EcoLogics

Anyone who wants to find out how it is that Nepalese soldiers came to be employed in segregated units of the British Army could do worse than have a read of the Wikipedia entry on the concept of ‘Martial Race’. The reader may also wish to peruse the Wiki on the Brigade of Gurkas, the term used by the British Army to refer to what is, as far as EcoLogics knows, the only explicitly racialised military unit in any Western, industrialised country. (Consider the uproar that there would be if the U.S. were to have, say, a ‘Brigade of Guambianos’, named after an aboriginal group in Colombia.) Where the first Wiki explains the racist origins of the brigade, the second entry reveals the manner in which Gurkhas have been employed over the last two centuries or so to fight many of the battles that the rest of the British Army could not, or did not see fit to fight itself. On more than one occasion, and as recently as the 1960s, the battles in question included attacks designed to suppress revolts against British colonial rule. From this perspective, the existence of the Brigade reflects a history of institutional racism.

As is frequently the case with institutional racism, a number of arguments might be deployed to dissimulate the racism. EcoLogics can imagine, for example, that the policy’s apologists might argue that the Gurkha soldiers actually want to fight in separate units. Another argument might suggest that even if the units are the outcome of a history of racism, there is no such racism today. In the end, the best evidence that institutional racism continues to exist is found in New Labour’s efforts—like those of successive Conservative governments before it—to exclude the Gurkhas from the automatic right to settle in the country that they’ve fought for.

It was marvellous to see how the tenacity of a movement fronted by Joanna Lumley and Nick Clegg unsettled, however temporarily, a policy that is centuries old. It was also disgusting to see how David Cameron tried to hijack, for party political gain, a campaign that Conservative governments have opposed in the past, and will almost certainly oppose once again in future. Anyone watching the BBC online video could be forgiven for thinking that it was actually Cameron who led the process. How significant, as part of this process, that whereas the camera remains in a three-shot throughout the duration of Clegg’s statement, it zooms in on Cameron when the Conservative Party leader speaks. Does anyone at the BBC look into these kinds of asymmetries?

UPDATE May 25, 2009: The New Labour u-turn over this matter is very welcome. But it says a lot about British politics that it took a celebrity like Lumley to humiliate the Brown government, and to force the change.

‘I don’t think anyone can say that I have said one thing in public and done another in private.‘
–David Blunkett, speaking on the BBC 10 O’Clock News in December 2004
‘Entrust customers now use security to enable more than just protection. They work with Entrust to transform their security challenges into business opportunities‘
–Website of Entrust, the Texan digital ID security which Blunkett joined after leaving the government

Note: this is the fourth in a series of posts. The following is a list of the posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

Helena Kennedy once famously described David Blunkett as a ‘shameless authoritarian’. She suggested he took ‘lessons in jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe’(1), and today we have been reminded why many regard the man not so much as one of New Labour’s former stars, but rather, as its leading ex-asteroid.  Blunkett was the first Home Office secretary to push the idea of a digital ID card. And as noted in the previous post in this series, it was Blunkett that transformed RIPA 2000—New Labour’s snooper’s charter—into an act of legislation that might be used (and abused) by Britain’s town councils in order to spy on parents suspected of lying in school application forms. If, as Tony Blair claimed in 2004, New Labour asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them, it was almost certainly Blunkett that did both the asking and the giving.

Alas, now that New Labour’s financierism has almost bankrupted Britain, and that Blunkett’s former colleagues are scrambling to axe some of the more sybaritic trappings of their securi-state, Blunkett is himself scrambling to save his digital ID scheme. According to the BBC,

‘Asked whether ID cards could be dropped, Mr Blunkett told the BBC: “I think it is possible to mandate biometric passports. “Most people already have a passport but they might want something more convenient to carry around than the current passport and may be able to have it as a piece of plastic for an extra cost.” Using existing databases to hold the same information already gathered to issue passports could be a way of allaying fears over a new “database of information”, one of the key criticisms of the ID scheme. “People don’t worry about the Passport Agency but they do worry about some mythical identity database,” he said’(2).

The ‘mythical identity database’ is the one that Jacqui Smith decided to cancel this week (though she too, proposed a way of keeping the security services happy: the principle, if not the actual practice of the mother of all databases will be maintained via the private sector obligation to spy on us all). If, then, the database was mythical, it was mythical in the anthropological sense of myth, or perhaps in the sense of myth famously described by Roland Barthes in Myth Today. Jacqui Smith’s database, like Blunkett’s ID card, are the totems of New Labour’s securi-state. While it would seem that New Labour’s totem poles are being taken down in the wake of New Labour’s economic fiasco, the totemism that transforms digital surveillance systems into magical objects apparently remains very much alive in New Labour’s backrooms. Any suggestion that Blunkett’s idea somehow undermines the Brown government (as per some media accounts) is thereby foolish in the extreme.

