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Fortress Britain

William Benzies — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:32:21 +0000

“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police¹. Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, writes Naomi Klein, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror²’.”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear will suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.

The Power of Nightmares

In October 2001 it was revealed that the Pentagon was consulting Hollywood writers and producers specialising in spy thrillers and disaster flicks to imagine future attacks in order to best prepare for them. Developments such as the colour-coded threat alerts that change hue at the Department of Homeland Security’s caprice have alarmed even cold war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski. Lamenting the ‘culture of fear’ he writes:

“Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue… Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum³.”.

In Britain each of the New Labour government’s political missteps has been accompanied by similar fear-mongering. While a terrorist threat does exist, its magnitude is wildly exaggerated. The European Police Office (Europol) released its first report on terrorism last year which listed 498 terrorist attacks for Europe in 2006; only one was attributed to Muslims. The majority – 136 – were carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA; only one of them deadly. When it came to the arrests on terrorism related charges, however, a good half were Muslims⁴.

It began with the ‘Ricin plot’: the highly publicised arrests, national hysteria and front page headlines. There was no Ricin, or a plot. It wouldn’t be until 2005, well after Colin Powell had used it in his case to sell the Iraq war to the UN, that the ban on reporting on the case was finally lifted and the public apprised of the truth⁵. The February 2003 ‘terror alert’ had Blair scrambling tanks to Heathrow, timed conveniently to coincide with the large scale demonstrations against the coming war. Notable support in the media came from BBC propagandist Fred Gardner, long suspected of ties to the intelligence services⁶. which were themselves busy fanning the fire. Simon Jenkins, the conservative columnist noted, “In 2002-03, before the Iraq war, the security service supplied the Cabinet Office with a weekly catalogue of ‘terror fears’ – anthrax, smallpox, sarin, dirty nuclear devices and a Christmas bombing campaign – to soften public opinion for the war⁷.”.

In June 2006, 250 heavily armed police men acting on ‘specific intelligence’ raided a home in Forest Gate arresting two young Muslims, shooting one in the process. The chemical weapons that they were alleged to have possessed were never found. Both were acquitted without charge. The police apologised. On August 10th, 2006, a day after then Home Secretary John Reid had hinted that new anti-terror measures were in order, the Deputy Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Paul Stephenson, announced that the police had foiled a plot to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Officials were soon conceding that the immediacy and scale of the threat may have been “exaggerated”; however, the scare succeeded in deflecting attention from Blair’s widely-denounced manoeuvres preventing a ceasefire in Lebanon. From Beirut, an outraged Robert Fisk wrote:

“Stephenson’s job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened …I’m all for arresting criminals…But I don’t think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice⁸.”.

In November 2006, the MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller warned of a violent threat from 1,600 suspects in 200 groups that could last “more than a generation”. Although she identified government policy towards Iraq as the main factor contributing to the rising radicalism, Blair endorsed the statement. He continued his scapegoating of Muslims with the periodic reiterations of the ‘Islamic threat’ to rationalize the fear, repression, lies and resentment brought in on the heels of the Iraq war. When Blair announced that “the rule of the game have changed”, no one took it more seriously than the tabloid press; they demonstrated just how toxic things could get when gloves come off with government sanction. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian confessed:

“I try to imagine how I would feel if this rainstorm of headlines substituted the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’ – I wouldn’t just feel frightened. I would be looking for my passport.”

One can’t miss the Islamophobic nature of much of the hysteria when one compares the difference in the treatment of the cases of Robert Cottage and David Bolus Jackson of the BNP with that of Mohammed Atif Siddique. The case of the former two, arrested for the possession of rocket launchers, a “record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs”, extremist literature, and bomb-making information, barely got covered in national media; the latter, a 20 year old, received front page attention and eight years in prison for merely downloading extremist literature, and his attorney, Aamer Anwer, got charged with ‘contempt of court’ for calling the trial a “tragedy for justice”.

The new MI5 chief, Jonathan Evan, raised the fear factor a year on with the warning that 15-year-olds were being “groomed” for terror and that there were up to 2,000 people involved in “terrorist-related activity”. Recalling Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknown’s”, the man appointed by John Reid with Tony Blair’s approval, bizarrely added “there are as many again that we don’t yet know of”. Described variously as “lurid”, “inflammatory”, “highly ideological”, “playing Halloween”, it came on the eve of the Queen’s address calling for yet another terror bill. The institutional imperative of self-preservation may also have been at play: MI5 has already expanded by 50 % with eight new regional offices, and will have doubled in size by 2011. Eyebrows have been raised at these very public interventions by the heads of a clandestine service. Simon Jenkins noted that chiefs of the secret service have long feared that the absence of a public profile may diminish funding appropriation. “The answer of both MI5’s Evans and MI6’s John Scarlett is to join the fear factory⁹.”.

Taking Liberties

The assault on constitutional rights that started in the US with Clinton’s ‘Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty’ law of 1996 was replicated in Britain with the ‘Terrorism Act 2000’. Section 41 of the Act granted police the right to detain terror suspects for up to one week without charge (criminal law on the other hand requires that suspects be charged within the first 24 hours of arrest, or be released). Section 44 granted police stop and search rights all across Britain – it has since been used against: Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinto for protesting outside Europe’s biggest arms fair in London; the 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang for heckling Jack Straw at the Labour Conference; Sally Cameron for walking on a cycle-path in Dundee; the 80-year-old John Catt for being caught on CCTV passing a demonstration in Brighton; the 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft for accompanying her parents to an anti-nuclear protest; and a cricketer on his way to a match over his possession of a bat.

In the United States, September 11 occasioned the most robust assault yet on civil liberties in the form of Bush’s ‘USA Patriot Act’ leading eminent constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson to describe Carl Schmitt, the leading authority on Nazi legal philosophy, as “the true eminence guise of the Bush administration” to the extent that the Administration (advised by Dick Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington) espoused a view of presidential authority “that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer¹⁰.”. The respected lawyer Gareth Pierce noted equally worrying tendencies in the UK:

“Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security¹¹.”.

The ‘Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001’ succeeded in ramming through measures that had been rejected in the 2000 Act. The ‘Criminal Justice Act 2003’ doubled the period of detention without charge to 14 days. Although the government suffered a significant setback when the Law Lords swept aside the indefinite detention ruling since it broke European human rights legislation (described by the Law Lords as “draconian” and “anathema” to the rule of law, it was seen by Lord Hoffmann as a bigger threat to the nation than terrorism). Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, immediately made clear his intention to undermine it. The government obliged by subsequently passing the ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005’ which gave the Home Secretary the right to use Control Orders and opt out of human rights laws¹².

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, the government upped the ante with the ‘Terrorism Act 2006’, which doubled – yet again – the detention period to 28 days, a period far longer than any other state in the western world. The bill marked the first parliamentary defeat for Tony Blair, whose original proposal was for 90 days detention without charge.

Blair’s determination to deflect attention from the failures of his scandal-ridden government by turning the war on terror into a permanent undeclared state of emergency appeared finally to have hit a wall. However, despite a noticeably prudent start, Brown’s multiplying political problems soon had him reaching for Blairite nostrums. He renewed the case for doubling the period of detention without charge (subsequently reduced to 42 days). This despite the fact that the newly appointed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had conceded that circumstances had not yet arisen where it had been necessary “to go beyond 28 days”. Seumas Milne reported in The Guardian that:

“it’s widely acknowledged in Westminster that a key motivation for this latest assault on long-established rights and freedoms is Brown’s determination to wrong-foot the Tories tactically and portray them as soft on terror”.

The deleterious effects of a creeping surveillance state cannot be discounted. While the public may have little enthusiasm for an ID card scheme after discs containing personal details of 25 million individuals were lost by the government, Brown remains adamant. Given the government’s record for handling personal data, proposals for a universal register of citizen’s DNA samples is very worrying. So are Tony Blair’s remarks about identifying problem children who may grow up to pose a menace to society by intervening before they were born¹³. A new plan under the government’s e-borders scheme would require each person entering or leaving UK to answer 53 questions including “credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights”. Taken when a ticket is bought, the information, it was reported, “will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place.”

When popular shows bear names like ‘Big Brother’, the appurtenances of mass surveillance society, such as the 4.2 million CCTV cameras, become an acceptable, even desired, part of the scenery. Privacy International rates Britain as an “endemic surveillance society” and, according to Timothy Garton Ash, the British state collects more data on its citizens than did the Stasi in East Germany. The more than 3,000 new criminal offences introduced under the Labour government have also turned privatized prisons into a growth industry. Today Britain has a higher incarceration rate than China, Burma or Saudi Arabia.

While the terrorist threat today has nowhere near the intensity of the IRA campaign, police are using military aircraft such as the Britten-Norman Islander used previously only in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Reaper robot drones of the type being used in Afghanistan will also be in operation during the Olympics.

