Weekly Worker 589 Thursday August 11 2005

Letters

We oppose Blair’s latest ‘anti-terror’ proposals not because they are an attack on ‘human rights’. We oppose them, argues Mike Macnair, because they provide our enemies with weapons that will be used against us

On Friday August 5 Tony Blair announced a raft of 12 new proposed ‘anti-terror’ measures. These supposedly represent the government’s response to the London bombings and attempted bombings on July 7 and 21. Commentators in the mainstream media were surprised by their ‘draconian’ character. The workers’ movement should oppose them - but not for the usual liberal reasons.

The proposals

The 12 points are:

l A new policy in relation to deportation and exclusion, including grounds of “fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs or justifying or validating such violence” (on this basis George W Bush should presumably be excluded from making any more visits to the UK ...). The government will if necessary amend the Human Rights Act to legalise deporting people to countries where they could be killed or tortured and will in any case amend legislation so that appeals do not stop deportations.

l A new crime of “condoning or glorifying terrorism”.

l Refusal of asylum to anyone who “has participated in terrorism or has anything to do with it anywhere”.

l Extended use of existing powers of deprivation of citizenship for people who “act in a way that is contrary to the interests of this country” (on this basis one A Blair should be the first in line ...).

l A maximum time limit for extradition proceedings.

l Extended police detention before charge of terrorism suspects.

l Extended control orders covering British citizens.

l An increase in the existing list of specially selected judges (those trustworthy in the view of the securocrats)

Our press: the cause of communism, not loyalty to queen and country

who deal with terrorism cases.

l Banning Hizb-ut Tahrir and the successor organisation to al-Muhajiroun; and a widened power to ban further organisations.

l Higher requirements for citizenship and a consultation with the ‘muslim community’ (ie, the elders) on increased integration.

l A power to close “place[s] of worship which are used as a centre for fomenting extremism” and a list of clerics to be excluded from Britain.

l Early introduction of biometric visas for some countries and a database of people to be excluded from entry.

Over the weekend the package was added to with some kite-flying about prosecuting imams or leaders of jihadi groups for treason or ‘incitement to treason’ under the Statute of Treasons 1351 - an idea almost as promptly abandoned. ‘Incitement to treason’ is a non-existent crime, since incitement to treason is a treason. Certainly, on the basis of the Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian case law, supporting the bombers could amount to a treason - either as “lending aid and comfort to the queen’s enemies”, or as “levying war in the queen’s realm”; or even as “compassing the death of the queen”, since the judges down to the 18th century held that efforts to overthrow the queen amounted to compassing her (political) death.

But under the Trial of Treasons Act 1696 charges require two witnesses to an overt act of treason. The difficulty of obtaining convictions against revolutionaries in the late 18th and early 19th century led to the creation of a new crime - ‘treason felony’ - under the Treason Felony Act 1848; and treason charges were last used against Nazi propagandist William Joyce in 1945. Senior lawyers have therefore pooh-poohed the idea.

Tuesday August 9 saw an elaboration on the ‘special judges’ material: the government is (as was suggested at the time of the Belmarsh case) considering the use of Diplock courts with ‘vetted’ judges to try terrorism suspects in secret.

Why?

In August 7’s Observer Gaby Hinsliff and Martin Bright have put together a plausible narrative of political-bureaucratic infighting leading up to Blair’s announcement. But the larger background has two aspects.

First, in spite of the media and politicians’ repeated invocations of the ‘spirit of the Blitz’, enough people are scared of a repeat of the July 7 bombings to ensure that visitor numbers in central London are still dramatically down. Moreover, cracks have begun to open in the initial establishment common-front insistence that July 7 and 21 had nothing to do with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Second, in spite of the liberal media and politicians’ sedulous attempts to separate British muslims at large from the bomb attacks, racist attacks are dramatically up, as are incidents of vandalism of mosques, etc. The Mail/Sun/Tory right narrative of the attacks as the product of a government too soft on immigrants and asylum-seekers has evidently gained enough purchase that some muslim Labour MPs have supported tougher measures against the ‘extremists’ in order to try to create clear water between muslims in general and the bombers.

Both these contexts meant that the government needed to appear to do something fairly dramatic. Hence the 12-point plan.

Not new

In fact relatively little in Blair’s 12 points is genuinely new. Much of it has been trailed for some time: for example, the new offence of “condoning or glorifying terrorism” was already promised in Labour’s election manifesto, and ‘control orders’ - ie, house arrest - for British citizens suspected of ‘terrorism’ was Charles Clarke’s response to the judges’ decision in the Belmarsh case.