*   *   *

In the third post in this series, EcoLogics noted that one motivation for New Labour’s spiral of terror can be found in the Hobbesian ideology espoused by Tony Blair. This account must be rendered more complex in two ways. First, the initial account is liable to be interpreted as a voluntaristic explanation of Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for authoritarian policing, i.e. it might be taken to mean that Blair is (or was) conscious of his own authoritarianism. While Blair’s capacity to lie with the conviction of an evangelist must never be underestimated, it would be a mistake to assume that he is fully cognizant of his own authoritarianism, let alone of its social consequences. Like every person on earth, Blair is, in this sense, at once his best and worst own judge. We must thus redefine ideology as meaning that serves to develop and sustain relations of domination. But if individuals make meaning, meaning also makes individuals (this a point made by EcoLogics in a post about neoliberalism, discourse and ideology).

Second, and echoing further the points made in that other post, even if we must allow for the possibility that politicians can deceive themselves even a they attempt to deceive others, we must also allow for the possibility that they may be the vehicles of powerful generic and specific institutions whose interests they articulate, however consciously or unselfconsciously, however simply or complexly. If Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are good examples of this process as it relates to financierism, David Blunkett is the best example of this process as it relates to the security industry.

An article published by The Observer on March 25, 2007, explains quite clearly how this is the case:

‘David Blunkett has taken a job advising a company interested in bidding to run Britain’s controversial identity cards programme, a policy he was the architect of and championed in government. The former Home Secretary took up the post for the Texas-based security firm Entrust, which specialises in securing digital information and combating identity theft, earlier this month. The firm already provides software for the Spanish national ID card system and has formally registered an interest in the British project. Blunkett is bound by a two-year ban on lobbying British ministers and officials from the date he resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary in November 2005. That does not expire until this November. His spokeswoman insisted yesterday that he would not be working in Britain for the company and would only advise on overseas work’ (3).

Entrust may be taken as a symbol of an industry that has arisen partly as a result of the neocon obsession with security. Entrust is to Blunkett and to British politics what Haliburton was to Cheney and to the invasion of Iraq. There are now hundreds, if not thousands of such firms busy lobbying governments across the world to spend billions on digital security systems. If the arms trade has always played a sinister role in the politics of countries around the world, the digital security business is now playing an even more nefarious role. To put the point more sharply, if companies such as Boeing and BAE have thrived on war, companies such as Entrust thrive on the kind of war that Blunkett waged on our civil liberties.

*   *   *

Blunket might prefer us to believe that his new-found role as a lobbyist for Entrust is a positive one: surely there is a goodness of fit between the big business of security, and Britain’s national security?

The first problem with any such argument is that, after some 12 years of massive investment in Britain’s security apparatus, we are no closer to achieving New Labour’s (or Entrust’s) ideal of a securi-state. Two events can be used to illustrate this point. On June 5, 2007, a burglar used what the BBC described as ‘his girlfriend’s Lithuanian ID card’ to enter offices behind 9 Downing Street. According to the BBC, ‘The 5 June break-in was described as an “astonishing” lapse of security “at the heart of government” as Marius [the burglar] walked unchallenged through a door marked “ministers” and, accompanied by his partner, entered the Cabinet Office’(4).

The second event was made public just yesterday (Monday, April 27, 2009). In an article titled ‘Gordon Brown steps in as agency fails to tackle organised crime gangs’, The Guardian suggested that ‘Downing Street is attempting to take control of the fight against organised crime amid growing concerns that thousands of major villains are not being brought to justice, the Guardian has learned. [… ] The prime minister’s strategy unit is investigating the failure by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – which was billed as Britain’s FBI – and the police to stop the rise of criminal gangs that run a multibillion-pound series of enterprises controlling the flow of drugs, human trafficking and illegal gun importation. The intervention is a measure of Gordon Brown’s concern and raises questions about the Home Office’s failure to get to grips with the problem at a time when agencies admit it has spread from the inner cities to the shires, eroding the fabric of almost all of Britain’s communities.’(5)

Both events show up the impossibility, to not say absurdity, of the securi-state ideal. Less than two years after 7/7, it was still possible to burgle—burgle!—the Cabinet Office. The idea of Gordon Brown taking on ‘thousands of major villains’ is itself absurd. Thousands of major villains? EcoLogics thought that Tony Blair had said in his July 2004 speech on law and order that in Britain we no longer have ‘wrong-headed villains’…. Semantics to one side, this blogger can almost imagine a Wild West scene, where Cowboy Brown walks down an alleyway, his twin Colt Single Action Army sixguns at the ready, hands held just above the cocked hammers… Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to conceive of Agent Brown waiting in a maroon sedan, with Agent Mandelson at the wheel. Brown and Mandelson are waiting with Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity (the FBI’s motto) for the villains to come out of… of…. Lloyds TSB or the Royal Bank of Scotland? Perhaps together they will stop ‘major villains’ like Fred the Shred from further eroding the fabled fabric of Britain’s shires…

