The Politics of Deception
B-Liar is one of the posters currently being carried on UK street marches. It reflects a certain public perception that Prime Minister Tony Blair has been economical with the truth over the war in Iraq. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq is the least of his problems. The question of exactly what advice he was given by the security services and by the Attorney General rumble on. Today it looks as if the Attorney General’s advice warned the Prime Minister that the war could be illegal, and that there have been persistent attempts to obscure this advice from the public. Another line of enquiry is suggesting that Blair had agreed twelve months in advance of the attack to support President Bush’s warmongering agenda.
So when this week the Government brought hastily conceived legislation before Parliament to enable it to place suspected terrorists under ‘control orders’ to limit their movement, phone calls, access to the internet and so forth, I allied myself with those Members of Parliament and members of the House of Lords who were disinclined to accept Blair’s statements at face value.
Thus through Thursday and Friday we saw both Houses sitting through the night and engaged in a head-to-head battle on the proposed new legislation. For some what was at stake were the civil liberties of the entire population as it was felt that the new measures of house arrest and a lowered burden of proof, could be applied far more widely than just to suspected terrorists. We could all become subject to them. Others felt that the decision to grant new orders should not be a political decision in the hands of the Home Secretary, but should be a legal instrument approved by a judge. This was one of the major concessions the opposition parties won.
But it was also argued that the legislation was deeply flawed because there had been so little time for parliamentary committees to examine it. It had to be hastily concocted when the High Court decreed that the terrorist suspects interned without trial for over three years, had to be released on bail this weekend. And so elements of the opposition argued for a so-called ‘sunset clause’ which would see the proposed legislation lapse in November and provide the space for better thought-out provisions to be advanced to replace it.
Both the House of Commons and the House of Lords sat all through Tuesday night in a stalemate, with the proposed legislation passing back and forth from House to the other, each House waiting for the other to blink first. In the end Blair and the House of Commons accepted an amendment which they claimed was not a ‘sunset clause’ but which opposition parties insisted was a sunset clause in everything but name.
What struck me from what I saw of the debates, was the way in which both Blair and Home Secretary Clarke kept adopting a ‘trust me on this one’ attitude. Both kept reiterating that the Security Services and the Commissioner of Police had advised of the current seriousness of the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom, and both had insisted that the proposed legislation was necessary for our safety. The Commissioner of Police had announced that he estimated there to be some 200 potential terrorists at large on Britain’s streets. In Blairspeak this rose to ‘several hundred in this country … engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts’ although security officials interviewed by the Press said there was a ‘serious’ to ‘moderate’ threat from no more than twenty to thirty persons. I dismissed most of the Government’s claims as scare mongering, given Blair’s propensity for reaching decisions on the basis of dodgy terrorism, or it might be argued, on the basis of no ‘intelligence’ whatsoever.
I did not hear anyone raise in the debates the fundamental question of why the United Kingdom has become such a priority target for international terrorism. What has rendered us so is Blair’s adulation of Bush and his War on Terror, and his committal of British troops to Iraq. Through this error of judgement Britain, for the better part of a century perceived as a friend to Arab nations, has overnight become along with the United States, their enemy. There are old memories which feed radical Muslim convictions that the West is engaging in a new Crusade with the object not this time of liberating the Holy Places, but under the banner of ‘regime change’ substituting suspect western democratic values, for traditional Muslim values. Sadly this is not a temporary hiccough in British-Arab relations. Blair’s folly has both undone a century of patient diplomacy and goodwill which can never now be restored, and rendered all of us who live in Britain far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
So when this week the Government brought hastily conceived legislation before Parliament to enable it to place suspected terrorists under ‘control orders’ to limit their movement, phone calls, access to the internet and so forth, I allied myself with those Members of Parliament and members of the House of Lords who were disinclined to accept Blair’s statements at face value.
Thus through Thursday and Friday we saw both Houses sitting through the night and engaged in a head-to-head battle on the proposed new legislation. For some what was at stake were the civil liberties of the entire population as it was felt that the new measures of house arrest and a lowered burden of proof, could be applied far more widely than just to suspected terrorists. We could all become subject to them. Others felt that the decision to grant new orders should not be a political decision in the hands of the Home Secretary, but should be a legal instrument approved by a judge. This was one of the major concessions the opposition parties won.
But it was also argued that the legislation was deeply flawed because there had been so little time for parliamentary committees to examine it. It had to be hastily concocted when the High Court decreed that the terrorist suspects interned without trial for over three years, had to be released on bail this weekend. And so elements of the opposition argued for a so-called ‘sunset clause’ which would see the proposed legislation lapse in November and provide the space for better thought-out provisions to be advanced to replace it.
Both the House of Commons and the House of Lords sat all through Tuesday night in a stalemate, with the proposed legislation passing back and forth from House to the other, each House waiting for the other to blink first. In the end Blair and the House of Commons accepted an amendment which they claimed was not a ‘sunset clause’ but which opposition parties insisted was a sunset clause in everything but name.
What struck me from what I saw of the debates, was the way in which both Blair and Home Secretary Clarke kept adopting a ‘trust me on this one’ attitude. Both kept reiterating that the Security Services and the Commissioner of Police had advised of the current seriousness of the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom, and both had insisted that the proposed legislation was necessary for our safety. The Commissioner of Police had announced that he estimated there to be some 200 potential terrorists at large on Britain’s streets. In Blairspeak this rose to ‘several hundred in this country … engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts’ although security officials interviewed by the Press said there was a ‘serious’ to ‘moderate’ threat from no more than twenty to thirty persons. I dismissed most of the Government’s claims as scare mongering, given Blair’s propensity for reaching decisions on the basis of dodgy terrorism, or it might be argued, on the basis of no ‘intelligence’ whatsoever.
I did not hear anyone raise in the debates the fundamental question of why the United Kingdom has become such a priority target for international terrorism. What has rendered us so is Blair’s adulation of Bush and his War on Terror, and his committal of British troops to Iraq. Through this error of judgement Britain, for the better part of a century perceived as a friend to Arab nations, has overnight become along with the United States, their enemy. There are old memories which feed radical Muslim convictions that the West is engaging in a new Crusade with the object not this time of liberating the Holy Places, but under the banner of ‘regime change’ substituting suspect western democratic values, for traditional Muslim values. Sadly this is not a temporary hiccough in British-Arab relations. Blair’s folly has both undone a century of patient diplomacy and goodwill which can never now be restored, and rendered all of us who live in Britain far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 1:07 AM
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