Читать книгу The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights - Dominic Raab - Страница 10

‘We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.’

KARL POPPER

Since New Labour came to power Britain has suffered a sustained attack on its tradition of liberty, with the government regularly claiming that stronger measures are justified to strengthen our security and make us safer. This unprecedented assault on our fundamental freedoms has been waged on diverse fronts, with justifications clustered around three principal rationales.

First, the government has argued that decisive action is needed in response to a unique danger, namely the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda and related fanatical groups. Second, it has justified its actions in the sphere of law enforcement and criminal justice on the basis of the overriding imperative to cut crime and tackle anti-social behaviour. Third, it has massed a range of powers to watch, intercept and gather private details on its citizens on the basis that such inroads on our privacy will make the individual, and our society as a whole, safer. The common denominator is the assumption that, when push comes to shove, security can be traded for – and should be prized above – liberty, a tough but necessary choice that many, at least at first sight, may intuitively be inclined to accept.

The difficulty with this analysis is that liberty and security are rarely stark alternatives or juxtaposed choices. The government has assumed the existence of a hydraulic relationship between freedom and security, a zero-sum game in which we have a genuine choice to pay a price in terms of our personal freedom, in order to yield a security dividend that provides greater public protection against violent crime and terrorism. But is the real world that straightforward, and does this paradigm provide more than a simplistic gloss, a political crouch that obscures a more complex picture? Draconian measures will always undermine liberty. But there is scant evidence that they have made us safer.

An alternative assessment, supported by a growing body of evidence over the last eleven years, is that the government’s attack on our core freedoms has not yielded any clear, significant or demonstrable security dividend; indeed, it has often had the reverse effect, jeopardizing rather than strengthening our security.

In the field of counter-terrorism, the government’s approach has fixated on a number of high-profile gestures, including extending detention without charge for terrorist suspects, introducing control orders and pressing ahead with ID cards, amongst a package of other authoritarian measures. While the government has moved to raise the limit on pre-charge detention sixfold since 2003, the rate of home-grown radicalization and the numbers involved in terrorist-related activity have only grown faster, at a current rate of 25 per cent per year according to MI5 – hardly the symptoms of successful policy.

When it comes to fighting crime, the government has created more than three thousand new criminal offences and attacked fundamental pillars of British justice, including the presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury. Yet, at the same time, violent crime has nearly doubled, the UK has the second highest crime rate in Europe and fatal stabbings and gun violence have surged.

Nor has the exponential increase in surveillance powers by the state improved public safety. Eighty per cent of CCTV footage is not fit for purpose. The government loses personal data on a regular basis, exposing those it is charged to protect to unnecessary risk. And, far from helping police to crack down on fraud, one Chief Constable predicts the government’s flawed proposals for ID cards will set the ‘gold standard’ target for criminal hackers.

As one commentator, Jenny McCartney, characterized the approach:

A pattern is emerging in the way that Britain deals with any kind of threat…It acts like a terrified but sieve-brained householder who tries to foil prospective burglars by putting expensive, complicated locks on the top windows while frequently leaving the back door swinging open…

The Faustian bargain that New Labour has traditionally offered the public is that we should submit to ever more intrusion in exchange for greater security. What we are getting now is intrusion and insecurity – and even Faust managed a more attractive deal than that.

Time and time again since it came to power in 1997 the government has presented tough measures that infringe fundamental liberties as a price worth paying to make the public safer. The serious charge to be laid against this government is that its confused approach has been driven as much by considerations of PR as national security. The government has deployed increasingly dramatic rhetoric with each new announcement, heralding serious inroads on our fundamental freedoms, with precious little improvement in public protection to show for it. Far from offering a finely balanced trade-off, or even a Faustian bargain, the government’s approach has turned out to be a straight con – leaving us both less free and less secure.

We have become accustomed to national security being regularly cited as one of the main grounds for sacrificing individual liberty, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 and subsequently the 7/7 attacks in London. Yet Britain has faced serious threats to its national security before, without knee-jerk resort to such far-reaching, unfocused and permanent measures that seek to redefine the fundamental balance in the relationship between the citizen and the state.