EcoLogics jests, but actually, this is no laughing matter. Serious crime is, of course, serious. But even more serious is the manner in which New Labour continues to conflate social policy with policing. This is problematic enough in its own right, but when it is considered in the light of the manifest conflict of interest in Blunkett’s role as a lobbyist for Entrust, then the securi-state, like the financierist state, becomes a recipe for corruption. One line in the Entrust website pretty much says it all: ‘Entrust customers now use security to enable more than just protection. They work with Entrust to transform their security challenges into business opportunities’.

*  *  *

New Labour might well, indeed probably would suggest that the security breaches and threats constitute the best possible reason why even more draconian laws need to be passed, why a biometric ID card, disguised (or not) as a downsized passport is more necessary than ever. But this is to overlook yet another problem with New Labour’s ideal of a Securi-State—a problem that this blogger described as follows in a post published back in November 2007:

‘The more personal information you put about larger and larger numbers of people in one place—be it a portable hard drive, or a mainframe computer’s hard drive in some government department—the greater the potential for disaster (criminal or otherwise) when someone loses that information. In such a context, more information in one place is tantamount to less security, not more’(6).

As suggested in that post, we might well describe this paradox as Blunkett’s Law, in honour of Blunkett’s entrusting of the digital surveillance apparatus. If New Labour’s spiral of terror is a matter of ideology, it is also a matter of Blunkett’s Law. But this law can, in turn, only really be understood in the wake of the neoliberal deregulation that has led to New Labour’s economic disaster. This will be the subject of the penultimate post in this series.

Update Friday May 1, 2009:

1) How ironic that Blunkett is now trying to rebrand himself as a kind of moral compass for New Labour: “We have got to get back to old fashioned politics that is in touch with the people we represent, and avoid self- inflicted wounds.” Old fashioned politics? Is Blunkett referring to the scandals he was involved in a few years ago? Or perhaps he means the gravy train of Entrust or Blair’s J P Morgan? Or maybe it’s just good old Thatcherism?

2) Blunkett’s efforts to talk up a ‘cyber attack’ on the London Olympics are a textbook example of New Labour’s spiral of terror: such warnings can only serve to increase public anxiety, and of course, to drum up business for Entrust and other digital security businesses.

Notes

1) as quoted in Guardian, March 27, 2004, ‘A radical in the house’, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1177977,00.html, accessed October 9, 2007.

2) Blunkett seeks ‘end to ID cards’, BBC Online, April 28, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8022791.stm, accessed April 28, 2009

3) ‘Blunkett is given a job at identity card firm’, Observer, March 25, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/mar/25/uk.idcards, accessed April 28, 2009.

4) Downing Street burglar walks free’, BBC Online, March 28, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7318719.stm, accessed April 28, 2009.

5) Guardian, April 27, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/27/serious-organised-crime-agency-brown-failure-gangs, accessed April 27, 2009

6) ‘Blunket’s Law’ and the Inland Revenue’s catastrophic loss of information’. http://ecologics.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/the-inland-revenues-catastrophic-loss-of-information-and-blunketts-law/

We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them

–Tony Blair, during speech about law and order in July, 2004

Note: This is the third in a series of posts:

Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

At first glance, Glasgow and Poole would appear to have little in common. One is far to the north of the British Isles, and represents itself as a modern, progressive, and multi-cultural city. The other is far to the south, and is happy to represent itself as a sandy tourist resort, the site of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. Where Glasgow is usually regarded as a bastion of ‘old’ Labour, Poole is so Conservative that it doesn’t even have a single New Labour councillor. Whatever the real similarities or differences, both places have recently witnessed events that reveal the social consequences of New Labour’s spiral of terror.

In April of 2008, Poole made national headlines when it emerged that its council was using what was widely (and mistakenly) regarded as anti-terror legislation to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.  The following extracts, taken from The Telegraph, tell the remarkable story:

‘A council [the Poole Council] has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. […] For two weeks the middle-class family was followed by council officials who wanted to establish whether they had given a false address within the catchment area of an oversubscribed school to secure a place for their three-year-old. […] The “spies” made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, who they referred to as “targets” as they were trailed on school runs. The snoopers even watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping. […] Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family’. […] The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: “I’m incensed that legislation designed to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old”’(1).