Reign of the Terrorologist

Riding the back of the raft of anti-terror legislations are the terrorologists and the ‘security’ entrepreneurs; and they have found green pastures in Fortress Britain. With governments unwilling to address political causes, the trend is increasingly one of framing the subject in cultural terms: ‘they hate our way of life’, ‘they hate our freedoms’ etc. This clears the way for the terrorologist to step in and sell a toxic brew of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology packaged in pseudo-academic jargon. In his study of the trade, James Petras detects the following “eerily predictable patterns”:

“They use a common language to describe their subjects and their environment; they are extremely ideological under a thin veneer of scientific jargon; they possess a keen sense of selective observation; they always pretend to possess a psychological understanding though few if any have dealt close up with their subjects in any clinical sense except perhaps under conditions of incarceration and interrogation.
Their style…slippery with euphemisms when it comes to dealing with the violence of their partisan states… Psychobabble provides a ‘legitimate’ sounding channel for… assuming a state of civilized superiority in the face of their dehumanized subjects. Indeed, the dehumanization process is central to the whole terrorist-political-academic enterprise¹⁴…”.

One consequence of earning an elevated place in official demonology is that the bar for those passing judgement drops radically. When it comes to Islam, Muslims and their alleged links to terrorism, any shoddy indictment will pass muster. Doom-laden sensationalism makes for good copy; it makes no demands on rigour and scepticism, and a stable of ‘experts’ is readily at hand to amplify fear. The degree to which this has penetrated public discourse was demonstrated by the Big Issue – a publication generally about as provocative as a phonebook – with a front page story on ‘cyber terror’ and ‘online vigilantes’. Trotting out a stable of ‘terror experts’ the story served as a platform for several tendentious claims (“There are no longer clear boundaries between real-world cells and ‘amateurs’ assisting terror plots via their computers”; “al-Qaeda is equal in the media war”). Rather than question why a dubious source such as Evan Kohlmann – the man used as a ‘expert witness’ in the Atif Siddique trial, who “has no expertise beyond …an internship at a dubious think-tank¹⁵.” – should be consulted by Scotland Yard, the story served as a puff piece for three Israel lobby hacks. Rita Katz has served in the Israeli military; Aaron Weisburd runs Internet Haganah (Hebrew name for the paramilitary that later became the IDF) a project of the Society for Internet Research that works with the Mossad-linked Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; and both Katz and Kohlmann are protégés of Steve Emerson whose own expertise includes having seen “the hallmarks of Middle Eastern terror” in the Oklahoma bombing (actually carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a decorated white Christian war-hero).

The trade of the terrorologist is not new: incubated in the Reagan administration’s earlier ‘war on terror’, its proponents had been exposed and elegantly debunked by Edward Hermann. September 11 ushered in a new breed – ubiquitous, ideological, and relentless. Some, such as Rohan Gunaratna of the St. Andrews-based Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), reinvented themselves over night as ‘experts on al-Qaeda’. Gunaratna’s book Inside Al Qaeda became an instant best-seller, even though before the date his expertise was limited to South Asian groups, such as the Tamil Tigers. In the book he claimed he was the “principal investigator of the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch”. However, after a Sunday Age investigation, he admitted that no such position existed. Intelligence services have been generally dismissive of his claims.

However, despite all this, he keeps making appearances as an ‘expert witness’ at various UK prosecutions and in media reports.

CSTPV itself bears some scrutiny. Established by an alumni of the RAND Corporation (a US think-tank which played a key role during the Cold War; satirized as the ‘Bland Corporation’ in Dr. Strangelove, it was an enthusiastic supporter of the arms race), the Centre has links to the government and intelligence agencies. Shaping discourse on terrorism through its two influential academic journals, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence, CSTPV emphasises terror directed against states, while mostly ignoring violence by states, excluding however those not allied to the West (‘Hell is other people’, Sartre might say). Reports by the Centre have been used by the government to rationalise permanent anti-terror legislation. The RAND-CSTPV nexus also has stakes in the Iraq conflict through its links to mercenary firms operating in the country. However, despite the conflicts of interest, the Centre’s embedded expertise remains much in demand¹⁶.

CSTPV’s output may be ideological; but it still retains a degree of sophistication. With the low demands on rigour, joining the fray now are some actors less restrained. In early 2006 it was revealed that authorities at several universities, including my own, were co-operating with Special Branch as a result of a recently published study by the right wing Social Affairs Unit. Conducted by Anthony Glees, the Director of Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, the study claimed to find evidence of Islamist, animal liberation and British National Party recruitment on UK campuses. The evidence comprised of the fact that people who have been arrested under anti-Terrorism legislation attended universities at some point. It castigated Universities for teaching students “theoretical tools for understanding the world”, such as Marxism, which could lead to further radicalization when students moved “from campus to Mosque”. Policy Exchange, another dubious neoconservative outfit, shouldered its way into the debate with an Islamophobic report on extremist literature being promoted through various Mosques which, to the BBC’s credit, was publicly debunked by a Newsnight investigation. This, however, did not deter Policy Exchange members from using the report to lobby the EU.

Hero and Horse

On November 18, 1822, the Observer reported that nearly “a million bushels of human and inhuman bones” had been imported in the previous year from Europe into the port of Hull. Battlefields swept alike of the “bones of the hero and the horse which he rode” delivered their haul to Yorkshire bone grinders who reduced them to granulary state. “In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands¹⁷.”. Two centuries on, the gap between the ‘support our troops’ rhetoric and reality has yet to be bridged.
An internal report into the state of the British Military obtained by The Independent on May 11 reveals that soldiers are living in such poverty that they can’t even afford food, with many living on emergency food voucher schemes set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). “Commanders are attempting to tackle the problem through ‘Hungry Soldier’ schemes, under which destitute soldiers are given loans to enable them to eat” the paper reported. With its proclivity for market solutions, the tradition of soldiers getting three square meals a day for free has been replaced with a controversial Pay as You Dine (PAYD) regime, which charges soldiers not on active duty for their meals, leading many into debt.
Likewise, slightly more than a year back on March 11, 2007, the Observer had revealed the shocking picture of neglect and poor treatment of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. It reported, for example, that “the youngest British soldier wounded in Iraq, Jamie Cooper, was forced to spend a night lying in his own faeces after staff at Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital allowed his colostomy bag to overflow. On another occasion his medical air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in ‘considerable pain’ overnight despite an alarm going off.” Another complaint alleged that one soldier “suffered more than 14 hours in agony without pain relief because no relevant staff were on duty”. (This, of course, is as much a reflection of the chronic lack of surplus within the health system as it is of the wider militarised draw on public resources.) The MoD has already revealed a serious shortage of medical staff in the armed forces:

“There was a 50% shortfall in the number of surgeons required by the army, an 80% shortfall of radiologists and a 46% shortfall of anaesthetists¹⁸.”.

Soldiers in the field haven’t fared any better: for example, both Reg Keys and Rose Gentle lost sons in Iraq due to the lack of proper equipment. Iraq has taken its toll on an overstretched military. Due to “continuing high level of operational commitment” an MoD report has revealed, “more than 1 in 10 soldiers were not getting the rest between operations they needed.” The report also referred to a “continuing difficult environment for army recruitment and retention”. With a high number of officers and other ranks going over voluntarily with another 2,000 awaiting approval of their applications to quit, the armed forces as a whole are nearly 7,000 under strength, the report revealed¹⁹.

The crisis has caused the military to redouble its recruitment efforts with visits to Scottish schools up by more than 180% in the last three years, The Herald revealed. The news comes only weeks after the National Union of Teachers voted to block future military careers’ presentations “to pupils as young as 14” in England and Wales. “Despite the outlay of almost £500m, in 2006-07 the field army – the frontline operational part of UK ground forces – missed its ‘gains to strength’ (GTS) recruitment goal by 12%. In 2007-08, it achieved only 63% of its target²⁰.” (In the US, the military has been reduced to enlisting former convicts and the mentally ill.) The degree of desperation is also evident in the recent advertising campaign for military recruitment: the military experience is presented as a sanitized adventure, an adrenaline-soaked escape from ennui. High-minded calls of duty and honour have been replaced with ones such as “for the travel, for the action, for the adventure”; “for the fun, for the friendship, for the Friday nights”.