During the Second World War identity cards and internment were introduced in the face of global war and direct military attack. In 1940, faced with the Blitz and the real prospect of a Nazi invasion, the government interned a range of ‘enemy aliens’, principally Italian and German civilians living in Britain. Around eight thousand were detained although most had been released by 1942 and the legal basis was revoked at the end of the war. Yet, as A. C. Grayling notes, from 1940, faced with an imminent invasion by Nazi Germany, temporary measures were taken that undermined individual liberty. In contrast today, ‘in face of a far lesser threat’, Britain is ‘enacting permanent legislation of even more draconian kinds’.

Churchill only reluctantly introduced temporary wartime measures that infringed individual liberty, removing them once the immediate exigencies allowed. When Oswald Mosley, the notorious Nazi sympathizer, was released from internment in 1943, Churchill sent a telegram to the Home Secretary justifying the decision in the following terms:

[T]he great privilege of habeas corpus, and of trial by jury, which are the supreme protection invented by the English people for ordinary individuals against the State…The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers – is, in the highest degree, odious and is the foundation of all totali tarian governments…Extraordinary powers assumed by the Executive with the consent of Parliament in emergencies should be yielded up, when and as, the emergency declines…This is really the test of civilisation.

Faced with a very real threat to national life, in one of the darkest moments in British history, the government of national unity took finite and temporary measures to meet the specific, overwhelming and undeniable threat.

Since then, our fundamental freedoms have come under periodic strain, most regularly in the context of the struggle against terrorism. The conflict in Northern Ireland lasted for around thirty years and cost 3500 lives, including more than 1800 civilians. Britain undoubtedly faced a real and sustained terrorist threat, and the government took measures against IRA terrorism that incurred human rights challenges and political controversy – including, most notably, the use of internment and Diplock courts (the latter allowing criminal trial of those accused of terrorist suspects without juries). Nevertheless, over a thirty-year period, internment lasted for only four years and withstood legal challenge at the European Court on Human Rights, which accepted that it had been required by the exigencies of an emergency situation. In practice, internment proved a disaster – fuelling the resentment and violence it was introduced to contain – and was replaced for the rest of the conflict with a maximum limit of seven days’ pre-charge detention, a fraction of the maximum period now in place in Britain.

Equally, Diplock courts were used between 1973 and 2007 because of the clear and serious threat of witness intimidation amidst the sectarian conflict, which successive governments – of both main parties – accepted was undermining efforts to bring criminal prosecutions against those accused of paramilitary violence. While a judge replaced the jury as the trier of the facts in these cases, the measure applied to paramilitary groups on both sides of the conflict, trials remained public and were subject to appeal.

The conflict threw up a range of other human rights controversies – including miscarriages of justice arising from police misconduct (such as the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four) and criticism of the shooting by British special forces of three IRA members in the course of trying to set off a bomb in Gibraltar.

Beyond the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Spycatcher episode arose out of the government’s attempts to ban the publication of a book written by Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, between 1987 and 1988. The book was published in the US and Australia and the government was eventually defeated in its attempt to prevent publication and bring related claims against the Sunday Times and Guardian.

No previous government can claim a perfect record on civil liberties, yet it is difficult to avoid the impression that the deliberate and concerted assault on liberty throughout the last decade has been without precedent – of a different order of magnitude to the ad hoc incursions that preceded it.

While the new government introduced a range of repressive new measures from 1997, the most serious attack on fundamental liberties in the name of national security took place after 9/11, when the government sought to introduce indefinite detention without charge for foreign terrorist suspects, and gathered momentum with its hastily put together response to the London bombings in July 2005. At a press conference less than a month after the dust had settled on the attacks in central London that left fifty-two people dead and many more seriously injured, Tony Blair reacted with a list of twelve new security measures, announcing a radical change of approach: ‘Let no one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.’

With this dramatic gesture before an audience of journalists, the then Prime Minister ostentatiously signalled that the struggle against terrorism would no longer be shackled by the traditional safeguards that protect those suspected – but not yet convicted – of involvement in any crime. In the years that followed, the government would introduce a range of measures that would undermine British liberty in the name of fighting terror. Proposals for ninety-day detention without charge, control orders amounting to house arrest, compulsory ID cards and a slew of measures that stifle free speech were proposed as the necessary means of countering the rising threat of al-Qaeda-related terrorism in Britain.