Almost exactly one year later, it was Glasgow’s turn to make security headlines. In late April 2009, the Guardian published an article that revealed that two police officers from the Strathclyde Police Force (or men who identified themselves as such) had tried to infiltrate the anti-climate change group ‘Plane Stupid’. They had done so by threatening one of the group’s activists, Matilda Gifford, with a criminal record for her previous arrests, and by offering to bribe her in exchange for inside information. The activist recorded the conversations, and the following are excerpts of the exchange, as transcribed by the Guardian:

‘”Well let’s just say if you were prepared to meet us, and talk to us, we may be in a position to help you out financially,” said the assistant.

The DC continued: “Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me, ranging from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism, leftwing extremism, rightwing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting.

“The point we’re making is: they come to us with the concerns, because within the organisations for which they have strong ideologies and beliefs they are happy to go along with that, but what they will not get involved in is maybe where it’s gonna impact someone else. That’s when they come to us and say ‘by the way, so and so – in my opinion – is maybe getting a wee bit too hotheaded’.”

Before ending the meeting, Gifford reportedly asked: “Are you Strathclyde police?” The DC paused, and replied: “We are.”’

When Gifford asked how much money would be involved, and said she was not interested in ’20 quid’ (the British term for 20 pounds sterling), one of the officers replied ‘”UK plc can afford more than 20 quid.”’(2)

Assuming that the two police officers were not themselves acting on behalf of ‘UK plc’, any questions regarding the legality of both sets of events—the Poole town council’s spying, and the attempted bribery by the Strathclyde Police—would have been covered by one same legislative act: the ‘Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000’, better known as RIPA 2000. In RIPA 2000 we find a good symbol of the legislative dimension of New Labour’s spiral of terror, and so it is pertinent to describe some of its key aspects.

* * *

To begin with, it should be noted that the name Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is rather cunning; in some respects, the act is arguably better described as a form of deregulation. The act established the new legal framework for what is known as ‘targeted surveillance’, i.e. spying on an individual or a group of individuals (as distinct from mass surveillance of the kind made possible by the fact that ISPs are now obliged to hold onto their users’ internet records for several years). However, its advocates within New Labour were as keen to provide a legal basis for targeted surveillance in the age of new media technologies—the official justification for the legislation—as they were to prevent the courts from making any spying public. RIPA allows the government to require an ISP to provide access to a customer’s communications in secret (or indeed to demand that an ISP fit equipment to facilitate surveillance). But it also stops courts from revealing the existence of interception warrants and any data collected with them. As the Act states, ‘Subject to section 18, no evidence shall be adduced, question asked, assertion or disclosure made or other thing done in, for the purposes of or in connection with any legal proceedings which (in any manner)—(a) discloses, in circumstances from which its origin in anything falling within subsection (2) may be inferred, any of the contents of an intercepted communication or any related communications data; or (b) tends (apart from any such disclosure) to suggest that anything falling within subsection (2) has or may have occurred or be going to occur.’(3)

This aspect of RIPA means that anyone who can use the legislation for targeted surveillance (more on that issue, below) can do so in the knowledge that the surveillance process is unlikely to be controlled by the courts. And yet, as the examples of the Poole town council and the Strathclyde Police reveal, there are good grounds to assume that RIPA 2000 not only can, but will be subject to abuse in the absence of strict oversight.

The second point worth highlighting involves the range of institutions that can use (or abuse) RIPA 2000. As the act’s original preamble makes clear, it was, from the beginning, a very wide-ranging act of legislation: ‘An Act to make provision for and about the interception of communications, the acquisition and disclosure of data relating to communications, the carrying out of surveillance, the use of covert human intelligence sources and the acquisition of the means by which electronic data protected by encryption or passwords may be decrypted or accessed; to provide for Commissioners and a tribunal with functions and jurisdiction in relation to those matters, to entries on and interferences with property or with wireless telegraphy and to the carrying out of their functions by the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Headquarters; and for connected purposes(3)’.

What is not always realised is that in 2003, David Blunkett dramatically extended the number of institutions that might use RIPA 2000. It would be serious enough if RIPA could be used (or again, abused) by the security services, alone. But as reported by the BBC’s Newsnight programme on April 14, 2008, by that date some 635 UK agencies had been authorised to use one or another of the powers instituted by RIPA 2000. The civil liberties non-government organisation Liberty, which was Newsnight’s source for the above statistic, suggested in its Privacy Report that amongst many other agencies, RIPA 2000 was enabling local authorities, food and fishing agencies, and even the Charity Commission to use targeted surveillance powers (4). What began as an act that was clearly written for the security services, ended up as what has rightly been described as a ’snooper’s charter’ for hundreds of councils and other national and local state agencies.

To put this practice into context, the Telegraph reported on April 12, 2008 that in 2007, councils and government departments across the UK made 12,494 applications for ‘directed surveillance’ to the police’s 19,000. In the same article, the paper suggested that an unidentified ‘local government body’ had admitted that councils and other government bodies ‘would soon carry out more surveillance than the police.’ According to the Telegraph, one council, the Gosport borough council, was even using the RIPA legislation for ‘an undercover investigation into dog fouling. Council officers equipped with digital cameras and binoculars are spying on dog walkers’(5).