Aspects of the changes, like the control orders proposal, are merely home office responses to inconvenient judicial decisions: this is the character of the deportation and asylum proposals and the idea of amending the Human Rights Act. Here Blair is exploiting July 7 and 21 to try to get through proposals which would otherwise have some difficulty passing. Similar considerations affect the police demand for more time to question suspects before charging them: the securocrats have been seeking this since the ‘terrorists suspects’ were random ‘paddies’ rather than random ‘Pakis’.

The idea of doing something about the dilatory character of extradition proceedings has been around for decades. This is hardly surprising, since it is merely a small aspect of the general problem of delays in judicial proceedings, which has been a subject of government and public complaint and satire (and periodic ineffective attempts to tackle) for at least 800 years.

The introduction of ‘biometric visas’ reflects a US demand on Britain and Europe made after 9/11. It is reasonably clear that the technology does not as yet work and the idea that the government will make it work by an act of will in the next year is simply an unrealistic attempt to appear ‘tough’.

What does seem to be new is the proposals to ban Hizb-ut Tahrir and “the successor organisation to al-Muhajiroun” (apparently called the ‘Saviour Sect’, but Johan Hari’s ‘Harry’s Place’ blog reports the existence of a number of splinter formations) and take wider banning powers; and the proposals to take powers to close down mosques and regulate or exclude muslim clerics. It is perhaps not a coincidence that these are also the only part of the proposals which reflect the fact that the people accused of the July 7 and 21 attacks are mainly people who grew up in Britain.

Gut reaction

The natural gut reaction of the left and of liberals is to oppose Blair’s proposals in absolutely general terms as an attack on civil liberties and human rights. Thus, for example, the Socialist Workers Party’s John Rees writes on behalf of Respect: “Tony Blair says that he is concerned to ‘defend our way of life’, but his new raft of police powers takes away more practical freedom than any terrorist organisation has yet managed.”

Mike Rowley, writing for the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty on July 21, before Blair’s announcement, predicted: “There is every sign that the government plans to use the terrorist atrocities in London as a cover for accelerating its attacks on civil liberties.”

The difficulty with this response is that on its own it has little political purchase. It is true that Blair’s proposals violate traditional liberal positions and civil liberties. He admits it. When he goes on to say that it is necessary in order to prevent more bombings, he has broad mass support. His supporters are mistaken. But the simple argument that no sacrifice of civil liberties is justified to prevent more bombs on tube trains is hardly going to persuade many people. As long as the argument is framed in terms of rights, most people would say that the right to life outweighs the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of movement.

‘Repression doesn’t work’

Given the limits of the straight civil liberties/human rights line of attack, opponents of such measures tend to fall back on the argument that repressive measures do not work. Thus John Rees: “Tony Blair’s new security laws, which will require the suspension of provisions in the Human Rights Act, will strike at our freedoms without bringing an end to terrorism. Taking powers to close places of worship, extending powers of deportation, proscribing bookshops, making it an offence to ‘justify’ terrorism and banning organisations will not make us safer, but it will make us all less free.”

And Mike Rowley: “Clearly these proposals [ID cards, and government retention of mobile phone and email records] are not much use in terms of fighting terrorism.”

It may be regrettable, but it is simply not true that repression (and restrictions on civil liberties to make repression easier) cannot work. Historically, repression succeeded in wiping out Japanese christianity in the 17th century, left oppositionism in Russia in the 1930s, and communism in Indonesia in the 1960s. In this country, much milder repression successfully marginalised Roman catholicism between the 17th century and the 19th (when the repressive laws were lifted). McCarthyism in the US successfully marginalised overt socialism. The large bulk of the Guevarist attempts to launch ‘people’s war’ in Latin America were crushed by repression. Repression combined with the creation of limited political openings has ended by inducing the large majority of the IRA to lay down their arms.

States do not fall when minorities - whether leftist or religious-radical - wish them to fall. They fall, as Lenin pointed out, when the rulers can no longer rule in the old way, and the masses will not be ruled in the old way. Before a state collapse, repression can work. The question is whether the state has the stomach for the measures that could make it work: meaning not only sufficient effective repression, but also political and economic measures which can undermine the base of support of the ‘terrorists’.

‘Underlying causes’

The third point of argument against the government’s proposed repressive measures is precisely that the government is not willing to tackle the underlying causes that lead young muslim men to be willing to bomb tube trains.

Here is John Rees again: “The government has tried to ignore the deeper causes of terrorism and is therefore trying to excuse its foreign policy by demonising the muslim community and severely restricting the civil liberties of all the people of Britain.”