New laws were rapidly formulated and presented by a government desperate to find a legislative way to demonstrate its security credentials in the wake of two terrorist attacks on the capital. Reactive legislation was broadly – and poorly – drafted, often rushed through Parliament under pressure of time that prevented proper scrutiny. Almost inevitably, the new powers were widely construed, without clear focus, which both blunted their operational effectiveness in countering terrorism and left them susceptible to abuse by law enforcement officers acting under operational pressures.

Looking back at Tony Blair’s press conference in August 2005, it is instructive to note the fate of the twelve-point plan he announced, each measure of which was hailed as ‘either being taken now, immediately, or under urgent examination’. Many of the eye-catching measures rushed out were quietly abandoned or rendered unworkable – Hizb ut-Tahrir has not been banned, grounds for deportation have been restricted not expanded, the idea of a maximum time limit on extradition dropped and border controls remain porous.

Equally, while the most repressive measures proposed – control orders, the offence of glorification of terrorism and extending pre-charge detention – have generated political controversy and threatened or undermined individual liberty, they have subsequently proved to be of minimal security value, if not outright counter-productive.

Of the string of measures announced, none posed a greater danger to British liberty than the new proposals to extend detention without charge, a serious threat to the ancient right of habeas corpus. In 2003, the previous seven-day limit on detention without charge – which had proved adequate for dealing with Irish terrorism for the past twenty years – was doubled to fourteen days, in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. While all other serious criminal cases remained subject to a four-day limit (including drug trafficking, organized crime and complex fraud cases), in 2005 Tony Blair sought to extend the time limit in terrorism cases to ninety days, offering no credible evidence as to why yet another massive increase was necessary to protect the public. In November 2005 the ninety-day proposal was rejected, Blair’s first ever parliamentary defeat, but the limit on pre-charge detention was increased to twenty-eight days – as an extraordinary emergency power to be used only in the most exceptional of circumstances.

While the proposals were rushed through without an opportunity for thorough scrutiny, evidence made available since suggests that some increase in the powers of police detention beyond fourteen days was necessary to deal with the increased terrorist threat and the growing number, and increasing complexity, of cases under police investigation. Basic details of the number of suspects and volume of evidence in police counter-terrorism investigations demonstrate some of the operational pressures on police and prosecutors. This was backed up by public briefings from the Security Service, MI5. In 2006, the Director General of MI5 spoke publicly of thirty terror plots threatening Britain and 1600 individuals under surveillance. By 2007, her successor had revised that risk assessment – the Security Service was now monitoring at least two thousand individuals thought to be involved in terrorism – and estimated that there might be a further two thousand they were unable to track.

Nevertheless, the government also increasingly relied on the shroud of secrecy that covers the work of our counter-terrorism authorities to avoid explaining the reasons for extending the powers of the police to hold suspects without charge. And while it has demonstrated an insatiable political appetite for extending the maximum period still further – beyond twenty-eight days – it has not offered any convincing evidence to demonstrate that such a step is necessary.

Between 2005 and 2008 the government put forward numerous proposals to extend the detention without charge beyond twenty-eight days. Seemingly plucked out of the air, proposals for fifty-six, fifty-eight, ninety days and even indefinite detention without charge were all mooted – with the government settling on forty-two days in the face of widespread scepticism from Parliament and the wider public. Despite some indications that Gordon Brown might prove less cavalier as Prime Minister than his predecessor, he made clear his intention to press ahead soon after taking office in June 2007. The government forced the legislation through the House of Commons on 11 June 2008 by nine votes, despite a major revolt by Labour backbenchers and amidst widespread reports of reticent MPs being bullied or offered financial inducements to silence their dissent. One estimate put the price tag on securing the vote as high as £1.2 billion. In October, the forty-two days proposal was subsequently mauled from all sides in the House of Lords. The Home Secretary reacted by accusing all those opposed to forty-two days of ignoring the terrorist threat and withdrawing the proposal from the Counter-Terrorism Bill. Yet at the same time, she published a separate new proposal, with even wider powers to extend pre-charge detention to forty-two days, and threatened to force it through Parliament in the event of another terrorist attack – an irresponsible display of sublime political brinkmanship.