The third point worth noting is that the RIPA legislation was introduced by New Labour in February 2000. Given the time that it takes to develop and introduce new legislation, this means that New Labour began work on the legislation years before September 11, 2001.  But also, and as noted earlier, the legislation was then dramatically extended, after 9/11, to a variety of forms and levels of everyday governance in 2003. The significance of both aspects of the timing cannot be overemphasized; to repeat the crucial point, the legislation was introduced before 9/11, but then dramatically extended beyond anti-terror operations after 9/11. On this ground alone, anyone who claims that the introduction of this legislation was no more than a response to terrorism is either mistaken, or being deceitful.

What RIPA 2000 makes clear is that a key aspect of the scaffolding that holds up New Labour’s spiral of terror involves a sweeping, and far-ranging legislative project which is by no means simply a result of any real or alleged ‘war on terror’. On the contrary, it illustrates the way in which the spiral of terror has involved what has become, in effect, a kind of ‘terrorisation’ of all forms of criminality, a U.S.-style zero-tolerance discourse that is premised on the notion that any and all measures must be taken to secure the safety of the nation. This ideal, which might be described as the idea of a ‘Securi-State’, has now gone so far that it is even possible to use the most draconian of measures to try to prevent people from leaving their dog’s shit on pavements and park grounds. But crucially, it has also been extended to any kind of protest or activism that is somehow deemed to be ’subversive’. The aforementioned Strathclyde policeman’s comment says it all:

“Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me, ranging from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism, leftwing extremism, rightwing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting.”

Upon reading this comment, EcoLogics wonders if part of that ‘whole spectrum’ includes the civil rights group Liberty—note that police looking through Damian Green’s computer searched for emails to and from Shami Chakrabarti—or indeed 10 Downing Street itself: who passed on McBride’s infamous email to the Conservatives? Such issues to one side, the question must be raised: what has motivated this extraordinary slide towards a more and more authoritarian form of policing?

* * *

A first answer can be found in a remarkable speech that Tony Blair gave on the subject of ‘law and order’ in July 2004. The speech makes very clear, by Blair’s own account, that the real agenda behind legislation such as RIPA 2000 was years, if not decades in the making:

It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility.

But in the 1960’s revolution, that didn’t always happen.

Law and order policy still focussed on the offender’s rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality.

All through the 1970s and 1980s, under Labour and Conservative Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice.

Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility.

The worst criminals became better organised and more violent.

The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense.

And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others.

All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world.

Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus.‘(6)

EcoLogics will eventually post a detailed critique of this speech—a speech which may well come to be regarded as one of the historical markers of Britain’s drift towards an authoritarian society. Here it suffices to note that, while Blair invokes John Stuart Mill, his stance, as represented by this speech and by his government’s actions, is actually much closer to that of Thomas Hobbes (if indeed his position can be said to be closer to that of any philosopher). Hobbes was famously the advocate of a ’social contract’ between society and a sovereign (or sovereign authority) to whom all individuals must cede any natural rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority should be accepted as the price of peace. The extent of the drift towards this authoritarian discourse in the New Labour party is perhaps best symbolized by what is the most extraordinary statement in Blair’s speech: towards the end of the speech, Blair actually boasts that ‘We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them’…

A first answer to the question posed earlier is thus that New Labour’s enthusiasm for the Securi-State is at least partly a matter of ideology, in the traditional sense of the word: a ‘world view’ such as was expressed by Tony Blair, and which has been enthusiastically echoed by many other leading members of New Labour: amongst others, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Peter Mandelson, Tony McNulty, Jacqui Smith, and of course, Gordon Brown himself.

In the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death, the question that is faced by the country is what, if anything, can be done to put, in one former policing minister’s words, the genie back into the bottle. The last post in the series will revisit this question; in the next post, we will concern ourselves with a second, and arguably equally important motivation for New Labour’s efforts to transform Britain into a ‘Securi-State’.

Update May 7, 2009:

In the wake of the controversy surrounding New Labour’s efforts to circumvent the European Court of Human Rights on the DNA Database, the Bristol East MP has provided an excellent example of what this post described as Blair’s Hobbesian ideal–an ideal that, if this MP’s ideas are anything to go by, goes far beyond the New Labour jefatura:as the MP puts it, ‘Yes, Shami Chakrabati is right when she says the Government’s proposals could mean that ‘wholly innocent’ people could have their details stockpiled for years. That’s the cost of such a plan. But the benefit – protecting other wholly innocent people from being raped or worse, isn’t that worth the sacrifice? Are your ‘civil liberties’ really so precious that you’d be prepared to have these crimes on your conscience?’ (http://kerry-mccarthy.blogspot.com/2009/05/dna-database.html)

References

(1)‘Poole council spies on family over school claim’, in Telegraph, April 11, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/11/nspy111.xml, accessed April 14, 2008.

