How Scared Should We Be?

In my fifty or so years on this planet, I have had very little to do with the British police.  I once enjoyed lunch at the house of mutual friend with the head of Scotland Yard's Serious Murder Squad, a delightful and intelligent man.  On another occasion, I found myself chatting amicably to two past heads of SIS [MI6] while defending the reputation elsewhere of an Arab gentleman wrongly accused of being complicit in terrorism.  They both knew the accusations were baseless, smiled at the absurdity of the political class and our conversation moved on to the more interesting business at hand.

Otherwise, the police and the security services have been on the fringes of my existence. They pop up at the house every few years to deal with the aftermath of some local incident and then they depart. I rather like it that way.  As no doubt do they.

Last Monday night, we had the novel experience of being drawn into the brave new world of intelligence policing.  This is the theory that takes the police out of the community, except as narks reporting on the coming and going of a mobile, probably unmanageable, population.  Day to day, we hardly ever see a copper, despite a police station being within walking distance of our house.  We certainly never see them appear as the drunks go singing merrily down our street at two in the morning.   Yet here were four of our local finest flagging down cars on a Tunbridge Wells back street and asking a lot of questions.

Coming back from some schlock horror film about Satanists in the Deep South, eager to get home, there we were, free-born Britons, held up with a number of others, to be asked questions about our vehicle, ordered to present documents within seven days and getting the obligatory damn fool question about ethnicity.  This, we were told, was, indeed,  'intelligence-based policing' and was apparently related to car theft in the area.  My wife's suspicion was that this sort of exercise was really about getting us used to having to produce some sort of identity card.  The Government dearly wants to introduce such a card and knows that most of us inwardly can only see the point of them for the criminals and not for us.

In fact, the police were, to remind ourselves of an ancient excuse, only obeying orders in inconveniencing both us and our fellow motorists.  Most coppers are probably getting fairly world-weary about the continual state of panic in the Home Office (our Interior Ministry) and its madcap schemes for trying to bring order to a collapsing social infrastructure. Generally, they do their job, we accept that they do it in good faith and we middle classes then try to get on with our lives.

But my wife's instinctive comment is interesting, especially as, within the following week, the Head of UK Counter-Terrorism lost his temper in public with the manipulation of the news agenda by unnamed persons widely assumed to be from within the Government.  He appeared to suggest that the spin doctors and policy wonks at the centre of government were undermining public trust in legitimate authority internally, much as they had done in the good faith of Government foreign policy.

The issue of trust is important because, without trust ,authority soon loses legitimacy.  Paranoia about the state and its intentions is growing and it is hard to know whether it is justified or not.  Unlike the US, the UK has a political structure that permits a strong Leader with a complete hold over the legislature through the party machine not only to command and control a highly centralised executive but to pass laws that would bind the judiciary.  The Crown has limited means of resisting such a determined leader and the British public has no access to the weaponry and skills that would permit the sort of insurgency against tyranny that we might expect in the US Mid-West or Switzerland in the event of an attempted 'fascist' takeover. 

In practice, only tradition and custom stop tyranny in the UK so the intentions of politicians become of vital importance in a way that would not apply in the US.  President Bush might be regarded by some as intending bad things but, in fact, Congress, the Supreme Court and the right to bear arms are all material limits on his domestic power.

So should we Brits be alarmed?  Well, it seems that, despite these constitutional truths, some Americans are more alarmed than we are.  The radical chic Naomi Wolf produced an extensive article in the Guardian on April 24th in which she outlined 'ten steps to a fascist America' - http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2063979,00.html  I will not outline the ten steps, which were academically sound enough if somewhat alarmist, because you now have the reference to the article and you can read it yourself. 

What I am interested in is whether her ten steps can be used as a guide in assessing not only whether the US but also other Western liberal countries are slowly sliding down the road to dictatorship.  After all, before we get complacent, we should remind ourselves that in 1928 Germany was a liberal democracy and only six years later it was a dictatorship in which all the dissenting leadership were either murdered or in concentration camps.

