TAKING LIBERTIES

I have a lot of time for Alex Carlisle, appointed from the Liberal Democrat benches by Tony Blair as the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation and retained by Gordon Brown. On The World at One today, he was talking about the issue of the limit on police detention of terror suspects (currently at 28 days) and calling for “a mature debate … free of party political points scoring”. I eagerly join such a debate.

Lord Carlisle proposed that any number of days is an arbitrary limit and that the police ought to be able to detain terror suspects for as long as the investigation takes, always provided that such detention is monitored regularly by a representative of the judiciary and, he implied, according to stricter tests than now obtain. He cited as support for this line the fact that the Glasgow police are currently holding a man who requires lengthy hospitalization because of the burn wounds he suffered when the car in which he was travelling rammed the entrance of Glasgow airport and ignited some of the combustible matter contained therein. It would of course be absurd were he to have to be released without interrogation because of the time lost while he underwent medical treatment.

This strikes me as a pragmatic and sensitive solution, provided it is deployed with care. I don’t as a rule believe that the police have any business arresting anyone if they don’t possess the evidence to justify holding them for any length of time. Whenever there is a terrorist incident, a flurry of arrests quickly ensues and some of those arrested are soon released. The damage that such arrests do is a serious consideration. On the one hand, they may well hurt the reputations of those wrongly held and have long-term effects on their family relationships, social lives, employment status and so on. There is no mechanism for getting redress for being herded into police custody on the whim of some officer who is concerned to make eye-catching gestures or to keep his numbers up. On the other hand, such treatment sows further resentment against the establishment within the community – at present, generally, the Muslim community. We could all do without anything that drives more disaffected youth into the power of mad mullahs. But provided that there is some better control exercised over willy-nilly police reactions to incidents, it ought to be possible in certain, minutely monitored circumstances for genuine suspects to be held pending the gathering of the relevant evidence.

But Carlisle also permitted himself a thrust that did him no credit. “Civil liberties groups have got to wake up to the reality of the situation” he said. It’s always alarming when a lawyer, particularly one who carries weight in Whitehall and Westminster, implies that we ought to stand ready to surrender our liberties. In situations such as the present state of maximum alert, it is all the more crucial to be vigilant about the instruments of the state arrogating to themselves extended or additional powers in the name of security. History, both recent and ancient, tells us that the police, the armed forces, the intelligence community, the bench and governments in full self-righteous mode are more like our enemies than our friends in the battle to keep our rights. Powers taken in supposed critical times can be handy in calmer days to employ against any group or individual whom the powerful believe they have a reason to dislike. The present government, like all its predecessors, will protest that it of course always has our interests at heart. But if it puts into the hands of a future dictator – a British Mugabe or Milosovic for instance – instruments by which he can silence his critics, jail the dissidents and hold indefinitely those he deems to be “different” while protesting that he is only making use of the powers that he inherited, the government will have done us a profound disservice.

It has been proposed that our airports should more resemble those of Israel. Unless you have flown into, within or out of Israel, you won’t know what that means. It means being interrogated individually for at least twenty minutes by someone who looks like a bright schoolgirl, being required to field questions of an often extremely personal nature (“so why are you with your partner?”, not in the sense of being together on this trip but of being together at all). These sessions are designed to wrong-foot you, to make you angry and to explore whether your story is genuine or a convenient cover for wrongdoing. They do indeed succeed in making you angry, which is probably just as well because it is when you start resenting it and contradicting yourself and failing to have a thought-through account that they begin to believe that you are an authentic traveller without an agenda. If this technique becomes the norm at British airports, where there is no such tradition of interrogation, I predict fights, riots and assaults on staff.

More seriously, I don’t think it is unreasonable to set the hurdle a lot higher for a first entry into this country, whether as a tourist or business visitor or as an immigrant or asylum-seeker. Perhaps the odd business traveller apart, no one comes here for the first time on an impulse and if they do they will just have to be obliged to think again. It ought to be acceptable for everyone applying for first-time entry, even from another nation within the EU, to agree to undergo some routine but rigorous examination of her or his background and circumstances. As the United States does, we could require a visa for entry and make the issue of a visa conditional on a check-up in the country of origin, by way of the embassy or high commission. This would have to apply to everyone entering Britain because we could not be seen formally to be discriminating against those from Muslim nations but of course in practice those coming from such nations would be examined the most rigorously as a matter of course. I think it is reasonable to expect people who do not have an allegiance to this country to have to bear with a harder test of their trustworthiness, from wherever they come. This is not an anti-immigrant issue. It is a matter of securing the borders.

But within Britain, we should not let the present emergency go to anyone’s head. We ought only to contemplate surrendering any of our hard-won civil liberties if the institutions that seek to erode those liberties agree to permit themselves to be far more accountable to the public and its representatives. The armed forces, the police and the security services cannot continue to be their own judge and jury over complaints made against them. While such outrages as the Deepcut barracks affair and the shooting of the innocent man at Stockwell underground station are allowed to stand as unresolved but generalized stains on, respectively, the army and the Met with no individuals called to account, either so that the bereaved are given satisfaction or so that the services themselves can close the matters, there can be no public confidence in these powerful institutions. Why then should they have greater powers? We need much greater transparency in the workings of all these forces – yes, including the security services. Who can doubt that MI5 and MI6 are peopled by individuals with political viewpoints of their own and with a strong institutional ethic that discounts any outside view? Let’s not forget that members of MI5 attempted to destabilize the democratically elected government of Harold Wilson and that other individual politicians – Leon Brittan when Home Secretary, for instance – have been the victims of campaigns to undermine them by intelligence officers operating (no doubt) individually but with the full protection afforded by such useful devices as unaccountability and the Official Secrets Act.

It does need to be said once again that, whatever the threat on the streets of Britain, the terrorists have won if, by over-reaction, we let ourselves be turned into any kind of a police state.