorated the anniversary of a massive terrorist attack, specifically eschewed detention without trial. A minister pointed out that Spanish democracy would not go back down that dictatorial route. For Spain to teach Britain a lesson in liberty is humiliating.
I do not think the control order legislation is the end of civil liberty as we know it. But it is a beginning of the end. Governments love arbitrary power. At the start of last week Labour ministers wanted no check at all on their new powers and fought like tigers to resist it. Once such power is won it is seldom surrendered. There is always a bloodcurdling intelligence report of a "threat to the British way of life". There is always a loophole that needs closing by another law. The executive always wants another curb on freedom, and another, and another ... until suddenly we find there is none left.
- The Prevention of Terrorism Bill never did have anything to do with protecting British citizens against external dangers. It was only and always about replacing habeas corpus with the EU system of law (I can't call it justice): corpus juris. This enables the government to pass so many rules, regulations and directives, all of which have the force of law, that the average citizen is almost certain to break one or more of them every day. The resultant climate of fear ensures that the population can be easily controlled. People are too afraid to draw attention to themselves by standing up for what used to be their rights, or by arguing with their political masters. It worked rather well in the Soviet Union for about 70 years. David Carr-Allinson, Oxford
The years since Labour's rise to power, even before the events of 9/11, have been marked by erosions to civil liberty. In every case, citizens have been told that this will not affect them because the executive is reasonable. Even if it were the case, would it always be? The demeanour of Tony Blair, a man with no reverse gear and a belief in his own infallibility that almost rivals the fanaticism of the terrorists he opposes, does not lead me to have much faith. The government is so enraptured by its own good nature and so childishly unable to see opposition that it can, and does, get away with such acts. Thomas Balogh, London
My country, Canada, has allowed Gestapo-like detentions against the will of Canadians. The measure is so unpopular that it makes us wonder why Canadian politicians would do such self-destructive things and, incidentally, what is the level of US control on our institutions. Rene Potvin, Montreal
The rescinding of habeas corpus in the US, and now in Great Britain, strikes a lethal blow to the heart of one of the most essential protections cherished by free peoples. The enormous incongruities of these events in our countries leads one to ask how they could have occurred. The role of corporate influence in setting US domestic and foreign policies can be credibly argued. But what has your Prime Minister to gain? Paul Bless, Petersburg, Alaska
What is the use of human rights without human safety? Navi Reyd, Toronto
I believe that the reason why the British government did not use such draconian means against the Irish is because the Irish are mostly white. It is always a lot easier to curtail somebody else's freedoms if they are not white. Marco Auday, Mississauga, Ontario
You shouldn’t worry so much. Governments always over-react. No sooner has a new draconian law been applied than judges are sending it back diluted, weakened or even declared unworkable - and that's when the government gets off lightly. If everything becomes illegal then everyone becomes a criminal - so the government represents nobody and is therefore redundant - and no politician will ever allow that to happen. Martin Wright, Birmingham
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