While the government cites police support for forty-two days, the equivalent of a short prison sentence, it has failed to articulate any persuasive justification or present any evidence to back up its case. Nor has it explained why other less repressive measures would provide inadequate alternatives. Instead of presenting a compelling case on the merits, the government has relied on popular nervousness after the 7/7 bombings and the – increasingly abused – public trust that the government would not seek additional security powers unless it was absolutely necessary.

So what is the strength of the case for extending detention without charge in Britain beyond twenty-eight days? A cursory comparison with international practice is revealing. At twenty-eight days the UK already has by far the longest period of pre-charge detention amongst comparable democracies. In Europe, France permits only six days’ pre-charge detention and Germany only two. While the continental justice systems operate differently, these represent the limits on the period of detention without formally laying charges before an accused. In common law countries with a justice system more closely comparable to our own, Australia allows twelve days’ pre-charge detention, New Zealand two and Canada just one day. In the US, after the horrors of 9/11 – and two terms of President George W. Bush’s war on terror – two days’ pre-charge detention has proved more than adequate in dealing with ten recent complex terrorism investigations. Outside the democratic world, Russian law only allows the police to hold suspects for five days, Zimbabwe only allows twenty-one days’ detention and even China only allows police detention of suspects for thirty-seven days. Britain, once a beacon of liberty, now has the longest period of detention without charge in the free world.

If international comparisons suggest that forty-two days is excessive, experience at home points to the same conclusion. While the security environment in Britain has changed in recent years, none of the counter-terrorism investigations in the UK to date have demonstrated the need for a longer period. Twenty-eight days was enough to comfortably deal with the most complex terrorism case we have ever faced, the plot to blow ten transatlantic airliners out of the sky at Heathrow in August 2006. If successful, it would have been the worst terrorist attack in British history, almost certainly causing a greater number of casualties than the attacks in the US on 9/11. Operation Overt, the police investigation that followed, was certainly complex – involving close cooperation with international partners, sifting large amounts of evidence (including computer hard drives and forensic analysis) and reviewing a wide range of suspects. It was held up, on both sides of the debate, as the litmus test case for scrutinizing whether the police can cope with a twenty-eight-day limit.

During Operation Overt, twenty-four suspects were arrested and seventeen were charged with terrorism offences. Of the twenty-four arrested all of those charged with the more serious offences of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to blow up aeroplanes were charged within twenty-one days of arrest. Five were detained on lesser charges of ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’ (and other related offences) to the maximum limit of twenty-eight days.

The five held for twenty-eight days formed the crux of the government’s case for an extension of the time limit. Ministers claimed the police were coming perilously close to having to release terrorists, because they were running out of time to gather the necessary evidence to charge them. But do the facts back this up? Of the five held for twenty-eight days, three were released without any further conditions. They were not placed under any restrictions on release. They were not subject to a control order, or any other related measure, limiting their movements or activities – the clearest indication that, by that point, they were now believed to be entirely unconnected with any terrorist activity relating to Operation Overt. So, the three innocent suspects released after twenty-eight days do not provide evidence that the government needs a longer period of detention to prevent real terrorists from walking free.

However, two of the five suspects were charged at the end of the twenty-eight-day period. But, in both cases, the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service subsequently confirmed that the evidence relied upon to charge them was obtained within four and twelve days of arrest respectively. Furthermore, both suspects were subsequently bailed, which no court would conceivably have allowed if they posed a threat to public safety. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, and the Minister for Security, Tony McNulty, both persistently denied these facts when they were presented to them in the House of Commons. At best, they failed to test the evidence presented to them by the police with the rigour to be expected of ministers. At worst, they disregarded – and then denied – key facts that they found inconvenient as they struggled to make the case for forty-two days. Either amounts to a serious dereliction of ministerial duty. The fact remains that, in the most challenging terrorism investigation the UK has ever had to deal with, police obtained all the evidence necessary to charge all the suspects within twenty-one days – not twenty-eight let alone forty-two days. There was never any risk that the police would have to release a serious terrorist suspect – posing a threat to the public – as a result of the twenty-eight-day limit.

On the contrary, as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) made clear for all counter-terrorism investigations carried out under the twenty-eight-day limit, the law enforcement authorities coped comfortably. Far from being ‘up against the buffers’ operating within the twenty-eight-day limit, as one senior police officer would later irresponsibly claim, the twenty-eight-day maximum limit gave the police ample time to gather the evidence required to make the decision to charge or release, even in the most exceptional of cases. There has been no other evidence or cases – suggested or adduced – that support the case for extending detention without charge beyond twenty-eight days.