The MoD caused much consternation among the National Union of Teachers when it distributed materials on the Iraq war for use in schools. The ministry was accused of “misleading propaganda” which “unethically” targeted recruitment materials at schools in disadvantaged areas. One worksheet described the purpose of the UK mission in Iraq as “helping the Iraqis to rebuild their country after the conflict and years of neglect”. Touting “achievements” in “security and reconstruction” it failed to mention the US-led invasion, its legality, Iraqi civilian deaths or the absence of WMDs. This is not the MoD’s only advance on the classroom. Another example is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) outreach programme, which sends DSTL scientists to talk to university and school students to encourage them to think about a career at the lab. According to Frances Saunders, the chief executive, DSTL sponsors “year-in-industry students, and are working with the MoD to develop school lesson texts to get people interested in the science behind defence.” Although DSTL already has strong links with universities including Southampton, Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge, Saunders plans to broaden this network.

Not since Suez has the military suffered a greater loss of prestige. RAF airmen in Cambridgeshire were recently advised against wearing uniforms in public in order to avoid being “verbally abused” for their participation in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the demoralizing effect of ill-conceived interventions abroad, the struggle for politicians is then of rehabilitating the myth of the military, rather that the military itself. What interests policy makers is not so much the military, but the cult of military. Plans are also underway to introduce US-style citizenship ceremonies for children and a new public holiday to celebrate ‘Britishness’ by 2012, as part of “wide-ranging proposals to strengthen British citizenship.”

In sharp contrast to the decrepit military stands the fortunes of the private military industry. The preference of recent governments for market solutions has facilitated the transfer of most military R&D to the private sector, with giants like QinetiQ and BAe Systems securing plum deals. When the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (Dera) was split in two in 2001, QinetiQ, a British company with links to the US-based Carlyle group, absorbed the majority of its activities. Along with a raft of other lucrative PFIs, the private military industry is set to benefit from the largest to date, involving at least £14 billion of taxpayers’ money, for a privatised Military ‘Academy’ at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan to train all-service personnel and private ‘security services’. The corporate bonanza in Iraq has had Private Military Contractors – mercenaries – reaping windfalls profits for investors with stakes in the businesses, such as Frederick Forsyth and former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind (of Aegis and ArmorGroup respectively). The lure of salaries, at times reaching as high as £1,000 a day, may be one reason why the military is losing so many of its men to the mercenary business²¹.

While the defence establishment has long complained of funding shortages for the forces, the R&D budget remains secure. The MoD, it was reported, has promised not to raid the R&D budget to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this injunction doesn’t apply in the reverse, as it has been revealed that the Conflict Prevention Fund set aside for clearing landmines and removing arms from conflict zones was being raided to pay BAe Systems to subsidise the £5m-£10m servicing cost of six Tornado jets in Iraq. The measure was needed because the MoD has closed its own state-of-the-art facility for servicing Tornado jets presented as a way of saving £500m over 10 years²².

Sensing opportunity as the war on terror grinds on, its neoconservative architects have swooped in from across the Atlantic to establish a presence in Britain. With ties to the arms industry and the neoconservative wing of the Israel lobby, the Henry Jackson Society seems to be assuming the role that the Committee on Present Danger played in the United States. Its Israel-centric worldview, as exhibited by its roster of speakers, predisposes it towards perpetual conflict. The support for a militarized ethnocracy is not the natural inclination of a liberal-democratic Britain; it can only be sustained in a context where Israel can be seen aligned with Britain in an overarching conflict against a common enemy. So it is that the Israel lobby has contrived to pass its enemies off as those of the ‘West’. HJS appears well placed to sustain this state of conflict should the Tories get in as its supporters include two of David Cameron’s key advisers. It is a dangerous confluence of interests.

Fortress Britain in the end is as much a consequence of ill-conceived alliances as it is a response to the neoliberal order’s need for distraction from its inherent contradictions. While not nearly as unscrupulous as his predecessor, Gordon Brown’s growing travails may lead him to seek the politician’s time-honoured remedy: to scare the hell out of the population. One only hopes that Fortress Britain is the apogee of what Tony Blair had set in motion with his promise to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with George W. Bush in his so-called ‘war on terror’, because things could always be worse.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch.org. His commentaries on arts, politics and culture appear on Fanonite.org.

¹ Might he be the same Amnon Maor of the squad of six Israeli border policemen who back in 1994 were sentenced to six months in prison with one year suspended sentences and a fine of NIS 1,000 each, for brutally assaulting an Arab in a supermarket whose cart had accidentally knocked one? “The six also arrested a passerby who witnessed the beating, and had asked them to stop and to show identification”, the Jerusalem Post reported. The Judge castigated them for abuse of authority and violating “all norms of acceptable behaviour”. (Jerusalem Post, 8 December 1994)
2. Naomi Klein, ‘How war was turned into a brand’, The Guardian, 16 June 2007
3. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Terrorized by “War on Terror”’, Washington Post, March 25, 2007
4. European Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2007; David Miller, ‘The statistical invisibility of Islamist “terrorism” in Europe’, Spinwatch, 23 May 2007
5. Duncan Campbell, ‘The ricin ring that never was’, The Guardian, 14 April 2005
fn6. Gardner admits that the MI6 tried to recruit him while he was stationed in Cairo, however, he insists he turned them down. See David Rowan, ‘Interview: Frank Gardner’, Evening Standard, 15 June 2005
7. Simon Jenkins, ‘These fear factory speeches are utterly self-defeating’, The Guardian, 7 November 2007
8. Robert Fisk, ‘If You Want the Roots or Terror, Try Here’, The Independent, 12 August 2006
9. Seumas Milne, ‘A pointless attack on liberty that fuels the terror threat’, The Guardian, 8 November 2007
10. Sanford Levinson, ‘Torture in Iraq & the rule of law in America’, Daedalus, Summer 2004
11. Gareth Peirce, ‘Was it like this for the Irish?’, London Review of Books, 10 April 2008
12. See ibid. for a description of the true onerous nature of the control orders, especially for detainees with families.
13. Henry Porter, ‘The way the police treat us verges on the criminal’, The Observer, 29 October 2006
14. James Petras, ‘Anatomy of the “Terror Expert”’, Counterpunch.org, 7-8 August 2004
15. Jim Crace, ‘Just how expert are the expert witnesses?’, The Guardian, 13 May 2008
16. J. Burnett and Dave Whyte, ‘Embedded expertise and the “War on Terror”’, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media, 2005, 1(4): 1-18.
17. Quoted in the incisive study of the social consequences of conflict, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by veteran correspondent Chris Hedges.
18. Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady, ‘Soldiers need loans to eat, report reveals’, The Independent, 11 May 2008; Ned Temko and Mark Townsend, ‘Scandal of treatment for wounded Iraq veterans’, The Observer, 11 March 2007
19. Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Under-strength and under strain as experienced soldiers queue to quit’, The Guardian, 23 November 2007
20. Ian Bruce, ‘Army visits to Scottish schools soar by 180% in three years’, The Herald, 12 May 2008
21. ‘Corporate Mercenaries’, War on Want, 30 October 2006
22. David Hencke, ‘MoD plans raid on landmine removal fund to keep Tornados flying in Iraq’, The Guardian, 10 March 2008

Mind-Forged Manacles

Tim Holmes — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:58:05 +0000

Which of these countries has the most prisoners per head of population? Sudan, Syria, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe or England and Wales? We win, or rather lose: I have ranked these countries in reverse order(1). On this measure, England and Wales have a more punitive judicial system than most of the world’s dictatorships.

On Friday, the government released new figures for the prison population(2). It broke all records, yet again. It has risen by 38% since Labour came to power(3), and now stands at 83,181. What does the government intend to do about it? Lock more people up. It is building enough new cells to jail 96,000 people by 2014(4). At the beginning of this month it laid out its plans for Titan prisons: vast broiler units, which will each house 2,500 people(5). But they’ll be only just big enough: the government expects the number of cons to rise to 95,600 in six years(6).

As ever, Britain appears to be chasing the United States. In both absolute and relative terms, the USA’s prison population is the highest on earth: one percent of its adult population is behind bars(7). This is five times our preposterous rate and six times Turkey’s(8). It is over twice the rate of the nearest contender, South Africa(9). If you count the people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to over 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population(10). Black men who failed to complete high school in the US have a 60% chance of ending up in jail(11). I feel I need to say that again: 60% of unqualified black men go to prison. It’s beginning to look as if the state has stopped imprisoning individuals and started locking up a social class. Is this what we aspire to?

To judge by the remonstrations of the tabloids, the answer is yes. But why? And why, in the United Kingdom, is imprisonment still rising? It’s not because of rising crime. Last year crimes recorded by the police fell by 2%, while the most serious violent offences fell by 9%(12). Nor does it reflect the conviction rate. That fell by 4% in 2006 (we don’t yet have last year’s figures)(13). Stranger still, it is not connected to the rate of imprisonment either, which fell by 9% between 2004 and 2006(14).