The question posed is: what are the deeper causes? For Rees and many opponents of the war the answer is relatively simple: the US-British invasion of Iraq. Now it is certainly true that invading Iraq on the basis of a pack of lies has acted as a recruiting sergeant for al Qa’eda: just as Germany invading Belgium allowed the British government to bring Britain into World War I and ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ allowed the US government to mobilise enough political support for their entry into the war. The analogy is strictly valid, because in both cases Germany was already at war: and Britain was already at war with al Qa’eda when it invaded Iraq.

Al Qa’eda originated as a US-Saudi operation mobilising mujahedin, military material and finances for the war in Afghanistan. Much of the far left scabbed on Afghan workers and women and on the workers’ movement in the Middle East by supporting the mujahedin.

Al Qa’eda’s war with the US began with the 1991 Gulf War and the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and continued with the US’s continuing war of ‘sanctions’ after 1991. But throughout this long war Britain has been a party alongside the US. British troops were also in Saudi Arabia, and have been in the Arabian peninsula (in Oman and elsewhere) ever since the 1940s. British warplanes were deployed throughout the 1990s to ‘enforce sanctions’, etc. It is therefore ludicrous to suppose either that Britain would only become an al Qa’eda target as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or that simple withdrawal from Iraq would mean al Qa’eda would no longer target Britain. A much more extensive withdrawal would be required: from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from the Persian Gulf states, and from support for the US’s projects more generally.

Deeper causes

Why are the current terrorist attacks the work of jihadi islamists, rather than (as in the 1970s) left-talking nationalists (the IRA, Palestinian factions, etc)? Answers are to be found in the article by R Yürükoglu in last week’s Weekly Worker (August 4), and in the discussion by Ardeshir Mehrdad and Yassamine Mather in the current issue of Critique (www.critiquejournal.net).

They have common broad themes. Political islamism arises from a convergence of those dispossessed and displaced by the neoliberal and financialising turn of capitalism since the 1970s with a section of the old islamic clerical caste, elements of the pre-capitalist merchant class and an element of the intelligentsia. Its relation to its ultimate mass base - the poor in muslim countries - is mediated by religious charities and educational arrangements. In this it is like the catholic anti-semitic movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, which it resembles in many ways.

The space for this movement to develop is given partly by the crisis of ‘official communism’ and with it the inability of the broader left to offer solutions. The resulting movement is one which strives to negate all class approaches and to fight against enlightenment ideas. It already included terrorist elements in the 1970s; Afghanistan gave it its major boost and real ambitions of success, due to US backing. It is not unique: the United States in particular has seen a growth of radical-protestant counter-enlightenment movements, which also include terrorists like Eric Rudolph (see www.juancole.com/2005/07/christian-terrorist-rudolph-sentenced.html), while there has also been a substantial growth of violent hindu and Sikh groups in India.

Some commentators in the mainstream media argue that this can hardly explain middle class Saudis organising al-Qa’eda (since Saudi Arabia has remained wealthy due to oil), the role of ex-students in islamist groups (since they are hardly the dispossessed), or a bunch of working class kids from Leeds blowing themselves and others up on London Transport, or a group of refugees from east Africa attempting the same two weeks later (since Britain is also relatively prosperous).

But relative prosperity is not the point. Neoliberal economics has undermined, and the neoliberal governments have systematically attacked, the institutions of secular collective life, in the name of setting capital free: and this is as true in Britain and the US as it is in Turkey. In doing so they have automatically promoted counter-enlightenment religious ideas, even where they have not done so deliberately.

Causes and solutions

If this diagnosis of the causes of islamist (and christian) terrorism is correct, then it is unlikely to be possible to remove these causes short of the overthrow of global neoliberalism. But capital worldwide is now so deeply enmeshed in the neoliberal project and global financial regime that it is hard to see how this can be done without the overthrow of capitalism as such.

Suppose, for example, that a new political leadership in the US, Britain, etc were to seek to reverse the neoliberalism and the financial turn and cancel all the third world debt obligations procured by corruption and fraud since the 1970s, in order to enable a ‘new Marshall Plan’. The result would be to crash the US, British and other ‘first world’ banks and financial systems. This would force (at a minimum) massive state intervention to allow, for example, people to get to eat. We are thus indirect and partial beneficiaries of Britain’s role as poster-child for neoliberalism. In this capacity, like Macbeth, we are “in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should [we] wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o’er”.

