SO IT is to be the Big Fear. We shall have dread at the dispatch box and heebie-jeebies on the hustings. The Queen’s Speech is not just dumbed-down politics, it is into the basement and out to the gutter politics. Who can scare you most? Who can have you waking each morning quivering in anticipation of the yob, the mugger, the addict, the drunk, the al-Qaeda terrorist behind every yashmak? Thank you Government, they want us to say, thank you for just being there. Take our taxes and our freedom and use them at will.
“In politics,” said Coleridge with reason, “what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” Strong politicians used to promise prosperity and reassurance. Weak politicians carp on insecurity. Yesterday’s seven “tightening” Bills on law and order in one Queen’s Speech was absurd, an insult to British liberty. They come after no fewer than 43 similar Home Office Acts since Tony Blair came to office. What was so inadequate about them as to demand this last-minute legislative blitzkrieg? The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is part Lenin part Papa-Doc Duvalier.
We need to remember — those who ever noticed — that approaching the statute book is one of the most comprehensive public order laws ever passed by Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Bill grants ministers unprecedented special powers. Mr Blunkett can do literally anything he likes. He need not even cite an emergency, merely his own belief in an intransitive “threat”. This need not be of terrorism but could be no more than damage to property, ecology or “the money supply”. He can override free speech, habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights. He can disregard both the courts and Parliament. His Bill was passed by the House of Lords the same week that it fought a foxhunting ban as undermining British freedom.
Yet to Mr Blunkett even his civil contingencies powers are not enough. He must have cleared the Home Office cupboard of every authoritarian morsel remaining from the days of Michael Howard. He will get his own internal crime-busting force, compulsory drug testing, wider phone tapping, on-the-spot fines for antisocial behaviour and that Home Office Holy Grail, identity cards. He will realise every government’s Orwellian ambition of each citizen on a national data base, complete with health details, social security, immigrant status and police record.
Mr Blunkett likes to claim that his job is about balancing risk against fear. Yet this was the minister who two years ago threatened London with sarin on the Tube, anthrax and smallpox among Christmas shoppers and dirty bombs everywhere. That shocking weekly performance was intended to soften up public opinion before the Iraq invasion. Yesterday the tradition was maintained with a leak that Canary Wharf faced an “al-Qaeda plot to hijack jets and fly them into skyscrapers”. I wonder which aide rubbed his hands with glee on seeing that on yesterday’s Daily Mail front page.
Mr Blair has clearly read the runes from George Bush’s victory in America. Security is used neatly to link the world of al-Qaeda, bombings and beheadings to a harmless drunk rolling down the neighbourhood street. Republican speeches similarly linked terrorism with domestic crime, East Coast liberalism and gay marriage. Mr Blair wants to push the same buttons. Labour politicians are eagerly pointing out that they have ouflanked the Tories and “put the Liberal Democrats on to the back foot”.
We used to rely on statesmen to keep us free from fear. Freedom from fear was Roosevelt’s “fourth freedom” in his address to Congress in 1941, when fear of a global war was real. Leaders today should guard the secrets of national security. They should publicise danger only so far as is necessary for that security. Otherwise they should not use their position to spread terror, which is what terrorists want. Least of all should they exploit it for electoral gain.
Like many journalists, I am occasionally told some of the material available to the police and security service. It includes much whose authenticity is no more plausible than Alastair Campbell’s Downing Street dossiers. It also includes hundreds of malicious “tip offs” and trivial sightings. Amid all this is something that is serious and genuine. There has always been a nutter with a bomb somewhere in London. But I rely on No 10 to sort the wheat from the chaff before leaking it. I rely on government to keep me secure without constantly boasting the fact.
I do not believe that Britain is under-protected from terrorism at present. Even if a bomb were to go off, I would still take that view. I certainly feel more secure than I did during the random IRA and pro-Palestinian bombings and killings of the 1970s and 1980s. We survived that without a Civil Contingencies Act. Identity cards are an irrelevance. So is a national crime-busting force. So is tighter immigration control. Britain is not a paranoid Dotheboys Hall. It was painful to listen to the down-to-earth John Prescott — who would have ridiculed a Tory Home Secretary for such measures — having to burble his defence of them on the radio yesterday.
Nor does the supposed global threat from al-Qaeda have anything do with domestic concerns over law and order. True, Britain’s city centres are more violent and alarming than before. But the cause is the abuse of alcohol and drugs. It is what these substances do to young people that most Britons tell pollsters is the chief threat to their “homeland security”, not global terrorism.
The Government’s refusal to engage with this menace is the greatest corset constraining “security” policy. Alcohol and narcotics lie behind most violence and property crime, public nuisance and disorderly conduct. To the electorate they seem beyond all customary social control. And they are enhanced by the epidemic use of knives and firearms. The Government has no clue what to do about this, except to pass 43, now to be 50, Acts since 1997.
The bonds that kept young people under some parental and neighbourhood discipline — and do so in most European countries — have broken in Britain, snapped by Mr Blair's centralism. The tiers of responsibility once present in urban and rural communities alike have been replaced by a police officer, a high-speed car and a Whitehall performance target. Most people certainly want a curb on antisocial behaviour. They want policemen on the streets and villains before the courts. But they know that these are palliatives, not cures. So too are Mr Blunkett’s enhanced stop-and-search powers, his on-the-spot fines and extended drug tests.
It is now axiomatic that antisocial behaviour, minor or serious, begins and ends in Britain with drink and drugs. We need search no farther for Mr Blair’s famous “causes of crime”. Yet his Government is inert. It is mesmerised by the drinks lobby, which it means to indulge with longer drinking hours. It turns a blind eye to the unenforceable 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, now hopelessly out of date. Britain boasts the worst reputation for public drunkenness in Europe and the worst record for drugs consumption. Its drugs trade is uncontrolled and its markets free of any regulation. All Mr Blunkett can offer is compulsory drug testing, which will do no more than cram ever more wretched young people into his already overcrowded prisons.
I sense that some ministers half realise this. They can see that stripping away local responsibility for public order and vesting it in the police and central government has not worked. John Reid, Nick Raynsford, David Miliband and even Mr Blunkett have variously held forth on the subject. They seem dimly aware that targets no longer motivate or deliver. One size does not fit all. Streets and neighbourhoods must somehow be re-empowered.
Someone called Tony Blair spoke along these lines back in the mid-90s, before the cup of power was lifted to his lips. But that was long ago. Today the adrenalin of dread is to be pumped into the electoral vein, yielding dark shadows and shudders down the spine. Once upon a time new Labour was going to rule by hope. Seven years on, it rules by fear.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