This explains why senior law enforcement officials have refused to back yet another extension of the maximum limit – including the DPP, the senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, and a range of senior police officers. While the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police sought to justify the move, his support was based on a ‘pragmatic inference’ that cases are getting more complicated, rather than any particular evidence drawn from police operations.

Further insights into the operational challenges faced during Operation Overt would emerge later at the end of the first trial of eight of the central suspects, which concluded on 9 September 2008. None of the suspects were convicted of conspiracy to blow up aeroplanes, although three were convicted on the more general charge of conspiracy to murder. In the aftermath of the trial, recriminations began to emerge from police, prosecutors and Whitehall, dismayed about the failure to convict anyone of the specific plot to blow the transatlantic airliners at Heathrow out of the sky. Reports trickling through the media suggested that police had been forced to arrest the suspects pre-emptively, by nervous US officials scarred by the experience of 9/11. The arrests were carried out earlier than planned, before the plotters had purchased airline tickets and obtained new passports, which would have provided valuable additional evidence of the specific plot. If this is accurate, and pre-emptive arrests prevented the police and MI5 from catching the plotters red-handed, then no amount of pre-charge detention would be able to rectify that evidential opportunity lost.

In the wake of the verdicts, Andy Hayman, the former officer who ran Operation Overt, went public with a withering critique of the organization of counter-terrorism policing in Britain. He criticized the lack of effective cooperation between local police forces and the Metropolitan Police’s national counter-terrorism command, and went on to highlight a list of operational police failings that were impeding the counter-terrorism effort:

…the present arrangements are frequently clumsy: IT and communication systems are not always joined up; surveillance teams, armed response units and scenes-of-crime officers vary in expertise and capability; the lines of command and control become stretched…These factors are serious enough but they pale into insignificance compared to funding arrangements.

Hayman called for an overhaul of counter-terrorism policing. He was a supporter of ninety days’ pre-charge detention in 2005, yet in his post-mortem of Operation Overt he did not once mention the twenty-eight-day limit amongst the problems he had encountered during that investigation, or more widely.

Lacking any compelling evidence from Operation Overt or any other previous terrorism investigations that could justify an extension beyond the twenty-eight-day limit, the government shifted tack and speculated that Britain could conceivably face multiple attacks, each on the same scale as the Heathrow plot in 2006. This nightmare scenario envisaged five simultaneous attacks in Britain, each equivalent to 9/11. The scenario presented was entirely hypothetical. There was no evidence that it reflected a genuine risk analysis. Nor was there any explanation of how such elaborate, compound and complex plots could be hatched on British soil without alerting the police or security services well in advance.

Curiously, in its zeal, the government had overlooked its own legislation which already provides sweeping powers to deal with genuine national emergencies on that scale. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 was explicitly designed to deal with terrorist threats, amongst other national emergencies. It allows the government to extend pre-charge detention beyond the twenty-eight-day limit by additional, and renewable, thirty-day periods. The extensions are subject to judicial review and parliamentary approval. If the government really needs this power, it must publicly state that there exists an emergency which makes it necessary to use it. If there existed a plot to blow fifty planes out of the sky – the hypothetical scenario posed by the government – there could be little doubt that there would exist a genuine emergency. It would also be both impossible and irresponsible to try to conceal the real situation for more than a few days. In practice, any public statement on the emergency would not need to be made in the immediate midst of a crisis. The government would just be required to make its statement before the expiry of the existing twenty-eight-day pre-charge detention limit. So, even on this hypothetical scenario, there was no need to extend the current twenty-eight-day limit – a reserve power was already in place, subject to robust safeguards.