The prison population is rising for one reason: people are being put away for longer(15). Between 1997 and 2004, the average sentence rose from 15.7 months to 16.1(16). That tells only half the story: the actual time served rose as well, as a result of new laws the government introduced in 1998 and 2003(17). In 2004 the courts started handing down indeterminate sentences – prison terms without fixed limits. These will be partly responsible for the projected growth in imprisonment over the next six years(18).

This exposes a remarkable contradiction in government policy. At the beginning of last year, the criminal justice ministers sent a begging letter to the courts asking them not to bang so many people up, as the prisons were bursting(19). But they are bursting because of the mandatory life terms, indeterminate sentences and other stern measures it has forced the judges to pass. In 2002, England and Wales had more lifers (5268) than the whole of the rest of the EU put together (5046) (20). I can’t find a more recent comparison, and since the accession of the former communist states this is bound to have changed. But it gives you a rough idea of how weird this country is.

So why, when the number of crimes, especially serious violent crimes, is falling, are both the government and the courts imposing longer sentences? Why does the UK consistently rank in the top two places for imprisonment in western Europe? Why, as this country becomes more peacable, does it become more punitive? I don’t know. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. But one thing I’ve noticed is that many of the states with the highest number of convicts are also those with the greatest differential between rich and poor. Within the OECD nations, the US has the second highest rate of inequality. Mexico, which is the most unequal, has the third-highest rate of imprisonment. In the EU, four of the five most unequal nations also rank among the top five jailers(21). The correlation, though by no means exact, seems to apply across many of the rich countries.

This doesn’t demonstrate a causal relationship. But there are three likely connections. The first is that inequality causes crime. This is what Anatole France referred to, when he claimed to admire “the majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”(22) But, while this has proved true at most times and in most places, crime is falling in England and Wales while inequality is rising. The second possible link is that prison causes inequality. The sociologist Bruce Western has shown that jail in the United States is a huge and hidden cause of deprivation(23). When people are locked up, they can’t acquire the skills and social contacts they need to get on outside. Employers are reluctant to take them on when they’ve been released, and they tend to be hired by the day or to get stuck in the casual economy, which is one of the reasons why so many return to crime. Among whites and Hispanics, wages for ex-cons are severely depressed. Among black people the effect is less marked: the “stigma of imprisonment”, Western suggests, appears to have stuck to the entire black underclass(24).

His ground-breaking research shows that US labour figures, which appeared to prove that the rising tide of the 1990s lifted all boats, were hopelessly skewed. The government’s claim that the boom had enhanced everyone’s job prospects – even those at the bottom of the heap – turns out to be an artefact of rising imprisonment: convicts aren’t counted in household surveys. Western found that while general unemployment fell sharply in the 1990s, when prisoners were included, the rate among unqualified young black men rose to its highest level ever: a gobsmacking 65%(25).

The third possible reason for a link between the two factors is that inequality causes imprisonment. I can’t prove this, and it is hard to see how anyone could do so. But my untested hypothesis runs as follows: the greater the wealth the top echelons accrue, the more ferociously they demand protection from the rest of society. They have more to lose from crime and less to lose from punishment, which is less likely to strike the richer you become. The people who help to generate the public demand for long prison terms (newspaper proprietors and editors) and the people who mete it out (judges and magistrates) are drawn overwhelmingly from the property-owning classes. “Those who have built large fortunes,” Max Hastings, who was once the editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote of his former employer Conrad Black, “seldom lose their nervousness that some ill-wisher will find means to take their money away from them.”(26) Money breeds paranoia, and paranoia keeps people in prison.

References:

1. King’s College, London, 2008. World Prison Brief. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?a…

2. BBC Online, 20th June 2008. Prison population at record high. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7465983.stm

3. National Statistics Office, viewed 23rd June 2008. Prison population: England and Wales.
www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D7361.xls

4. Ministry of Justice, 1st February 2008. Minister opens first prison in government building programme. Press release. http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/newsrelease010208a.htm

5. Ministry of Justice, 5th June 2008. Titan prisons. Consultation Paper CP10/08. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/cp1008.pdf

6. Ministry of Justice, August 2007. Prison Population Projections 2007-2014. England and Wales. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/stats-prison-pop-aug07.pdf

7. Sky News, 29th February 2008. US Prison Population Reaches World High. http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1307500,00.html

8. The US rate per 100,000 people is 751. UK: 152, Turkey: 127. King’s College, ibid.

9. 347 per 100,000.

10. Bruce Western, 22nd June 2007. Mass Imprisonment and Economic Inequality – III. Who we Punish: the Carceral State. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6959890/Mass-imprisonment-and-ec…

11. ibid.

12. Home Office, July 2007. Crime in England and Wales 2006/07. Statistical Bulletin. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb1107.pdf

13. Ministry of Justice, November 2007. Criminal Statistics 2006: England and Wales. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/crim-stats-2006-tag.pdf

14. ibid, Table 1.2.

15. Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid.

16. ibid.

17. The Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid, lists these factors as follows:
“• greater numbers of offenders recalled to prison for breaking the conditions of
their licence, reflecting legislative changes in 1998 and 2003;
• increased use of indeterminate sentences following the introduction of
Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) in April 2005;
• the introduction of Suspended Sentence Orders in April 2005 for which
offenders in breach can be taken into custody; and
• inflation in the time certain types of offender remain in prison (particularly in
recent years) as the use of Home Detention Curfew for the early release of
offenders has diminished and the parole rate has fallen.”

18. The Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid, states that “Much of the underlying growth in the High, Medium and Low scenarios can
therefore be attributed to the use of IPP [Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection] sentences.

19. Ministry of Justice, 23rd January 2007. Statement from the Criminal Justice Ministers to the National Criminal Justice Board:
Managing the Impact of Rapid Growth in the Prison Population.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmconst/467/4…

20. Prison Reform Trust, March 2004. England and Wales, Europe’s lifer capital. http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/subsection.asp?id=352

21. I took the inequality stats (as measured by the Gini Coefficient) from the CIA’s World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172….

22. Anatole France, 1894. The Red Lily.

23. Bruce Western, August 2002. The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality. American Sociological Review. Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 526-546.

24. ibid.

25. Bruce Western, 22nd June 2007. Mass Imprisonment and Economic Inequality – III. Who we Punish: the Carceral State. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6959890/Mass-imprisonment-and-ec…

26. Max Hastings, 2002. Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers. Macmillan, London.

What is Britishness?

Ellie Keen — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Citizenship, values and identity

One of Gordon Brown’s first acts after becoming prime minister in 2007 was to publish a green paper with Jack Straw, The Governance of Britain (CM7170), outlining a ‘new constitutional settlement’ that would ‘forge a new relationship between government and citizen’. Part 4 of this paper, entitled ‘Britain’s future: the citizen and the state’, was focused on a set of concerns about what it means to be British, what are the distinctive British values, and what rights and responsibilities people should have as citizens, all of which were argued to be unclear or confused and in need of greater clarification.

So, for example, we read: ‘The government believes that a clearer definition of citizenship would give people a better sense of their British identity in a globalised world.’ (sec. 185). ‘A clearer understanding of the common core of rights and responsibilities that go with British citizenship will help build our sense of shared identity and social cohesion.’ (193). ‘It is important to be clearer about what it means to be British, what it means to be part of British society and, crucially, to be resolute in making the point that what comes with that is a set of values which have not just to be shared but also accepted.’ (195).

To this end the green paper promised a series of discussion documents – on citizenship, on British values, on a British bill of rights – as part of a wide-ranging national debate on the country’s future. The first of these was Lord Goldsmith’s Citizenship Review, Citizenship: Our Common Bond, complete with a host of accompanying research documents; others are promised shortly.

The first reaction of anyone reading this mass of material has to be astonishment that so much effort is felt to be necessary chasing a will of the wisp called Britishness, or even to defining a distinctive set of rights and responsibilities which are specific to British citizens as opposed, say, to long-term residents settled here from other EU countries, from Commonwealth countries or the Republic of Ireland. A second reaction is how prescriptive, even hortatory, so much of the language is in which this whole enterprise is couched, as the above quotations from the green paper demonstrate. What exactly is going on here, and why is it felt to be so urgent at this historical juncture?

It may be that Gordon Brown’s longstanding preoccupation with Britishness has something to do with a certain vulnerability he has felt as a Scottish premier-in-waiting and now prime minister of a predominantly English country, with other Scots holding leading positions in his cabinet. There are, however, more general concerns which have coincided to drive this agenda:

· Following devolution of government to Scotland and Wales, increasing numbers of residents there declare that they think of themselves as more Scottish or Welsh than British, and the English are now following suit. A British identity seems to be losing its attraction, and the Union to be correspondingly at risk.

