Terrorists and what they may or may not be capable of dominated the news
agenda again last week. Extra security measures at stations were announced,
which mean hundreds of thousands of commuters will face a daily reminder of
what ghastly fate they may meet if Al-Qaeda gets its way.
Meanwhile, the Commons home affairs committee was considering more proposed
antiterror legislation, including extending the maximum period of 28 days
during which a suspect can be detained without charge. As a survivor of the
7/7 bombings, I was asked to give evidence.
Monstrous as the atrocities of 7/7 were, I am not sure that we need to react
as we are doing. Terrorism likes publicity. If I were Al-Qaeda’s UK PR
officer, I’d be rather pleased with last week’s excellent coverage,
especially given the material I had to work with over the past few months.
Limousines full of gas canisters that could be unwittingly towed right
across London by parking staff without exploding? Glasgow airport under
threat by men so inept that one set fire to himself while trying to throw a
Molotov cocktail before being thumped to the floor by a passer-by? A weeping
shopgirl who admitted that she changed her nickname from “Lyrical Babe” to
“Lyrical Terrorist” because she thought it sounded “cool” and hoped to find
radical romance online?
A video was shown at the trial last week of defendants accused of terror
offences filmed on a “training weekend”, gamely trying to leap a stream
commando-style and repeatedly falling in – to howls of mirth from the public
gallery. Not quite the lethal mujaheddin hordes of nightmares. Scary? Or
just a very British collection of bloody-minded bungling amateurs?
Yet you do not need to be especially clever, or cunning, to be useful to the
terrorist cause. You need to be idealistic, angry, reckless, committed,
useless at long-term thinking, gullible and easily manipulated. There are an
awful lot of people who fit into that category. In fact, if you don’t fit
into that category at some point between 15 and 25, you are likely to be
something of an oddity, whatever your religion or background.
Germaine Lindsay, who suicide-bombed the Underground carriage I was travelling
on two years ago, was 19 years old when he died, killing 26 innocent people
and injuring 100. His fellow bomber, Hasib Hussain, who blew himself up on
the No 30 bus, killing 13 passengers and injuring scores, was 18 years old.
They were ordinary British teenagers, motivated, the official government
narrative says, by “a fierce antagonism to perceived injustices by the West
against Muslims and a desire for martyrdom”.
It is worrying that Samina Malik, the 23-year-old self-styled “Lyrical
Terrorist” now awaiting sentence, believed that her vicious outpourings and
habit of watching beheading videos on the internet made her appear “cool”.
Yet when we give such prominence to the terrorist threat that we consider
handing over ancient freedoms – not to be detained without charge, submit to
conversations and e-mails and movements being tracked and watched and logged
and agree not to gather in peaceful protest – we show our fear and prop up
the self-important fantasies of the terrorists.
The youngster with a backpack of homemade explosives versus the mighty power
of the state is a potently empowering image of rebellion for disaffected
youth. There are hundreds of thousands of disaffected Saminas. Youthful
posturing, secretiveness, obsessive internet surfing, writing angry poetry
and expressing a desire to die because “nobody understands” your pain can
fast-track into real chaos and carnage.
I wonder whether we are in danger of helping to glamorise the thing we
despise, as well as demonstrating to those who seek to destabilise us and
who despise our tolerance and our freedoms that scaring us makes a real
difference to our behaviour. Extremist attitudes are very far from “cool”;
having read some extremist literature recently I was struck by how paranoid,
rambling, racist and antisemitic it is. Its intention is to create a kind of
theocratic prison state: I doubt Samina would be pouting in her glittery
hijab and her tight jeans in an extremist theocracy.
In Westminster more antiterror legislation is under way. I told the committee
that I was against extending the 28-day detention period. No evidence had
been put forward to show that it was necessary and while the police and
security services said they thought it might be useful in future, I did not
think that was sufficient grounds for shredding habeas corpus.
The government talks of the new complexity of terrorist plots, but MI6
officers confirm that for years they have worked with police and security
services around the world to combat organised crime such as international
drug or weapon trafficking operations that involve networks of suspects in
different countries. Such cases involve evidence cached on computers, hours
of surveillance and intercept evidence to go through and some of the best
resourced, most determined criminal masterminds. Why is terrorism so
different? Isn’t terrorism organised crime, with a side order of propaganda
and theology?
There is no proof that the availability of lengthy detainment without trial
would have stopped the 7/7 bombers or the 21/7 bombers or any of the other
failed bomb plots of the past few years. Legislating on the basis of what
might happen, accumulating powers “for the future”, has no place in British
democracy.
In 1940, faced with the threat of German invasion, Churchill brought in
regulation 18b. This gave the government the power to detain anyone it
thought was a threat to national security without charge or trial. Churchill
loathed it and said that to detain a man “without the judgment of his peers
is in the highest degree odious and the foundation of all totalitarian
government, whether Nazi or communist”.
More than a thousand suspected fascists were locked up, although none was ever
shown to be a genuine threat. All detainees were released before the end of
the war and 18b was effectively abandoned.
Nothing convinces me that we face anything like the threat to daily life and
liberty that we did in the 1940s. The only possible explanation for this
recent desire for 58 days’ internment without charge is that it is
politically motivated. Since 7/7 I have spent a lot of time talking to the
police and security services and it has become clear to me that it is not
being pushed by them.
The sudden capitulation of Lord West, who was unconvinced of the necessity to
extend the 28-day limit on Radio 4’s Today programme the other morning but
changed his mind after half an hour in Downing Street, proves this point.
This is the politics of fear and it is a disgrace.
Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat shadow home secretaries have spoken
out powerfully against the government’s plans. I never thought that I would
have much to discuss with a Conservative shadow home secretary, but I am
meeting David Davis in the next few weeks and I will be interested to learn
whether the Tories, if elected, would repeal some of the worst laws made in
the name of terror.
Meanwhile, terrorists continue to rely not on the bang but on the fear of the
bang. Terrorists desperately want politics and the media to notice them. By
showing we are so rattled that we will give up our cherished liberties, we
are giving those with murderous jihadi dreams a gift. By pandering to the
toxic fantasies of suburban wannabe warriors, by dignifying their delusions
of global struggle with horrified headlines and constitutional change, we
are debasing what we stand for.
Rachel North is the author of Out of the Tunnel, a memoir. Her blog is www.rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com