Not all effects can be readily reversed by altering the causes. Suppose al Qa’eda nuked London: the destruction and contamination would not be eliminated by anything we did, either repressive or political, to get rid of terrorism. Similarly, jihadi islamism, christian terrorism, etc are consequences of the long-term policy of the imperialist centres. Taking away that policy will reduce the likelihood of a repetition. It will not eliminate the results of what has already been done.

Remember - again - that al Qa’eda originated in connection with the war in Afghanistan. The islamists began their new political life from the 1970s as an enemy of the left and the workers’ movement: as murderers of women teachers and of trade unionists. The bombs on the tube were an act of war on the British workers’ movement as much as on the British state: and our fight to overthrow neoliberalism in the name of secular collectivism and political democracy would be as much of a motive for jihadis - and christian terrorists - to plant bombs as neoliberalism itself is.

War

The bombs - 9/11, Bali, Madrid, London, etc - are acts of war. They are war crimes, since they are targeted at civilians with the aim of causing terror. But they are not simple crimes like gang murders or armed robberies. Still less are they the result of ‘insanity,’ as a good deal of media coverage suggests. Significant numbers of British soldiers and airmen in 1939-45 engaged in what were for all practical purposes suicide missions - military actions which they had little or no chance of surviving. In the official discourse these people are called heroes, not madmen. Suicide bombers are driven by essentially the same motivations. In their view they are at war with the infidel, and are ghazis, raiders deep into the enemy territory of the dar al-harb - the ‘land of war’ that is all territory not ruled by islam.

A corollary of the fact that this is war is that the logistical backup and recruitment agencies of the warriors are legitimate military targets. It is for this reason that police stations, army recruitment centres and the officials of the US puppet regime are legitimate military targets for the ‘Ba’athist-sunni’ guerrillas in Iraq. For exactly the same reason, imams and organisations which preach the jihad as a literal duty of making war on the unbeliever, and charities and other mechanisms of funding the operations of the bombers, are legitimate military targets for those who do not wish to be ruled by islamists.

If we had the power ...

Imagine for a moment that by some unlikely turn of events the British constitutional-monarchy fell and a democratic workers’ republic was created in this country in the near future. Jihadis would continue to seek to plant bombs and the christian right would be added to the mix: what would change would be that the motivation would be ‘godless communism’ and the bombers would be unambiguously backed by the US. The choice which would face us would not be whether to try to repress jihadi islamism: elementary self-defence would require us to do so. The choice would be what forms of repression are consistent with the political liberty of the majority.

This is a choice of historical path, which I discussed in my article ‘From Belmarsh to Rangoon’ (Weekly Worker February 3). The point is worth repeating. The choice can be illustrated by the Venetian republic in the late medieval and early modern period and the post-revolutionary regime in England in the 18th century. Both states faced determined efforts to overthrow them.

The Venetians took the path of the secret state. The Council of Ten and the systems of anonymous denunciation, secret trials and imprisonment became notorious throughout Europe. Venice as a republic became not merely an oligarchy, but an increasingly narrow and unfree one. The regime fell in the 1790s to the French, and when the French were defeated there was no mass resistance seeking to restore the republic.

The English regime took a different path. The laws against Roman catholicism, as they developed after 1689, excluded catholics as a group from political power and attempted to undermine their wealth and consequent patronage by allowing protestant relatives to claim their land. These laws did not require a system of imprisonment without trial or a secret state which reached into the whole of political life. Though the country was a monarchy and far from democratic republicanism, its political life tended to be increasingly open.

The ‘English path’ was not a total absence of repression against those whose religious commitments led them to seek to overthrow the state. Rather it was the choice of forms of repression which were consistent with political liberty for those who were loyal to the regime: open laws against specific ideological positions, and an attack primarily on the political and property rights of religious opponents.

... The choice posed is at the end of the day a simple one. For or against secret and unaccountable power for the bureaucratic-coercive state?

The logic of choosing against secret and unaccountable power is to choose for laws which are specifically discriminatory against particular religious views which lead people to make war on the public. Right now that would mean a clear focus on jihadi islamism. But specific targeted measures against christian supporters of, for example, anti-abortion terrorists in the US would certainly be necessary in a democratic republic.

What sort of laws? It would be entirely proper to exclude or jail jihadi preachers. The penal laws of the 17th century punished ‘seminary priests’ trained overseas with death; we would not need such extreme measures. Attendance at madrasas which teach the doctrine of jihad as a literal duty could be made a crime. Preaching the doctrine of jihad as a literal duty and the virtues of the ghazis is an act which it is not difficult to establish and could be readily tried by jury.

Similarly, laws forfeiting the property of supporters of jihadi variants of islamism, and laws diverting charitable funds used for these purposes to other purposes, could be enforced through trial in open court.