· The growing number of black and Asian Britons in our cities, many of them with their own distinct languages and cultures, and maybe identifying with their country of family origin, is felt to require the assertion of some overarching or unifying identity as a necessary counterweight to the centrifugal tendencies of ‘multiculturalism’. The discovery that the suicide bombers of 7/7 and 21/7 were British born and bred has been particularly shocking.

· There is widespread concern in government about the public’s alienation from the formal political process, and especially that of young people, whose participation in the elections of 2001 and 2005 showed a massive decline from 1997. Among the measures outlined to combat this in last July’s green paper was the idea of a Youth Citizenship Commission, which would ‘examine ways to invigorate young people’s understanding of the historical narrative of our country and what it means to be a British citizen, and to increase their participation in the political sphere.’ (190)
A historical narrative of Britain

A good place to start if we want to understand what is problematic about the government’s attempt to revive Britishness as a response to the concerns listed above is precisely with ‘the historical narrative of our country’. Of course there is no single narrative but many diverse, even competing, ones. However, one historical account which any discussion of this issue has to come to terms with is that by Linda Colley in her widely regarded book, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 to 1837 (Yale UP, 1992). Great Britain (as distinct form the United Kingdom), she argues, came into being with the Act of Union of 1707, and the British nation was subsequently ‘forged’ out of a number of components: through the project of Empire and the trading opportunities that went with it; from a common commitment to Protestantism; and by a monarchy at the apex of an increasingly interconnected landed ruling class. All these elements were reinforced by wars against Continental Europe and especially Catholic France, which served as the ‘other’ against which British distinctiveness came to be most clearly defined.

A number of points are worth noting from Colley’s account:

1. British nationhood came to be ‘added on’ to other identities, Scots, Welsh, English, or more purely local ones, rather than replacing them, or merging with them. Great Britain was ‘an invented nation superimposed, if only for a while, onto much older alignments and loyalties.’ In this respect being British has always allowed for multiple identities, though the English as the numerically and politically dominant element have always more readily regarded ‘English’ and British’ as interchangeable, rather than distinguishing between the two.

2. British nationhood was always more civic than ethnic, to use a common distinction from nationality studies. That is, it was a matter of commitment to, and identification with, certain common institutions, including of course the Westminster Parliament, rather than depending on ‘blood and soil’. There were certain exclusions of an ethnic kind, it should be said, such as Catholics and Jews, and the English language provided a significant unifying base. But it was the common institutions of political and civic life that defined what was distinctively ‘British’. And commitment to them, Colley insists, was always as much a matter of self-interest as of emotionally based allegiance or ideology.

3. The British nation was essentially an elite project, though identification with it spread downwards in the latter half of Colley’s period through a combination of military service in successful wars and popular mobilisations at royal events and anniversaries.

Not everyone agrees with Colley that the story of Britain began only in 1707, but nearly everyone who has commented on her work, including Colley herself, accepts that the defining elements of Britishness which she identifies all came to an end or were substantially eroded during the second half of the twentieth century, and can no longer form the basis of a distinctively British identity or nationhood. Here is how Colley herself puts it:

‘As an invented nation heavily dependent for its ‘raison d’etre’ on a broadly Protestant culture, on the threat and tonic of recurrent war, particularly war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire, Britain is bound now to be under immense pressure…..We can understand the nature of present debates and controversies only if we recognise that the factors that provided for the forging of a British nation in the past have largely ceased to operate.’

To be sure, Colley’s own narrative ends with 1837, and there have been attempts by others to identify nation-wide institutions developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have provided alternative bases for a distinctively British identity, and served as integrating elements. These include the Royal Mail and the Post Office, the BBC, the political parties, the trade union movement, and the various institutions of the welfare state created by the 1945 Labour government, from the NHS to a range of nationalised utilities and other bodies with ‘British’ in their name, serving the whole of the country. Whether these institutions could ever have provided the same resonance as the ones identified by Linda Colley is now irrelevant, since most of them have been decimated, if not eliminated, by the privatisations initiated by Mrs. Thatcher and continued under New Labour. Even the ‘Unionist’ Conservative Party ended Mrs. Thatcher’s period of rule as almost exclusively English, having lost virtually all Parliamentary representation in Scotland and Wales. And there is no doubt that her period of rule exacerbated if not started a trend towards the individualisation of economic and social life, which provides infertile ground for any wider social or political loyalty or commitment.

Two simple conclusions can be drawn from this history. The first is that to look to ‘the historical narrative of our country’ to find any basis for a contemporary restatement of what it means to be British, is to build on very shifting sand. The second is that a sense of nationhood cannot be forged from flags, from ceremonials, from statements of values or even from definitions of citizenship, but only from shared institutions of civic and public life which command wide respect.

But does it really matter if the constitutive elements of a distinctively British identity have worn thin? Is it any longer relevant in a globalising age, when many of the public values we subscribe to are ones we share with other western democracies, when our justiciable rights as citizens are drawn from the European Convention on Human Rights, and when the causes many of our young people are attracted to are international rather than national ones – the environment, fair trade, global poverty, and so on? Is a concentration on trying to define what it means to be British anything other than a rather parochial sideshow?

It is tempting simply to answer ‘no’ to all these questions, and to end this paper here. To do so, however, would be to miss the opportunity provided by the government’s initiatives, and the publicity surrounding them, to articulate a more progressive alternative to those contained in the recent documents. Sketching out what this alternative might look like, and what the obstacles are to realising it, will form the second part of the paper.
A progressive alternative

I shall begin again with Linda Colley, this time with a millennium lecture she gave to Tony Blair and other dignitaries in Downing Street in December 1999, speaking as she herself says more as a citizen than as a historian. The lecture was entitled Britishness in the Twenty-first Century. Here she exhorts her listeners to stop ‘persistently asking agonised questions about the viability of Britishness’, since it would be difficult to identify core national values ‘in a way that commands broad assent, unless you descend to uttering platitudes … Instead of being so mesmerised by debates over British identity,’ she goes on, ‘it would be far more productive to concentrate on renovating British citizenship, and in convincing all of the inhabitants of these islands that they are equal and valued citizens irrespective of whatever identity they may individually select to prioritise.’ She then sketches out a conception of a revivified ‘Citizen Nation’ based on equality of rights and sovereignty of the people, shorn of rank and ‘antiquated elements’, dedicated to tackling racial and sexual discrimination, and involving a wider diffusion and decentralisation of power.

The contrast between this conception of citizenship and that offered by Lord Goldsmith in his Citizenship Review could not be starker. Where Colley seeks a more genuinely inclusive and democratic citizenship, Goldsmith is preoccupied with finding what distinguishes those who possess British citizenship from those who don’t; with using this citizenship to define a British identity; with rituals, ceremonies and other antiquated remnants; and with an extremely narrow definition of ‘active citizenship’ which is limited to voting and ‘volunteering’, rather than the range of activities in which citizens can and do engage to defend and promote their interests, improve their lives, influence public policy or challenge injustice. In sum, it is just what one might expect from a patriarchal Lord rather than a democratically minded commoner.

Linda Colley’s millennium lecture provides a good starting point for a more progressive conception of citizenship, and I would recommend people to read it. What it does not address, however, are what the obstacles might be to realising the more progressive conception that she outlines. It is surely no accident that many of these obstacles are to be found in precisely those foundational components of British nationhood which everyone assumes have now disappeared or lost their significance. Far from having disappeared, however, their inheritance remains deeply ingrained and persistently reproduced in the British state and public life, where they work to frustrate the realisation of a more democratic Citizen Nation based upon equality. Let me consider each of these components in turn.
Empire

The most obvious legacy of Empire is of course the multi-racial and multi-ethnic composition of Britain’s population itself. But the integration of these peoples as equal citizens continues to be hampered, not only by linguistic and educational disadvantage, but also by the attitudinal legacy of white superiority that was inherent in the British imperial project. This legacy is powerfully reinforced by latter-day versions of liberal imperialism, in which Britain seeks to bring ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ to benighted countries of the developing world, albeit now on the coat-tails of US military power. Far from being an aberration of Tony Blair, this mentality is continually reproduced within the British state, as witnessed most recently by David Miliband, who in a recent Oxford lecture outlined a ‘great progressive project’ of spreading democracy around the world, if necessary by ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power.

What has this to do with the different progressive project of creating a more inclusive and equal citizenship at home? Colley’s history shows repeatedly how national identities come to be defined externally, through opposition to a foreign ‘other’, especially in war. In the contemporary world of multi-ethnic societies, however, this process of opposition can turn out to be as internally divisive as unifying. The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have caused deep alienation among the Muslim communities of Britain, and the characterisation of these conflicts as part of a ‘global war on terrorism’ has reinforced the conception of a threatening ‘other’ in our midst which echoes the position of British Catholics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars against Catholic Europe.