So, I looked at her ten steps and counted each as ten points of 'tyranny value' in a wholly unscientific way in order that I might get to a 'percentage of tyranny' figure.  I also made the calculation situational - that is, how do things stack up in April 2007 in the UK, with a Government smashed to a bedrock of popular support but still with complete executive control of the State machinery (and indeed of its own Party machine).

Well, there were a full nine points out of ten on 'invoking a terrifying and external enemy". Fortunately, the British public do not believe a word of Government propaganda on this score but the administration clearly believes the nonsense that it spouts so a high score is in order.

As for the creation of a gulag, the British are merely complicit in the world of extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay.  Although liberal public opinion has forced it to back track somewhat, this did not come from the heart - so, call it five points.

But despite some nasty bits of work lurking inside our Special Branch (our proto-political police), we cannot be said to have a 'thug caste' (so just two points to cover the Specials).  On the other hand, intelligence policing, alongside the massive introduction of CCTV, ASBOs and the planned introduction of identity cards, is clearly a move towards an internal surveillance system - five points at this point in history and rising.

Are UK citizen's groups harassed in the UK?  In general, no.  The anti-war movement is broadly left free to protest so we suggest one point to cover the occasional attempts to ban the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir and to open up unnecessary populist debates about the hijab.

And what of arbitrary detention and release?  No, the rule of law seems to still stand but dissident Islamists are being returned to regimes with a poor record on torture and the Blairite eagerness to please the Americans on extradition is sending free-born Englishmen across the water to suffer serious incarceration in the sink-pit of the US prison system - three points.

Are key individuals being targeted?  Well, yes, they are although still at a low level.  There was an attempt to take out George Galloway politically and there has been a truly vengeful approach to dissident opinion within both the Labour Party and the State - two points.

Is the Press controlled?  Well, of course it is not controlled.  But the attempted manipulation of the news agenda is clearly intended and extensive - so we suggest a significant four points (although two of these points are down to the weakness of an editorial class whose inability to see what might come matches that of German trades unionists and churchmen in the late-1920s).

But there is no evidence that dissent in the UK (except at the very margin) is in any way credibly regarded as treason and the rule of law is not suspended (on the contrary, the judges are proving important checks on executive ambition)  - no points for tyranny here.

So, on our assessment of Naomi Wolf's ten points, we came up with 31 points out of our hundred for the UK in April 2007.  We are nearly one third of the way to dictatorship compared to the situation before 9/11 and certainly before Tony Blair came to power but we are not in a worse position than that.

Fortunately, the second two thirds are going to be a tough game for any proto-Mosleys to drive forward.  The British do not panic under attack, racism is never going to go mainstream, the argument against migration is rationally conducted and British bloody-mindedness may not extend to insurgency but it does extend to a libertarian preparedness to ignore authority when it is inconvenient.

This is why the next few months are rather critical.  A discredited administration is about to see a major change in leadership.  The situation is likely to be fixed at a 'one third tyranny' so long as New Labour retains power.  The worry must be that we will go all French on ourselves and accept a degree of tyranny as normal.  Perhaps this is what it means to become European - to permit the State a role in our lives far in excess of what we would accept customarily.

But wiser, perhaps more conservative, counsel (and bear in mind that I write from the centre-left) will have worked out that dealing with organised crime and terrorism requires public trust and that trust never comes from fear.  The success of intelligence-based policing depends on our rolling back the tyranny quotient to at least half its current level - and you can pick any fifteen out of the thirty one points to do this!

Given the profile of tyranny that we have identified, much of the problem would be solved simply by removing the panicky belief that we are engaged in a war on terror instead of a global police action and reasserting the rule of law in international affairs (where the Europeans are way ahead of the Anglo-Saxons.)  An editorial class that started asking more questions about how it is being manipulated would be helpful too.

When policemen stop you in the middle of the night nowadays, the natural instinct is to see them ambiguously - half our ally in the fight against crime and half the arm of the state in keeping us under control.  So, if they want us to trust them fully again, let us both see which way the political wind blows in the months to come.