Simon Jenkins: It’s one small step from Brown’s paranoid state into a police one
Simon Jenkins
Sunday, 18 November 2007
The Sunday Times
Britain is not a police state but a nation with police state tendencies. In any democracy the dictates of freedom wrestle with those of security. Britons are a liberal people who want to be safe. Do they also want to live in a condition of perpetual paranoia?
In his five months of power, Gordon Brown has shown himself a tentative, uncertain leader, reluctant to confront admirals, bankers, property developers, American presidents, and now his own security apparatus. This final weakness is the most dangerous.
Under the same “fortress Britain” rubric as Tony Blair, his predecessor, Brown last week initiated a sudden and extraordinary set of measures curbing liberty in the name of security. They involve extending the present eccentric luggage checks at airports to 250 “strategic” train stations as well as to ferry ports, sports stadiums and other places of public resort.
A further 100 “sensitive” installations such as power stations and petrol plants are to be reconfigured against suicide car bombs. Architects are to redesign public buildings as blast resistant (and presumably windowless) on their lower storeys. Brown is insistent that security demands British citizens be subject to detention without trial, charge or even explanation for up to 56 days.
The public realm is here being medievalised at the bidding of Osama Bin Laden. According to the civil rights group Liberty, the 56-day infringement of habeas corpus compares with a maximum of one day in Canada and two days in America and Germany. The British limit is already 28 days and there is no evidence that this has impeded counterterrorism. The 56-day proposal is rather a display of machismo and a leitmotif of loyalty to the prime minister.
The steady extension of discretionary detention 56 represents a collapse in democracy’s ability to curb the repressive tendencies in any security regime. It suggests a drift towards banana republicanism, towards regimes that survive on perpetual states of emergency, in thrall to some bullying police chief or paranoid spymaster.
|
