It’s as inevitable as the fall of leaves from the autumn trees. As soon as another Islamic terrorist plot is discovered, a great caterwauling emanates from Britain’s useful idiots whining that once again the country is under terrible threat – from counter-terrorist activity. A new type of bomb which the authorities almost missed and which could have brought down airliners over British or US cities? Ah, but they didn’t go off, see – so there’s obviously no threat at all, only from daft Home Secretaries and sinister heads of intelligence services who just want to frighten us all so much we will allow Them to control all our lives...another terror plot, don’t make me laugh, no evidence at all, just another hyped-up scare from those lying spooks still licking the boots of the Americans, just another excuse to destroy our ancient liberties which They so desperately want to do...no, not the Islamists, you stupid neocons, the British government... Ah yes, all those security folk on both sides of the Atlantic banning all cargo from Yemen for no good reason simply because they are lying imbeciles; desperately trying to track down a further twenty-something possible bombs because they are US poodles; warning that the Yemeni terrorist mastermind Awlaki may have recruited some 30 murderous fanatics in Britain so that They can create mass hysteria to enable Them to snoop on all of us and lock us all up and turn Britain into a police state. For heaven’s sake fetch the strait-jacket, Deirdre. In the Telegraph, the intelligence expert Professor Anthony Glees injects a much-needed note of sanity in warning that the British establishment -- far from whipping up a non-story in order to persecute the average British citizen – was slow to respond to the news from the US that there were bombs on planes because it is still in a state of denial over the Islamist threat: One explanation for the weekend’s mystifying lack of urgency is that there was no specific intelligence in the UK that indicated a plot might be unfolding. The key intelligence came from the Saudis who had passed it to the Americans, not us. But there is another: it is that the Government and our opinion- formers, for obvious political reasons, have moved far too quickly to dismantle past security measures. The Coalition’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, for example, boasts that it will ‘review our most sensitive and controversial counter-terrorism and security powers to provide a correction in favour of liberty’. But strong, lawful security policies don’t undermine our liberty, they defend it. The new Government’s very first Bill abolished ID cards. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, explained: ‘They are wrong, they won’t work and there is a civil liberties argument against them.’ She didn’t say, as she should have done: ‘We need to know who is here in the UK on national security grounds, but it costs too much.’ No one’s civil liberties are abused if we know who they really are. No one has ‘the civil liberty’ to attack people here, or elsewhere in the West, who simply want to go about their lawful business. It is far more convenient to forget that we are under persistent attack; so we prefer to remain in denial about who is attacking us and how they come to do so. We read that a battle royal has been raging behind the scenes in the Coalition over whether or not to keep control orders. The argument against them is that they destroy our ancient liberties by locking people up without trial. But the only reason they were introduced in the first place was that the English judiciary had made it impossible to protect Britain against terrorism by declaring it unlawful either to deport foreign terrorist suspects – who could not be brought to trial without compromising intelligence sources – or to lock them up pending their ultimate removal to another country (to which they could always voluntarily depart, thus walking free from prison, if they so chose – truly draconian, huh?). Control orders were a desperate – and indeed unsatisfactory – last resort to plug the dangerous security hole created so irresponsibly by the ‘human rights’-fixated English judiciary. Without control orders, there would simply be no protection for British citizens against foreign terror suspects who cannot be brought to trial. Yet in the political battle now raging, it is reported that not only the reality-challenged LibDems but the Tory Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and the Tory Attorney-General Dominic Grieve want them to be abolished. That is the measure of the state of denial in Britain about which Professor Glees so vainly warns. Britain's still-flowing river of denial-melanie phillips
Tuesday 2 November 2010
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