CRACKING the SAFE

How many of your rights would you be prepared to forgo in order to assist the attempts of the authorities to foil terrorism? I ask as one who was, for many years, a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known simply as Liberty) and who has always argued that to surrender our freedoms to security forces is no better than to surrender them to supposed enemies of the state.

But let us cleave to the principle that motivates this very blog, that of common sense. Some of the rights that we like to holler after barely deserve the term. So don’t let us mistake a few moments (or even a few hours) of inconvenience and/or indignation for a loss of our precious heritage.

Take the increasing controls and filtering processes being introduced at airports. There are those who argue powerfully that body-scanning devices are intrusive, and that being confined to one’s seat for the hour before touchdown is an imposition. Moreover, some argue that Muslims and others of Arabic origin or appearance are apt to feel that immigration officers and airline officials discriminate against them.

I find myself unsympathetic to these objections. Boarding a plane is not some god-given right. Of course if you are turned away or gravely incommoded, you should be recompensed. But the airlines and the airports have every right to refuse entry to anyone of whom they entertain suspicion. Further, they have a duty to monitor and, where it seems prudent, to exclude any would-be traveller against whom questons are raised. If you don’t like it, go by bike. You don’t have a right but you do have a choice.

Given that searches and restrictions are advertised in advance of check-in, travellers should be responsible for making provision for whatever delays and deprivations they may endure. Anyone who has ever passed through an international airport knows that a propensity for delay is endemic to the process, even on routes that are unlikely ever to attract political trouble.

The restrictions presently applied seem to me to be entirely commensurate with the threat, the perceived level of which has been raised in the UK in the last 48 hours to “severe” – which translates as a situation in which an imminent terrorist attack is thought to be “highly likely”. And why is now an appropriate moment to raise the supposed threat level? Well, it’s pretty obvious: this week, London will host a summit on the future of Afghanistan. President Karzai, Secretary Clinton and several other juicy quarries will be here and the whole event naturally presents itself as a target. If London at least didn’t go on heightened alert, you’d be a bit surprised.

If anything, the conditions that apply to air travel err on the side of laxity. There is no earthly (or mile-high) reason why cigarette lighters should be allowed in hand luggage: what useful purpose could such implements possibly serve on a flight and, if such a purpose can be identified, why cannot cabin crew be furnished with lighters for supervised, temporary loan to passengers who have need of them? Nonetheless, lighters are still permitted at a restriction of one per passenger. Anyone wanting to convey his invaluable collection of rare lighters of the world from one country to another needs to stow them in the hold or make arrangements to have them shipped. Tough. If it were up to me, I would not permit either cigarette lighters or matches in anybody’s hand luggage.

Are Muslims justified in complaining that their rights are compromised if they are seen to be more liable for more comprehensive physical searches and passenger profiling than others? No. It would be an absurd system wherein a retired Anglican vicar and his wife, returning from visiting their daughter and her family in New Zealand to their home in The Wirral, were given the third degree, while a single man in his twenties with a Muslim name and Arabic appearance, stopping over at LHR on a flight from the Yemen to JFK and presenting a passport containing evidence of substantial trips to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were waved through. Those who target planes are Muslim fundamentalists. Is anyone dissenting from that summary?

I know that it is maddening to feel that one is being tarred with a brush that applies to others who only bear a superficial resemblance to oneself. For years from the early 1980s, I detected an arms’ length treatment from many people – even some who knew me and trusted me, as I thought – because I was a gay man. The suspicion, perhaps only subconscious, that I might somehow be a conduit for Aids undoubtedly lurked in many minds. I hated it but, even at the time, I understood it. Though not HIV+, I duly destroyed my donor card and I did not press kisses and other intimate attentions upon any in whom I sensed some residual reluctance. One has to live in the world as it is and be realistic. It doesn’t help to act in a self-righteous manner.

Detailed and, at times, unexpected security is essential to the safety of every passenger and of others on the ground who are not even aware of any threat from above. We do not want to find ourselves in the position of saying “yes, it’s awful that all those people died when the flight from Mogadishu exploded as it circled over Chicago but thank goodness none of those passengers died feeling that they had been affronted or inconvenienced; and of course the people who died on the ground had no grounds for complaint, so that’s a mercy”.

The problem, as always, is the egregious advantage that the security forces – most especially the police – are inclined to take of our acquiescence in the erosion of our rights. From the shooting dead by Met marksmen of Jean Charles de Menezes on an underground train at Stockwell station to the wounding of Mohammed Abdulkahar in the police raid on the Forest Gate house he shared with his brother, the police have not only exceeded their authority and basic standards of good practice but have sought to absolve themselves of blame and, supported in this aim by the structure of enquiry and internal discipline, protect themselves from any deleterious upshot for the police in general or the officers involved in particular.

Clearly, if the populace are to accept that greater and more intrusive powers are to be ceded to police and other security services, the control of those powers and its own policing must be taken away from parti pris committees and given to genuinely independent bodies with wide and penetrating dispensation. It is not good enough for self-righteous police authorities to exonerate officers and commanders who have clearly exceeded their brief, any more than it is acceptable for the Army to find nothing amiss at Deepcut Barracks.

By the same token, I confess I am not sanguine that the Chilcot Enquiry will achieve any more than the effective exculpation of those who ought to be in jail for their responsibility for the illegal invasion of Iraq. The establishment commonly takes care of its own.

In this unstable world, our rights and freedoms are a bulwark against creeping dictatorship. But we shall enjoy no rights or freedoms at all if we dare not go about our business for fear of suicide bombers breaching a defence that is too light and too scrupulous to risk putting any of us to inconvenience.

************************************************

Votes and comments on Irritating and Overrated Public Figures are still welcome: see the immediately previously posting. We are a tad short of the 1,500 responses I had aimed for. It’s up to you …