Blair’s securocrat proposals

We should oppose most of Blair’s proposals not because we oppose all repression of jihadi islamism, but for two quite concrete reasons (I say “most of” Blair’s proposals because one - time limits on extradition proceedings - is a highly desirable object for any judicial system: justice delayed is justice denied). In the first place, Blair’s proposals precisely take the path of secret and unaccountable state discretion. Secondly, there is no reason to trust the British government as an ally against the jihadis.

That Blair’s proposals take the path of secret and unaccountable state discretion is clear. In the first place, many of the proposals simply aim directly to give more power to the police and the home office. The idea of secret trials for terrorism offences is equally - obviously - an expansion of the secret state.

Secondly, the proposals for new crimes and new powers also expand secret state power: and they do so precisely because of their liberal, rule-of-law, non-discriminatory character. As should be apparent from the summary at the beginning of this article, “fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs or justifying or validating such violence”, “condoning or glorifying terrorism” or “act[ing] in a way that is contrary to the interests of this country” are incredibly broad concepts.

They are all the more so, given the definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000: “the use or threat [of action] designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public”, “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause” and where the “action” “(a) involves serious violence against a person, (b) involves serious damage to property, (c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.”

The breadth of the definitions obviously does not mean that people like the 2000 fuel tax protesters (who fall within them) are going to be charged with terrorism offences. Someone is going to have to decide who is charged and who is not. Guess who? It will be an unaccountable bureaucrat somewhere in the security apparat. Writing laws to deal with specific problems in a way which is absolutely general creates new unaccountable powers in the state bureaucracy: the rule of law concept thus contains its opposite.

Don’t trust the state!

In 1936 anti-fascists and Jews fought a battle at Cable Street to defend the local Jewish community against the British Union of Fascists. The government responded by the introduction of the Public Order Act 1936. Sold as targeting the BUF, the Public Order Act’s powers were mainly used against the left and trade unionists: the fascists were only seriously targeted after the outbreak of war in 1939. The section 5 offence of “threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace” became a staple ground of arrest on demonstrations and picket lines and it, and its successor under the Public Order Act 1986, have been extended as far as gay men ‘threatening or insulting’ policemen by kissing in public. This little bit of history tells us one side of why we should not trust the state with broad powers which we are told are aimed at our enemies. The powers turn out to be used mainly to exalt the power of the state over the subjects.

The other side is equally simple. Right now, the jihadis are enemies of the British state. But they have been allies before - in Afghanistan and, indirectly, in Turkey; and to the extent that the workers’ movement in the Middle East recovers, they will be allies again. Even now, the US-British occupiers of Iraq are making deals with shia islamists who seek to make the sharia the fundamental basis of Iraqi law, and British troops in Basra preside loosely over a tyranny of shia militias who attack students and trade unionists. In fact, it is convenient to the British state that jihadis should continue to exist, as a threat which justifies taking broader powers and an ‘enemy’ which can distract attention from inconvenient economic and political problems; and, potentially, a resource which could be deployed against a revived workers’ movement. The Italian catholic far right was deployed in this way against the workers’ movement in the 1970s.

Self-defence

If we are not to trust the state to defend us from jihadi terrorists, and we are not in a position to create a democratic republic, what can we do?

In the first place, the workers’ movement needs to begin to think in terms of organised self-defence. In the long run a workers’ militia rooted in the localities has a far better chance of catching jihadis than a bureaucratic-hierarchical professional police force. At present our position on this front is extraordinarily weak; the defeat of the 1984-85 miners’ strike marginalised trade union self-defence activities, while the gradual collapse of the SWP into ‘official communism’ has swept aside, through the Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism, the local self-defence initiatives against far-right attacks which emerge from time to time. But if we are extraordinarily weak on this front, we are weak on every front, and this is the core strategic way forward.

Charity and solidarity

The relation of the jihadis to their broader base is ultimately mediated by the role of religious charities in providing social solidarity in the face of the neoliberal turn of the state. In the face of 19th century liberalism and catholic anti-semitism, the workers’ movement was not just trade unions and political parties, but also all sorts of cooperatives, educational ventures and social support networks. The trade unions were not merely organisations of the employed, but, to paraphrase Engels, an alliance of the employed and the unemployed.

To undermine the jihadis, the workers’ movement does not just need a break with support for the policy of the imperialists: it also needs a return to organising its own forms of social solidarity. Again, our present position on this front is extraordinarily weak. But again, as with self-defence, this is the only road which offers a strategic way forward.

Print this page