2) ‘UK plc can afford more than 20 quid,’ the officer said, in Guardian, April 25, 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/25/police-informers-tape-recordings-gifford, accessed April 27, 2009.

3) See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000023_en_1#Legislation-Preamble, accessed April 14, 2008.

(4) G. Crossman et al. (2007) Overlooked: Surveillance and Personal Privacy in Modern Britain. London: Liberty, p. 16. Copy available at http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/issues/3-privacy/index.shtml, accessed April 14, 2008.

(5) Council spy cases hit 1,000 a month, in Telegraph, April 12, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/nspy112.xml, accessed April 14, 2008.

(6) Full text of speech transcribed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3907651.stm, accessed April 27, 2009.

‘…got a reference to capitalism and communism’...‘It’s one of the things he’s being arrested for’… ‘It’s to provide evidence of his views.’
–justification given by a police officer for taking an item from the home of environmental activist

Note: This is the second in a series of posts. The following is a list of the posts: New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

On June 13th, 2008, a group of environmental activists stopped a train carrying coal to the Drax power station. The climate change campaigners boarded the train and prevented it from moving for about 24 hours. The action was designed to heighten public awareness over the emissions of the largest coal-fired power station in Europe.

The next day, the police raided the homes of most of the protesters. The raids would have passed unnoticed by the public had it not been for the fact that the father of one of the alleged activists filmed the police as they went through his son’s personal possessions. The video itself might have been lost among the millions of videos that are put up in YouTube had it not been for the fact that on Sunday, April 19, the Guardian website gave the video the internet equivalent of a front page treatment. The video, which is available here, offers a good example of what this blog is describing as New Labour’s spiral of terror.

* * *

The video is structured as a kind of visual first-person narration, with the father (or the presumed father) asking the officers about the rationale for their actions as they search through the alleged activist’s possessions. The viewer must be careful when drawing conclusions from the video because it is extensively edited. However, one exchange appears to leave little space for manipulation on the part of the filmmaker(s). Speaking off-camera as he films the police opening an envelope, the father asks the police why they are taking the envelope (or at any rate, of the alleged activists’ possessions). The officer who is handling what looks like a medium-sized manila envelope answers ‘…got a reference to capitalism and communism’. When the father asks ‘What’s the significance of that?’, the officer answers ‘It’s one of the things he’s being arrested for.’ When the father says ‘What?’, the officer replies ‘It’s to provide evidence of his views.’ The reply from the father pretty much says it all: ‘Of his views…?’

* * *

As captions explain in the beginning of the video, police in the UK have the right to search the property of a suspected offender for evidence of the alleged crime. During the exchange shown in the video, there appears to be a reference to Section 18 of the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act of 1984. This legislation allows police to search the premises occupied or controlled by anyone who has been arrested for an indictable offence. PACE 1984 has a rather notorious legal pedigree; it was introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government at the height of the events surrounding the Miners’ Strike, and New Labour has made some aspects of the legislation even more draconian in recent years. While the legislation has officially been represented as a means of balancing police powers and civil liberties, it is clear that PACE is part of a long and growing series of legislative acts that have reduced our civil liberties; they also appear to have given the police the kind of quasi-legal elbow room required to engage in the abuse that is finally generating the universal condemnation that it deserves.

Now Section 18 of the PACE legislation was presumably designed to allow police to search premises in order to find evidence such as stolen goods, illegal drugs, firearms and so forth. The fact that the video shows the police taking personal items that relate to what one of the officers describes as the alleged activists ‘views’—in particular, views relating to ‘capitalism and communism’—illustrates perfectly what EcoLogics means by New Labour’s ‘spiral of terror’. British (or at any rate, English) laws that were once designed to combat organised crime and other serious offences are now being used in an apparently routine manner to gather ‘intelligence’ about the views of individuals suspected of engaging in environmental and other forms of activism.

To conservative viewers of the video (or readers of this blog), this might seem like a perfectly legitimate action—after all, the alleged activists whose actions are mentioned by the video have just ‘hijacked’ a train. However, it doesn’t take an expert in British jurisprudence to point out that it is one thing to search for, say, firearms or illegal drugs, and quite another to be looking for evidence of ‘politics’ or ‘views’. In the former case, the police are acting legally in the sense that they are searching for evidence that can be treated as evidence according to the law. In the latter case, the police are acting illegally in so far as they are searching for information that is not defined as being illegal by any legislation. Pursued to its logical conclusion, this practice implies that anything from adherence to an environmental(ist) discourse to a civil libertarian outlook is now regarded as evidence of criminality—in fact, as a form of terrorism—by at least some sectors of the police.