Even human rights groups like Liberty and barristers, including David Pannick QC, confirmed that such broad emergency powers could be used, removing any conceivable justification for a further extension of the twenty-eight-day limit, even under the worst nightmare scenarios conjured up by ministers. However, the government rejected this analysis on two grounds. It suggested that there were technical difficulties in using the 2004 Act in this way. It also claimed that declaring an emergency would create panic. It is difficult to take either argument seriously. If there are technical difficulties in applying the 2004 Act, they could presumably be addressed through a minor legislative amendment providing the clarity required. Equally, the British public are not known for their disposition to panic, whether during the Blitz of 1940, the campaign of IRA violence, the London bombings in July 2005, in the aftermath of the terrorist plot at Heathrow in August 2006 or during the attacks in Glasgow and London in 2007. On the contrary, British public reaction has been consistently characterized by composure and resolve. Furthermore, the government itself has hardly been shy about publicly briefing blood-curdling assessments of the terrorist threat. MI5 now regularly briefs on the thousands of terror suspects operating in the UK and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner referred to the future terrorist threat as the coming ‘epidemic’. The government’s refusal to consider its existing powers under the 2004 Act, and insistence on draconian new powers, demonstrates its preference for placing Britain under a permanent undeclared state of emergency – rather than a temporary and transparent one, if and when the strict necessity should arise.

Finally, faced with mounting opposition in 2008, the Home Secretary based her proposals for a forty-two-day maximum limit on what she referred to as a ‘precautionary principle’. The precautionary principle is derived from environmental law, which presents a rather different set of challenges to counter-terrorism. There has been no explanation of why this environmental principle is relevant or what it might mean in the context of terrorism. It appears little more than a thin veneer to allow the government to keep returning to Parliament for additional police powers on the basis of an unspecified threat that may or may not materialize at some indeterminate point in the future.

While there is not a shred of hard evidence to support the case for extending detention without charge beyond twenty-eight days, the government has encouraged a common, but wholly misleading, assumption that extending pre-charge detention would help deal with the classic ‘ticking bomb’ scenario – that we need longer than twenty-eight days to hold terrorist masterminds or suicide bombers who might otherwise abscond to launch a terrorist attack. In fact, experience suggests the opposite. The key players in a terrorist plot are, in practice, the least likely to be held for the maximum period of detention without charge, because they are the suspects that tend to be questioned and investigated first. During Operation Overt, all the alleged ringleaders were arrested and charged within twenty-one days. It was only those either subsequently released (without further suspicion) or charged with lesser offences that were held for twenty-eight days.

This case illustrates an emerging trend: it is precisely those most likely to be innocent or least involved in a terrorist conspiracy who are most likely to be held for the longest period of detention. Far from being necessary to deal with imminent threats to public safety or terrorist masterminds, extensions of pre-charge detention are generally used to follow up secondary leads and suspects. Each extension of the maximum period of detention risks exacerbating this trend – delaying the point at which the police need either to charge or release those on the fringe of their investigation. It is often said that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, but the reality of police investigations suggests that those with nothing to hide may be most at risk from extensions of pre-charge detention.

If an innocent person is detained for weeks or months, the consequences can be personally disastrous, even if he is eventually released. The case of Lotfi Raissi demonstrates the devastating impact that prolonged detention without charge can have on a wholly innocent individual. Raissi was an Algerian-born pilot living in London. He was arrested in Britain after 9/11, because he had attended the same flying school as the bombers. US authorities accused him of having taught the 9/11 bombers to fly the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. The FBI quickly realized that this was unlikely to be true. However, the British police held Raissi in pre-charge detention awaiting extradition to the US on the flimsiest basis. He was not held on suspicion of terrorism offences but on trivial grounds, including that he had lied on his pilot’s licence by failing to reveal previous knee surgery – an allegation that was subsequently proved false as well.

It appears that the US authorities were still interested in questioning Raissi, but no longer thought it likely that he was involved in 9/11. The Court of Appeal in Britain later criticized both the US and UK authorities for deploying this ‘device’ to keep Raissi in detention without charge for over four months. The court went on to criticize the British police and the Crown Prosecution Service for ‘serious defaults’ in allowing this abuse of process. The court exonerated Raissi of all allegations, delivering a judgment that paved the way for him to seek compensation. The case shows how, in the wake of a terrorist attack, the police can come under considerable pressure to bend the law at the expense of a suspect who may prove to be entirely innocent.

In this instance an innocent man’s life was left in ruins. Raissi was twice stabbed by prisoners during his period of detention, because of allegations that he had links to the 9/11 terrorists. He suffered two nervous breakdowns under the strain and did not sleep properly for seven years. He lost his job and found himself blacklisted from finding a new one. He became entirely dependent on his family, although in the wake of his arrest both his wife and his brother’s wife also lost their jobs.