If the persistence of the imperial mentality within society and state is one legacy of empire that works to hinder a more inclusive and equal citizenship, a second is the institution of the public schools. Although some of these predate the Empire, it was the 19th century that saw their greatest expansion and consolidation as a training ground for imperial rule. They now survive as a highly effective vehicle for reproducing social and economic privilege across generations, through the preferential access of their pupils to the most prestigious universities and into the leading professions. Yet the most fundamental requirement for equal citizenship is a common system of public education, which is shared by all, and through which they learn to recognise all sorts and diversities of future citizens as potential equals. Tinkering at the margin with the charity law for private schools only shows how far we remain from realising such a basic condition for citizenship.
Trade

The trading supremacy which came with the British Empire is of course long since at an end, but its legacy persists in one of the world’s most open economies, in which finance capital through the City of London holds the dominant position, nurtured by successive governments. The enormous and ever-increasing inequalities generated by this ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of capitalism have been well documented and commented on by others. Two consequences have followed, however, for the ‘rights and duties of citizenship’ that are the direct responsibility of government, one at either end of the economic scale.

At the top end is the enormous system of tax avoidances and evasions which enable wealthy corporations and individuals to escape their citizenship obligations. On the very day the Goldsmith review of citizenship was published we were reminded of the tax rules that have allowed British citizens to spend up to 270 days a year working in Britain, while avoiding paying tax by claiming residence in tax havens such as Monaco. This is only the tip of a very large iceberg. For example, Goldsmith’s account of ‘recent changes in citizenship’ mentions an exotic-sounding list of places, from Anguilla and Bermuda to the Turks and Caico Islands, whose citizens now qualify for British citizenship under the British Overseas Territories Act of 2002. What he does not mention, of course, is that these remnants of Empire include a roll-call of tax havens under British jurisdiction, where international companies and billionaires can escape their citizenship responsibilities, and deprive governments around the world, including our own, of vitally needed revenue. And this list does not include the Isle of Man or Jersey, the latter of whose citizens, we recently learn, have now to be charged a food tax to pay for the reduction of corporation tax to zero.

The other side to this open and deregulated economy is the determination of successive British governments to demand opt-outs from the EU treaties from Maastricht to Lisbon, which would guarantee workers the same rights in employment that are enjoyed by the citizens of other member states. Given this record, it comes as no surprise to find that the one item that the July green paper explicitly excludes from a future British Bill of Rights and Duties is any incorporation of economic and social rights into British law. Labour’s ‘common bond of citizenship’, in short, will continue to allow the evasion of responsibilities by the wealthy, while limiting rights to economic security for other citizens.
The monarchy

Of all the components contributing to the forging of Britain since 1707, the monarchy is the one that has remained relatively unchanged, despite various vicissitudes. In doing so it has not only consolidated the remnants of an aristocratic social order, complete with titles, ermine and ceremonial, but perpetuated the self-definition of the people as subjects rather than citizens. The first action of those acquiring British citizenship through naturalisation is to swear an oath that they ‘will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors’. Lord Goldsmith now proposes that this feudal relic, which has no intelligible meaning in the modern world, should be extended to all young people in public citizenship ceremonies to be attended at the end of their schooling. His reasoning seems to be that, since those holding public office have to swear the oath, it is ‘evidence of the duty of allegiance owed by all British nationals’, and should therefore be publicly acknowledged by all.

Not surprisingly, this proposal aroused the strongest opposition in the consultation process commissioned as part of the Citizenship Review. However, the fact that it could be entertained at all shows how deeply ingrained in the British state is the idea that the monarch, not the people, is sovereign, albeit in practice the government through Parliament now exercises that sovereignty on her behalf. And the attitude of deferential subordination to those representing that sovereignty which the whole idea conveys is deeply corrosive of any democratic conception of a Citizen Nation, confident in itself as the only source of legitimate political authority, and ready to challenge and hold accountable those who temporarily exercise it on their behalf.
Protestantism

Unlike the monarchy, Protestantism has long since ceased to be a defining marker of being British, since the Catholic emancipation of the nineteenth century and the removal of lesser civil disabilities from members of other religious minorities. However, what it has left as its legacy is a wholly disproportionate place for religion in the formal public sphere, given that we have one of the most secularised societies in the world in terms of religious observance. The point where this most impinges on citizenship, again, is in the school system, and in the continuing proliferation of ‘faith’ schools paid for from public funds. I should say here that I myself come from a deeply religious family, and I am no militant secularist. But I believe that religion belongs in the sphere of civil society, where it has an important role and an honourable tradition, but not in the formal public sphere, whether this be through guaranteed places in an upper chamber of Parliament, or in segregated schools paid for from taxation, whose curriculum, ethos and selection of both pupils and staff is subject to religious criteria and influence. The necessary educational basis of a common citizenship does not rule out diversity between different schools and their curricula within a common system, but it is inconsistent with exclusivities of access and membership based either on wealth or parental religious belief or occasional practice.
Wars against continental Europe

The most powerful element in forging the British nation, according to Colley, were the wars against continental Europe, first against France in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and then against Germany and its allies in the 20th. Thankfully, these have now ceased, but they have left perhaps the most persistent legacy of all, in a population that is readily influenced by the caricatures of a Europhobic press and a government that is scared of making an honest case for the European Union and our role within it. This is particularly relevant to the issue of citizenship, since arguably the most progressive feature of the EU lies in the common rights it offers all citizens of its member countries. If we leave aside the rights enjoyed under the European Convention of Human Rights through membership of the Council of Europe, these rights include the right to reside and work in another member country of the EU, to stand for election and vote in European, local and devolved elections in another member country, to enjoy a range of social benefits there linked to work, incapacity or retirement, and so on. In addition is the range of rights in employment guaranteed by the social chapters of EU treaties that the UK has opted out of.

Given the background of Europhobia, it is perhaps not surprising that the Goldsmith documents do nothing to emphasise the positive aspects of European citizenship, but rather try to find the increasingly diminishing content exclusive to British citizenship in distinction to it. In the context of our existing membership of the Union, however, this conveys an extraordinarily parochial impression, and suggests a major lost opportunity to offer an outward- rather than inward-looking account of citizenship, and one that is appropriate to the realities of the contemporary world. The democratic conception of a Citizen Nation outlined by Linda Colley could best be anchored in a wider European citizenship, including its economic and social rights.

Conclusion

The argument of this article, then, is that the key elements that went into the forging of the British nation after 1707, far from disappearing, as is widely assumed, have left a distorting legacy that continually militates against the realisation of a fully democratic conception of citizenship. This is one where we are truly citizens rather than subjects, enjoying a common system of education without privileges or exclusiveness, divested of imperial pretensions and superiorities, fairly sharing rights and responsibilities in economic life, and outward looking towards a common rights-based European citizenship. Any discussion of the citizenship agenda, or of Britishness, which fails to address this distorting legacy will necessarily be incomplete.

There is naturally no mention of these issues in the mass of Goldsmith’s documents on citizenship. Consideration of them might give a more realistic dimension to the citizenship education on which the government sets such store for instructing future citizens in their rights and responsibilities, and encouraging political participation among the young. Goldsmith’s own commissioned research reveals that many pupils lack enthusiasm or respect for the subject, perceive their teachers as disengaged, and consider citizenship classes as a ‘doss lesson’. The government’s preachifying approach is hardly likely to alter this perception. So, for example, the July green paper lays the blame for the massive decline in voting by young people on ‘their lack of appreciation of the democratic process and of the need for active citizenship’. There is no recognition that people will not vote if they cannot see any difference between the main parties, or any chance of representation for those that might more closely reflect their views and interests.

The lack of any self-critical element in these documents is striking. No one would guess from them that Parliament and its membership stands at an all time low in public esteem. This is not just a matter of Parliamentary expenses or cash for honours. As any parent will know, ‘do as I say not as I do’ is quickly seen through by the young. I recall the massive outburst of civic activism by young people, including many Muslims, leading up to the invasion of Iraq, when they participated in protest meetings, marches, demonstrations and school walk-outs. This was the first generation of students that had been exposed to David Blunkett’s new civics curriculum. In the classroom they may have learnt about the importance of the United Nations, the need to resolve disputes by peaceful means, and the values of representative democracy. What they learnt in practice was that Parliament and government can defy the UN and invade another country when they choose, and that they give more weight to the views of a foreign president than they do to the voices of their own people. A frank acknowledgement by government of the failings of our own democratic process would seem to be a precondition for any credibility in encouraging the young to participate more fully in it.

Report: UK children's rights systematically violated

Tim Holmes — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:04:12 +0000

You can hardly have failed to notice that the children’s commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have combined forces in a joint report to the United Nations to condemn the treatment of children in the United Kingdom. But you may not have taken on board their central message, and you very likely missed an equally significant report last week on the effects of poverty on education and social mobility in the UK.

