Getting Terror into Proportion

Mr or Ms ‘Baz’ writes  (first quoting me) :   ‘“It wouldn’t, in fact, have prevented the main terror outrage perpetrated against such a gathering, the planting of a timed bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, long before the Tory conference took place.” Quite right. The searches carried out by police officers using dogs prior to the event address that threat.’ 

 

‘However, do you think it would make any sense whatsoever to search an area, then let anyone walk in without searching them or their luggage? Given that the people inconvenienced are those who choose to attend a political conference, I'm not losing sleep. "...Like the absurd gates in Downing Street..." Yes, it's not like terrorists have ever attacked Downing Street? Oh wait, the IRA did just that, but because of security features like the very gates you whine about, they had to attack from a distance using home-made mortars. This meant that the attack was much harder to accomplish, and it failed. Perfect security does not exist. The best that can be done is make it harder or less rewarding for potential attackers. There is an argument to be made about government abuse of "anti-terrorism" powers, but you're doing a very poor job of it.’

 

 

Am I? Surely the question is one of proportion. Is the danger that someone will walk into a party conference with a bomb really so great that thousands of law-abiding citizens must be treated like serfs or convicts?  I’d be perfectly happy to have my luggage searched if I were staying in the same hotel as the Cabinet, though in general I’d rather a nice friendly B&B down the road to any such place.

 

 But it goes much further than that. You cannot even enter the area in which the hotel stands without being searched, and providing a detailed biography to the police.

 

Wouldn’t a few vigilant police officers, patrolling the relevant buildings constantly, be just as , if not more, effective against this remote danger? And if party conferences must be protected in this way then why not department stores, shopping malls,  cinemas, theatres, concert venues, festivals, railway and bus stations, the underground in London, supermarkets, universities, anywhere that people gather in numbers?  What’s so important about politicians? Are they any more irreplaceable than non-political fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands, sons and daughters?

 

Life would of course be impracticable if we did so.  A similar argument could be advanced for wearing body armour while going up and down stairs, or riding on the London Underground’ perilous escalators.  You’d be safer in such armour. But it would be silly.  

 

 

Having undergone what seems like dozens of these checks, I have come to the conclusion that these selective exercises are little more than propaganda, an attempt to suggest that the state can make us safer by interfering in our lives more, when it actually cannot. If we saw through these attempts, we would be less willing to accept the formula of ‘you must submit to this because it will make you safer’.

 

For me, I also think that the hanging by the neck until dead of the convicted Brighton bombers would have been a fine safeguard for the future, as well as sparing us the continuing grisly exhibition of one of them, who still walks about free as if he was entitled to breathe God’s open air and should not hide his face away in shame from human society.

 

De Valera’s execution of the IRA leadership in late 1930s Dublin kept IRA terrorism out of the Free State for decades. Despite talk of ‘creating martyrs’, nobody knows their names.  I do, however, know for a fact (don’t ask me how) that the first thing every IRA terrorist planned in a bombing was his or her own escape.

 

As for ‘the people inconvenienced’, it is indeed the people who are inconvenienced. Normal human beings now have no chance, as they once did, of simply walking into an auditorium and seeing and hearing (and having the chance to heckle) their political leaders. Leaving that important fact aside, what does ‘Baz’ know or think about the ‘people who attend party conferences’ which makes him think that they somehow deserve to be selected for this sort of treatment, as Mr or Ms Baz? seems to think they do?  All kinds of people go to them, many of them, even I must admit, with good motives. And it’s not their convenience I’m concerned about. It’s society's acquiescence to surveillance and supervision far beyond what ought to be acceptable in a free society, on a flimsy pretext.

 

As for the IRA’s mortar attack on Downing Street in February 1991, there is no evidence that this method of attack was forced on the IRA by the silly gates about which I ‘whine’. Apparently the IRA originally thought of a large static car bomb nearby, to be detonated as the Prime Minister’s car went past, but the resulting carnage among passers-by would have been unacceptable to those persons, not because they had anything against carnage itself- far from it -  but because TV footage of large numbers of corpses scattered across the tourist part of London (possibly including some Americans)  might have damaged the notion current in much of the USA to this day  that the IRA were an army of heroic freedom fighters.

 

I think that, even without the gates, it would have been hard for anyone to drive a car laden with explosives into Downing Street, park it there and leave. Indeed, some simple precautions make it difficult even for a suicide-bomber to drive a car into the street at high speed, because it opens at right angles off the main road which is Whitehall. There are in fact plenty of ways of keeping vehicles out of a street, without closing it to pedestrians.

 

 

He or she doesn’t really address my central point, which is proportionality. Are the precautions proportional to the threat? I am often for instance asked if I would be ready to fly in an aeroplane whose passengers had not been subjected to the ‘security’ procedures which I so often complain about. My answer is an unhesitating ‘Yes’ , especially if we are once again allowed to carry corkscrews and use metal cutlery (though I would make an exception for a flight to or from Tel Aviv, on El Al, which has serious security procedures which are onerous but effective, and in my view proportionate to the threat, because flights to and from that destination are highly likely to be specifically targeted by groups known to be proficient in terrorist murder, and with long records of using aeroplane hijacks and the planting of explosives to do so, see the Hindawi case) .

 

Since the introduction of armoured flight-deck doors, and the strictest possible rules against opening those doors under any provocation, the danger of a repeat of the horror of 11th September 2011 on most flights is hugely reduced. And if everyone on board a plane has a corkscrew, a penknife, or some other similar object of the sort I have had confiscated and no longer carry, I wouldn’t fancy the chances of three or four hijackers, with similar weapons, against 200 passengers who preferred to continue on their normal route.  The same, in my view,  goes for people who suddenly try to set fire to their shoes or underpants.

 

 

Of course, the only really effective measure against terrorism is never to give into it. We only have terrorism because the terrorists know it works. The PLO’s hijacks and murders made Yasser Arafat into a ‘respected world statesman’ and created the ‘two-State Solution’.

The IRA’s murder campaign put Sinn Fein into government, made its leaders honoured guests in the White House and spelt the end of the United Kingdom.

 

As for September 11th, read my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ for an analysis of the USA’s response to that. I’m not sure the words ‘standing firm’ fit the bill.

 

The best security would be to kill the terrorists when we catch them in mid-crime, try, convict and execute the rest, and make no concessions to them ever at all under any circumstances. But that, of course, is ‘politically impossible’, whereas the current regime of searching and surveillance and sequestering of politicians far beyond the reach of their employers, in gated streets and fenced-off ‘conferences’ and armoured convoys, is ‘acceptable’. To whom? I find it repellent and disproportionate.  Are we being offered any choice?