* * *

The political implications of the crossing of this threshold, and indeed the reach of New Labour’s spiral of terror were dramatically illustrated by the illegal arrest of the Tory shadow immigration secretary, Damian Green. Thanks to a parliamentary enquiry on the matter, it has now been confirmed that members of 10 Downing Street used the excuse of threats to national security to sick the anti-terror squad on Green. It was bad enough that Green was falsely and maliciously accused of endangering national security, and that 25 or so anti-terror police officers were sent to harass him and his family just hours after a major terrorist attack took place in Mumbai. Green himself has noted the irony of this in a recent article in the Times: after describing the cock-ups at the beginning of the raid (apparently the police surrounded the wrong house at one point), he said that he was

‘pleased that Mr Quick, who authorised his arrest, resigned this month over another matter. “I thought that he should not be in charge of the anti- terror squad because the day they arrested me was the day of the Mumbai bombings. Al-Qaeda might have been trying to do a worldwide spectacular. It did seem to me that to have 25 of the anti-terror squad going through my bank statements and my bed was not what the head of the anti-terror squad should have wanted.”’(1)

But the event that revealed the full extent of the politicization of Britain’s security apparatus was the news that the police also searched Green’s computer for emails to and from Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty(2). Like other critical observers, Chakrabarti has taken the government to task for the spiral of terror, and this fact has evidently not been lost on whomever sent the anti-terror squad to ‘do’ Green. It is significant in this sense that no one has actually had to resign over a matter that in another place and time might well have forced a Home Secretary, if not the prime minister him/herself, to resign. Bob Quick was forced to resign, but only after he supposedly compromised another raid. His immediate superior, acting commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, was later confirmed by New Labour as the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It is precisely this kind of politically inspired ‘category mistake’, and the fact no one has actually paid for its abusive nature, that shows just how far New Labour’s spiral of terror can and will go.

* * *

After the departure of the Bush administration, at least one leading member of the New Labour Party felt safe enough to come out and recognise what most people had long suspected: that the so-called ‘War on Terror’ was an ideological construct (3). After that dramatic, if somewhat belated acknowledgment, Gordon Brown has tried to row back and to resuscitate the ideological crusade. It would seem that some in the New Labour machine still believe that there is political mileage to be gained from the process. Witness, for example, the effectiveness with which the disastrous news about Ian Tomlinson’s death were blitzed by the grand announcement of what has subsequently proved to be yet another false anti-terrorist operation. But a more worrisome, and more plausible prospect is that New Labour is now unable to stop the forces pushing the nation in the direction of what many have described as a police state.

In some respects, it is unhelpful to raise the spectre of a police state in the UK. On the one hand, and as many critical observers have rightly pointed out, we are a long way from the kind of repressive regime that, say, Cesar Augusto Pinochet, or Jorge Rafael Videla instituted respectively in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. On the other hand, in a context that remains driven by a increasingly isolated but still powerful coalition of neoliberal politicians, media, and transnational corporations, any suggestion of anything like a police state provides a welcome opportunity to tar and feather anyone so far to the loony left (or the paranoid right) so as to mistake ‘a few minor police infringements’ with Pinochet’s DINA or Jorge Videla’s Buenos Aires Provincial Police. In the process, any debate about what is happening in the UK gets distracted by a debate over what is not happening, and the outcome is that New Labour and their security apparatus (and it does seem that it is increasingly their apparatus) continue to have free reign.

Part of the reason for this is that no one in the media seems to have the time (or perhaps the space) to sit down to spell out the middle ground between democracy and a police state. We remain stuck in a discursive oscillation between the New Labour (and it seems, the Tory) claim that there are just a few police ‘bad apples’ (as if the spiral of terror has nothing to do with the overall political process); and the equally problematic, though perhaps somewhat more accurate view that police brutality has always been an issue, and that what has changed is only really the targets of that brutality: where once it was miners and then road protesters, now it is ‘respectable’ members of society such as the members of the Countryside Alliance, or indeed, the Shadow Cabinet. Where one stance denies the far-reaching changes by minimalising or individualising any problems, the other denies at least some aspects of the changes by totalizing and generalising all forms of police abuse.

In the following weeks, EcoLogics will propose a different vocabulary with which to analyse New Labour’s spiral of terror. Next week’s post will begin the process by starting to identify something that is a half-way house between democracy and a police state (the ‘Securi-State’), and by analysing one of the central motivations for the emergence of what is at once a very old, and a novel principle of governance.

Notes

1) ‘Damian Green: It could have been terrifying but it was a farce’ in Times on Line, April 18, 2009, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6115806.ece, accessed April 18, 2009.