The point of this unprecedented initiative is to insist that children have human rights, separate from the family, and that their rights are being systematically abused. The commissioners have presented a dossier of human rights abuses of British children in violation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that, in the words of the Guardian report (Monday, 9 June) have “denied hope and opportunity to many of Britain’s 14 million children and adolescents”.

The report is to the UN committee set up to review compliance with the Convention; in its last review of the UK, in 2002, the Committee found “serious violations” of the Convention. An additional report from the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, a coalition of more than 100 civil society organisations, says that the government has passed 30 laws that breach the Convention since then.

The biggest complaints centre on the punitive juvenile justice system and public attitudes that demonise adolescents. But there is a deeper-lying cause for complaint and concern. At a Sutton Trust conference on social mobility in New York last week Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office minister, and UK educationists, heard the results of a massive study of children born in the UK and US in 2000 and 2001. The study found that the damaging effect of being in a low-income home was more pronounced in the UK than in the US and that “there is a stronger income differential in the UK than in the US,” meaning that (as a US academic told the conference) “there are more behavioural problems among low-income children in the UK”, and that the transition from home to school was harder, especially for boys. (The gap between the UK and the US would be even wider were it not for Britain’s childcare provision.)

Meanwhile, the Department of Work and Pensions is said to be releasing figures on Tuesday (10 June) that show that the government is nowhere near meeting the target of halving child poverty by 2010; and that 200,000 more children fell into poverty in 2005-06, measured after housing costs.

For me these reports reinforce the need for us in Britain to press for a “rights-based democracy”. The UNCRC provides for a five-yearly review of the rights of children in the UK. The UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights similarly involves a five-yearly review of such rights here. Britain has signed up to both these UN instruments without taking seriously the commitments that they entail. Neither of course is written into UK law; and there is no domestic equivalent.

If Gordon Brown’s pledge to consult on a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities is to command any credibility, then he must rescind his ban on consideration of economic, social and cultural rights in any consultations that may yet occur. Not that much good would come of it. Brown made a great fuss about consulting on the extension of detention without charge, but he and his Home Secretary have set that process and all informed opinion aside in a blind and obstinate offensive that is now reduced to arm-twisting Labour MPs and apparently concluding dirty deals with the Ulster Unionists.

One of the Labour whips’ argument is said to be that Labour MPs who vote against 42 days could put David Miliband in No. 10. Well, I don’t know about that, but I have very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Gordon Brown is no more fit to be there than his immediate predecessor.

Police powers increased by new London mayor

tim — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:24:18 +0000

The new Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has announced sweeping measures to ramp up police powers. After a series of highly publicised knifings in central London last month, the mayor called for a policy of “zero tolerance” and “immediate operational response.” This announcement neatly dovetailed with the launch of a £3 million public relations campaign funded by the Home Office.

The measures introduced include an extension of the existing “stop and search” procedures, the introduction of metal detectors at Underground tube stations across 10 London boroughs and scanning of suspects with hand-held devices.

“Operation Blunt” was launched barely days after the attacks with 4,277 stop and searches around the capital over two weeks. Young people are being singled out for particular attention under the new initiative, with police taking their pictures even if they are found to be innocent of any crime.

Since the beginning of 2007, 68 people aged under 25 have been killed in London, including 13 teenagers. But the new policing measures have been enforced with little attention to the actual levels of violent crime that have been recorded in recent years. There was in fact a sharp fall in knife crime in 2007 and overall knife crime has fallen by 19 percent since 2004.

The increases in violent crime that have been recorded this year have been amongst the young—from teenagers up to people in their early twenties. But civil rights campaigners in the capital have urged caution instead of this knee-jerk and heavy-handed response to the recent incidents. They have called attention to the fact that historically the use of “stop and search” has discriminated against black minorities and, more recently, Asian and Middle-Eastern ethnic minorities. Government figures suggest black people are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, while Asians are almost twice as likely.

Peter Herbert, a barrister and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, was also critical of the plan.

“It will undoubtedly lead to more stop and search, and more racist stop and searches where people are stopped on the basis of their appearance or ethnicity,” he said. “The MPA was not consulted and it should have been. It is another example of policy being manufactured on the hoof for political expediency.”

The Newham Monitoring Project, a group that works against racial discrimination, police misconduct and on civil rights issues, gave a cautionary statement on the mayor’s response:

“If Boris Johnson wishes to address gun and knife crime, he needs to first carefully examine why current police powers, which are some of the toughest in Europe, are failing to deal with this issue effectively. If the police do not have to apply reasonable suspicion, what grounds will they use to determine who they stop and search? Selecting individuals based on appearance and ethnicity is fundamentally flawed, will criminalise and alienate communities and is ultimately likely to fail like the hated Sus laws that were abolished in the 1980s.”

Under the “Sus” laws police were able to stop and search based on suspicion alone, using the precedent of sections of a Vagrancy Act of 1982, making it illegal to “loiter in a public place” with “intent” to “commit an arrestable offence.”

The police singled out young people in the impoverished areas of the city, stoking tensions between youth—particularly poor black youth—and the police in the early 1980s.

In 1981, police launched “Operation Swamp,” involving stop and searches across large swathes of the poorest working class regions. This was a major factor in provoking the Brixton riots in London, and those in St. Pauls, Bristol and Toxteth, Liverpool.

Under pressure from the public backlash, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced new rules for stop and search. Officers would now require “reasonable suspicion” that an offence had been committed.

Stop and search powers were again curtailed in 1999, after a public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence found the police guilty of “institutional racism” and negligence in the case.

After the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, the powers were again extended under Section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. Under the previous laws, people stopped for the purpose of a search must have the reason explained to them if they request this from the police. The police are then obligated to explain “reasonable grounds for suspicion”—for example, a recent violent crime in the area or the person stopped matching the description of a suspect.

Under Section 44, the exception to this rule is in cases associated with terrorism, in which case the police have no obligation to give a reason for the stop. In other words, the “clause of exception” gives the police powers to stop, search and detain anyone arbitrarily. Similar powers to detain arbitrarily have been given under Section 60 of the Public Order Act.

The official “Stop and Search” web site produced by the Home Office states that these powers “help to deter terrorist activity by creating a hostile environment for would-be terrorists—ensuring it is not easy for them to carry or use explosives.”

It then explains how this “hostile environment” is created: “Police can search anybody anywhere under this law, and they do not need reasonable suspicion to do so. It is under this law that police conduct random searches in train and tube stations.”

The extremely low efficiency of the stop and search laws in combating street crime is revealed by official statistics: In 2004-05, when 100 people were stopped each day, only 455 arrests were made out of 35,776 searches.

In line with Johnson’s ratcheting up of police powers, the opposition Conservative leader David Cameron called on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to scrap forms officers must fill in when they stop someone. This would effectively enable police to carry out a far greater number of stops with even less accountability for their actions.

Cameron’s call to cut “red tape” reflected views expressed in the Flanagan report, published the following week. Ronnie Flanagan, the chief inspector of constabulary in England and Wales, said police were afraid to use their own judgment because of bureaucracy and form filling.

The Conservatives were competing with Labour in backing Flanagan’s report. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith responded with an official letter of endorsement, urging immediate action to cut down on “needless bureaucracy” and extend police powers to stop and search.

Johnson has also held a highly publicised meeting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, in early May, announcing a “new partnership” between the two capitals.

Bloomberg has presided over a city that has experienced an unprecedented disparity of earnings between workers and a parasitic financial aristocracy on Wall Street. His administration has made drastic cuts in social services, including health and education, while increasing police powers.

In Britain, over the last decade policing has seen major increases in funding, rising by 39 percent to £5 billion. The overall police workforce has increased by 25 percent in the same period.

Nineteen young suicides in South Wales

tim — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:09:06 +0000

The death of 23-year-old Christopher Jones from Nantymoel on May 5 is the latest in a series of tragic suicides of young people in and around the South Wales town of Bridgend. In the last 12 months, 19 young people under the age of 27, many of them in their teens, have committed suicide in the area. The latest death is the 34th since 2006.

The deaths have generated a media furore, with astonishment and confusion being expressed by the political establishment as to the cause.

Officially, however, an inquest into five of the deaths, held on March 19, said that the deaths were not related.

Allyn Price, a 24-year-old man from Maesteg whose death was investigated at the inquest, was described as “happy go lucky,” with no overt signs of depression. Similar accounts were given of cousins Nathaniel Pritchard, 15, and Kelly Stephenson, 20. A relative told the press, “We just don’t know what is going on in Bridgend. Kelly and Nathaniel were both brilliant kids with good futures ahead of them. We would never have thought in a million years that they were capable of anything like this. None of this makes sense.”

