Scandal, Panic and Anomalies

I did think there was something disturbing about some of the posts here demanding, sometimes rather peremptorily,  that I comment on current (unnamed) events. It was as if it was my duty , in the eyes of such people, to join in the creation of a climate of suspicion and assumed guilt.

 

For me, it was been actively unpleasant to listen to news bulletins and read the newspapers for the past few days. It seemed to me that my trade, which used to be trained to doubt what it was told and to question authority, had laid aside all caution and was helping to bring into being a dense miasma of general disquiet.

 

In such a smog, I fear, independent institutions will rot and liberty will quietly choke to death.  

 

As some contributors have rightly pointed out, scandal is often the weapon of those who would destroy an existing order, and put themselves in its place.  I sometimes wonder if the French Revolution would ever have taken place if it had not been for the (empty and meaningless) affair of Marie Antoinette and the diamond necklace. Even if the scandal had been true, what was it compared with the bloody harvest of the Guillotine and the horrors of the September massacres?

 

Rumours of obscene liaisons between Rasputin and members of the Imperial family did much to bring the Bolsheviks to power (and the Empress and her daughters were taunted with these lies by some of their guards in the final weeks before they were murdered). Much such things mattered once the Bolsheviks were in charge.  Be careful when you undermine the existing order with scandal. Scandal will be nothing compared with what you well get once that order has gone.

 

As for scares and security panics, when do they ever cease?

 

Acting on the ancient civil service motto of ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’, authority responds to these horrors, both real and imaginary, by acquiring new powers, powers which in my view do little to prevent future outrages and are out of all proportion to the threat.  

 

And it loves to use the word ‘emergency’, to give us all a thrill of enjoyable fear, and to make us huddle, bleating,  in the sheepfold as the grim-faced shepherd stands over us scanning the horizon for wolves, real or (more probably) imaginary, and the sheepdogs snarl and growl until we are properly, neatly, abjectly bunched together and under control.

 

I am still troubled by the bizarre, but minor things that happened to me on 7th July 2005, as London went into severe state-sponsored panic (later misreported as phlegmatic calm) over the bombings. My mobile phone stopped working (as did most others) . It seemed to me to have nothing to do with the alleged network congestion which was later given as the official reason for this. There were no unobtainable tones or ‘network busy’ messages. The phone just did not work at all.

 

But *before* mobiles stopped working,  the BBC crew with which I was spending the morning received a call. (As I remember, we were filming my BBC4 documentary about Britain and the Common Market, ‘This Sceptic Isle’, and interviewing the refreshingly intelligent Lord (Nigel) Lawson,  just off Piccadilly). The call ,as far as I could make out from various muttered conversations,  instructed them to cease whatever they were doing and to return to TV centre immediately because of a ‘national emergency’.

  

I am sure I read reports in early editions of the London Evening Standard of troops (not ceremonial , but in battledress and with modern weapons)  being deployed in various central London locations. But they were not carried in later editions and I can now find no trace of them. Official accounts do say that important buildings, such as the Houses of Parliament were ‘sealed off’, but do not say who did the sealing, or how. I had the odd feeling that I had glimpsed the outlines of a much more severe response, half-unveiled and then withdrawn when the atrocities turned out to be less extensive than at first feared.

 

A few weeks later, all-party support was obtained for what would become the Terrorism Act, a measure which originally was intended to introduce 90-day detention, and which also created the unEnglish offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’ , which has always sounded to me like something out of the Soviet penal code of 1936. In the hands of a tyrant (and of course we will never have a tyrant here, so no need to worry) , the Act’s vague provisions are a severe blunt instrument. Take a look at them, and also at the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, under which Parliamentary government and almost all the ancient constitutional protections in our law could be suspended in seconds.

 

How long before we’re back to 90-day detention (the end of Habeas Corpus) or Identity Cards? I don't think it will be that long. 

 

I’m not sure I’ve ever before seen scandal and nervous panic arrive simultaneously, as they did this week. It was distressing to see an outwardly educated person such as the Prime Minister mouth the words he spoke today as he justified what our forebears would have angrily rejected as a tyrannical interference with their privacy.  

 

The consequences of not acting are alleged to be ‘grave’ The need for new laws is ‘urgent’. But we cannot be told in detail why this is so, because of course,  that is a matter of ‘security’. This alone we can trust, the whispered word of some bureaucrat with a huge budget to defend and enormous expenses to justify.

 

Now, a few other responses. I am attacked for being silent on some unpleasant plans attributed to Yvette Cooper, as if this were some sort of deliberate silence. I am silent about them because I had not heard of them till now. I try to be as omniscient as possible, spending hours with the newspapers every day, but I still miss things. It is monstrously wrong to assume that any silence on my part means a reluctance to criticize.

 

I have indeed heard of the excellent book on the safety cult (‘In the Interests of Safety’ by my good friend Michael Hanlon and Tracey Brown) , and commend it to my readers. I have been meaning to write about it at some length.

 

I am also asked  ‘does he (that is, me) genuinely believe that his incessant intransigence and war-mongering over Northern Ireland is shared by anybody else?’

 

I had no idea I was war-mongering. I have long accepted that Britain has surrendered to the IRA and the ‘Loyalist’ murder gangs in Northern Ireland, and I see no possibility of that surrender being rescinded or the battle against lawless terror being resumed. I spoke out against the capitulation before the manipulated plebiscite which endorsed it, but that was the end of any small influence I might have had.

 

I have always regarded intransigence in the face of violent, lawless evil as a virtue, and cannot see how it could be anything other than incessant, if it were to be intransigent. I couldn’t care less if I am the last man living who thinks this. That would not be a reason for ceasing to think it, but rather an added reason to carry on doing so. Why do people so*want* to be in the majority? Truth is truth and right is right,  however few people support them. And indeed they remain right and true if no living human supports them.

 

But it does seem to me that the inflamed moralising of our government, and that of the USA, against the horrors of terrorism is rather undermined, in the eyes of any thinking person,  by their recent open surrender to the successful terrorists of the IRA, and (come to that) their negotiations and good relations with the equally successful terrorists of the PLO.  This is an anomaly, and anomalies are invariably the keys to proper understanding of what is really happening, as opposed to what we are told is happening.