2) ‘Shami Chakrabarti was target in police search’ in Times On Line, April 18, 2009, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6116023.ece, accessed April 18, 2009.

3) ‘David Miliband: ‘War on Terror’ was wrong, in Guardian, January 15, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/15/david-miliband-war-terror, accessed April 21, 2009.

And it [a New Labour government] will be a government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralizes it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public.
–Tony Blair, speaking in front of 10 Downing Street after the elections in May 1997

Nowadays, the intersection between politics and the economy in different parts of the world, including the emerging markets, is very strong.
–Tony Blair, in interview with Financial Times after joining J P Morgan in January 2008

Note: this is the first in a series of posts. The following is a list of the posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

Two articles appeared in today’s Guardian that arguably mark a watershed in the history of the British policing: the first was an article by David Gilbertson, a former Scotland Yard commander and assistant inspector of constabulary. In the article, Gilbertson offered a remarkably candid and critical account of how it is that Britain’s police have come to be dominated by an organisational culture that is intimately linked to, but by no means simply determined by the ideology of the now widely discredited ‘war on terror’. According to Gilbertson,

‘Over the past decade, supine management has compensated them with various “toys and fripperies, beads for the Indians” (in the words of a very senior officer at a meeting I attended in 1997), including extendable batons and Tasers. Increasingly, British policing morphed into a faux-US style of operation. Uniforms were made to look overtly military. The public were regarded, almost uniformly, as suspects, with any hint of dissent interpreted as anti-police. To this must be added the post-9/11 and 7/7 atmosphere. A succession of intrusive powers under the various terrorism acts convinced many officers that they are frontline combatants in the war on terror’(1).

Given its author and content, this article was worthy of a headline in any newspaper. But by mid-morning, a second article had displaced it in the Guardian’s website. The second article was titled ‘Secret police intelligence was given to E.ON before planned demo’. For those unfamiliar with the firm, E.ON is a German energy corporation that was established in 2000 and has become one of the world’s largest energy service providers. Its CEO is Dr Wulf Bernotat. According to Business Week, Bernotat’s career in the energy sector took off at Shell; amongst several other posts that Bernotat held within the oil giant, he was Area Coordinator for Africa of Shell, London from 1992 to 1995 (2), a period that was perhaps Shell’s most controversial from the point of view of its involvement in Nigeria (3).

The following quote sums up the shocking claims made by the Guardian:

‘Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent. [...] Intelligence passed to the energy firm by officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) included detailed information about the movements of protesters and their meetings. E.ON was also given a secret strategy document written by environmental campaigners and information from the Police National Information and Coordination Centre (PNICC), which gathers national and international intelligence for emergency planning’(4).

The Secretary of State for the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is Peter Mandelson. Mandelson is, of course, the third man in the New Labour Troika, and prior to being ‘rehabilitated’ for a third attempt at cabinet service, he was the European Trade Commissioner. In the light of the news divulged by the Guardian, Mandelson must have one of the most ironic job titles in the New Labour government.

* * *

Last year, EcoLogics began a series of short essays titled ‘Britain’s Spiral of Terror’. The series was never completed, partly because it was difficult to come across incontrovertible evidence of a dynamic that was increasingly obvious to critical observers, but which could be plausibly dismissed by political realists (or conservatives) as a form of conspiracy theorising.

What a difference 12 or so months can make. The crisis in New Labour’s increasingly authoritarian approach to policing and national security, and now the news regarding E.ON, vindicate the ’spiral of terror’ thesis. However, they also show that EcoLogics underestimated the extent of New Labour’s self-entrapment in a downward spiral of authoritarianism and neoliberalism; a spiral which, contrary to what might be expected from the most chameleonic of parties, continues to lead New Labour politicians to promote policies that virtually guarantee that the party will be slaughtered in the forthcoming elections.

This raises the question: what is the nature of this ‘spiral of terror’, and why is New Labour locked into a course of self-destruction (and to be sure, not just of self destruction)? What are the motivations behind the process, and what, if anything, will the next government be able to do to reverse Britain’s fateful descent towards a ‘securi-state’? EcoLogics will be having another go at the series, with a change in the title that reflects the growing isolation of New Labour as the party most unambiguously committed to the politics in question.

Notes

1) D. Gilbertson, ‘At the core of this policing crisis is a leadership failure’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/20/policing-relations-general-public, accessed April 20, 2009.
2) Wulf Bernotat, Executive Profile, Business Week, http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=796926&symbol=EONGn.DE, accessed April 20, 2009.
3) See for example, the Wikipedia entry about Ken Saro-Wiwa at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Saro_Wiwa, accessed April 20, 2009.
4) ‘Secret police intelligence was given to E.ON before planned demo’ in Guardian April 20, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/20/police-intelligence-e-on-berr, accessed April 20, 2009.