In 2007 Dale Crole, 18, was found hanged in an abandoned warehouse. His friend David Dilling, 19, took police to the scene. Dilling was also found hanged little more than a month later.

It also emerged that Kelly Stephenson knew two other young men who died last year, prompting media speculation of “copycat suicides.” Some of the other suicides were friends, some distant acquaintances; many knew each other through social networking sites. It is reported that seven of the dead are believed to have frequently used the social networking site Bebo, for example. Angelina Fuller, the 14th suicide, had her memorial site posted by her partner on MySpace.

Consequently, the media have blamed such sites for the suicides, claiming that online memorials, which supposedly gave the victims some “prestige,” were triggering the tragedies. With each new suicide inspiring more memorial pages, the louder become the calls for these sites to be controlled and censored.

Madeleine Moon, Labour MP for Bridgend, said, “If you are a young and vulnerable person who sees nothing in life ahead of you, if you are feeling in despair and you can see no way you are ever going to make anything of yourself, having your photograph and your way of dying splashed all over the national media is perhaps one way of gaining fame; a very sad way of getting it but one that certainly some of this coverage is exploring and exploiting.”

The Ministry of Justice, with the departments of Health, Culture, and Children, is currently reviewing laws to censor or shut down sites that give information regarding suicide as an acceptable option. Many users of such sites are not in fact youth, but older people suffering from illnesses for which no palliative care is available.

The police have set up a task force investigating the computers of the youth, as well as the social networking sites.

In fact social networking sites have become hugely popular, particularly among youth, precisely because they offer a limited possibility of expressing both feelings and broader social concerns that have no other outlet—particularly under conditions where young people are deeply alienated from existing forms of political expression.

The calls for censorship of social networking both shift attention from the more fundamental issues giving rise to suicides amongst young people, and prevent discussion at the point when it is vitally necessary to talk to young people about how they feel and what they think. Equally it is not enough to blame media coverage for the suicides, even when it is as shallow and sensationalist as is suggested by lurid headlines about “Death Town” and “Suicide Valley.”

After all, figures from the Office of National Statistics show a death rate from suicides of 19.4 per 100,000 of the population for Welsh men, and 6.3 per 100,000 for women. This is the highest in Britain, which overall has a disturbing rate of 17.4 per 100,000 men, and 5.3 per 100,000 women. Most of these tragic cases never make the pages of the media and the victims do not regularly use social networking sites.

In any case, what is necessary is to ask just why it might be, if Madeleine Moon’s suggestion is true, that some young people are so vulnerable, and see “nothing in life” ahead of them and no way of ever “making anything of themselves,” that suicide could be seen as a way of “gaining fame.” And even if one rejects such a claim, the issue remains of why some young people are so filled with despair.

As a letter to the Times from a writer in Pontypool in South Wales pointed out, would young people stop being depressed if the sites were censored?

The writer went on to call for an examination of the reasons for “such a depressive state of mind,” and suggested it had more to do with “the fact that they are priced out of higher education, have little or no chance of affording a house of their own. And that their only option is to work in a poorly paid job simply to continue their existence … Even when things were bleak in the 70s and 80s, young people had a voice, and often protested passionately against their circumstances. Sadly, those in authority seem to have silenced today’s youngsters, and here we see the logical reaction.”

The fact that the cluster of suicides centres on the former industrial town of Bridgend underscores the necessity to probe these questions more fully. Tens of thousands in the area were employed in mining, or in the steel industry in nearby Port Talbot. Today this has all but disappeared. The major employers now are call centres.

The betrayal of the miners strike of 1984-85 by the trade unions and the Labour Party began the devastation of the area. The closure of pits led not just to a loss of jobs and declining wages, but the break-up of entire communities.

Accompanying this, vast amounts of wealth have been transferred from the poor to the very rich, who have demanded ever greater attacks on the social conditions of working people by the very party that once claimed to represent labour against capital.

For most young people, good job prospects are a thing of the past, and buying a house is impossible. And in the areas of health, social work and mental health, that would once have identified and helped treat those in most need financially and emotionally, cut after cut has been made based on the claim that overcrowded, understaffed and under-funded schools can provide an adequate “joined-up” substitute—using the services of unqualified support staff.

The government’s own official education body, OFSTED, describes 10 percent of state schools as “inadequate.” Class sizes are among the highest in Europe. Meanwhile there are diminishing welfare facilities, long waiting list for counsellors, social workers with dozens of “clients” and a system in breakdown.

The victims of this onslaught on social provision are in turn vilified, demonised and criminalised. Today young people are often regarded as a problem, not as society’s greatest asset and its future. Figures on British youth crime, drunkenness, pregnancy and violence are at their highest and dominate the press. Time magazine led a recent issue with the cover story, “Unhappy, Unloved and out of Control: An epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young.” Britain has the highest population of children behind bars in Europe, with almost 3,000 children now in custody, an 8 percent rise since 2005, compared to Germany with 1,422 and France with 646.

This situation must inevitably produce a deep social malaise that affects significant layers of young people. But it also creates opposing sentiments: a sense of anger, a critical attitude to the existing social set-up and an often profound desire for change. This response is far more widespread than is ever acknowledged by the media. Those within the establishment who have plunged Britain’s youth into such dire straits have no answer to the social despair this generates and are bitterly hostile to and threatened by the inevitable growth of a more forward looking and universalist desire for a better society.

Hammering the BNP

Ellie Keen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:25:15 +0000

It feels very odd to find any comfort from the local election results, but there is one outcome worthy of a small sigh of relief. The British National Party did not do as well as it might. It is true that it got Richard Barnbrook, its most personable, if absurd, figurehead, onto the London Assembly. But overall the party had a net gain of just ten councillors across the country, when it was hoping for, and many of us were dreading, some two or three assembly members and 40 more councillors.

It seemed that the BNP had everything going for it. It was exploiting the pumped-up fear of extremist violence and Islamophobia, aided by the media obsession with immigration and migration. The sudden media pre- occupation with the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech could hardly have been better timed. The party’s claim to have taken over Labour’s traditional role as the defender of the working class has had a great deal of resonance and could have put it in a strong position to take advantage of Labour’s collapse.

There are two obvious reasons for its comparative eclipse. The first and most obvious is that Cameron’s Tories swamped the BNP as they did Labour. But the second is that the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight and the trade unions combined in vigorous community- based campaigns against it, involving literally thousands of activists across the country. Nick Lowles, of Searchlight, says, ‘We have never had so many people involved in the anti-BNP campaign before. Against the odds, both political and climatic, decent people took to the streets and campaigned strongly for “hope not hate”.’

It is great to have something we can celebrate and I think we should. But most of these ‘decent’ people were from the left and we need to build stronger defences against the BNP across the board. Far from being down and out, the BNP is now a well- organised modern party and next year it will be seeking seats in several regions in the Euro elections, where low polls will assist it.

Combating the BNP involves an adjustment in the way we regard and describe the party, along with a surer and wider approach in society and in local government.

First, natural though it is to loathe the BNP, too often the left discourse sounds like an echo of the hate the BNP exploits. This is especially harmful when angry or violent expression spills over onto the people who vote for it. ‘Decent people’ can and do vote for the BNP, often with some shame, true, but defiantly nonetheless. It is not a protest vote, but a demand to be heard.

So tear off the party’s veil of respectability. Expose and broadcast the vile things that its members say and do. Keep watch on the performance of its councillors, show up their incompetence, deride the irrelevance of their statements and policies, complain to the local government Standards Board.

On the wider front, it is important to encourage people to take a robust approach to combating the BNP, especially in local government where councillors and staff often feel inhibited, either by fears that attacking the party gives it the ‘oxygen of publicity’, or that exposing the myths it propagates as lies will somehow breach electoral law. In the last election, a council official rang me and said that the other party leaders wanted to make common cause against the BNP offensive, but feared to draw attention to it.

Councils across the country have a duty to promote good race relations and social cohesion: combating the BNP’s lies simply fulfils this duty (on this point, see the Cohesion Matters website at www.cohesionmatters.co.uk).

Even in the Labour Party, I have experienced a reluctance to take on the far right. The most extreme example of this came some years ago when I was one of three people standing for election in Hackney. The agent (a man with real anti-fascist credibility) ordered us not to take part in a debate with the National Front candidate, Derek Day, a violent thug and prominent racist, on the estate where he lived and not to canvas the estate. The agent even came to the meeting to order us out. We stayed, trounced Day in the debate and won over people on the estate as we canvassed. In the pub one evening, my colleague’s handbag hit the table with a big thud. She was carrying a hammer, ‘just in case’.

I don’t advise carrying a hammer. But it is vital not to compromise or be intimidated. Resolute, informed, principled and persuasive argument is the way to combat the BNP.