If extending pre-charge detention would undermine a fundamental freedom, with severe consequences for the innocent that are imprisoned – as half of all those held for twenty-eight days have been – there is an increasing number of warnings that, far from making us safer, an extension to forty-two days may actually jeopardize our security. In addition to criticisms by human rights lawyers and NGOs, a growing chorus of security experts have publicly declared their opposition to forty-two days – on the basis that it is either irrelevant as a security measure or actually risks making the terrorist threat worse.

While the government has consistently cited evidence from MI5 on the growing numbers involved in terrorism to bolster its case for forty-two days, it is striking that the current and previous two heads of MI5 have either criticized or refused to back an extension beyond twenty-eight days. In an interview in July 2007, the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, made clear her opposition to an extension: ‘It behoves us all to question when governments want to bring in increasingly draconian measures.’

This was followed by further, more recent, criticism from her successor at MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, who declared she could not support the extension to forty-two days ‘on a practical basis or on a principled one’, arguing that the measure was both disproportionate and unworkable. The current Director General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, also refused to publicly back forty-two days. The subsequent riposte from ministers – that MI5 is not responsible for pre-charge detention – flies directly in the face of its regular reliance on MI5’s assessments, not to mention Tony Blair’s public claim in August 2005 that MI5 had then asked for an extension. The reality appears to be that MI5 positively backed an extension beyond fourteen days – but refused to back an extension beyond twenty-eight days.

There is further disquiet within the ranks of the police. Chief Constables and other senior officers have expressed their opposition or reservations in private, with senior officers at the Metropolitan Police letting it be known that the forty-two-day proposal is unworkable, and therefore either irrelevant or counter-productive as a security measure.

Other experts warn against two specific risks generated by prolonged detention without charge. First, the disproportionate effect on innocent young Muslim males risks creating widespread resentment and serving the twisted narrative that extremists and terrorists thrive on – Britain targeting Muslims at home as well as abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such draconian measures alienate whole communities, nurturing the friendly sea within which terrorism thrives. In short, a further extension beyond twenty-eight days risks serving as a recruiting sergeant for terrorism.

During the debate on ninety days, Lord Condon, former head of the Metropolitan Police, raised this concern in explicit terms: ‘If we now go back and make it look like we are going to challenge yet again the point of 28 days that we have reached, I fear that it will play into the hands of the propagandists, who will encourage young men and women…to be misguided, brainwashed and induced into acts of martyrdom.’

More recently, Lord Dear, former Chief Constable of West Midlands Police and a former Chief Inspector of Constabulary, delivered an even starker warning:

Make no mistake, extending pre-charge detention would most certainly be a propaganda coup for al-Qaida…The immediate danger if we travel down this road is that we will lose the battle for hearts and minds abroad, and particularly in the minority groups in this country, whose long-term support is vital if we are to counter and remove the threat of terrorism.

Even the government’s own Security Minister, Lord West, expressed concerns about extending pre-charge detention before being forced to retract them by the Prime Minister:

I want to have absolute evidence that we actually need longer than 28 days. I want to be totally convinced because I am not going to go and push for something that actually affects the liberty of the individual unless there is a real necessity for it. I still need to be fully convinced that we absolutely need more than 28 days and I also need to be convinced what is the best way of doing that.

A growing list of security experts, with front-line experience in the fight against terrorism, are warning that extending pre-charge detention will aggravate, not mitigate, the terrorist threat level.

The second security risk in extending pre-charge is that it will cut off the flow of human intelligence to the police. In 2007, the head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, Peter Clarke, made the case publicly that improving public understanding and trust represents the greatest current challenge we face in addressing the terrorist threat. While Clarke supported the Metropolitan Police’s line in favour of forty-two days, he has also pointed out that very few terrorism prosecutions originate from ‘community intelligence’ – namely members of local communities coming forward to the police with information or cooperation about suspected terrorist activity. This is in marked contrast to the high level of cooperation and intelligence derived from local communities in France and other countries. Clarke warned that: ‘…the lack of public trust in intelligence is in danger of infecting the relationship between the police and the communities we serve. Trust and consent are two concepts that lie at the heart of the relationship between the British police and the public.’

It is increasingly evident that the disproportionate impact of police powers on the Muslim community risks undermining their confidence in and cooperation with the police and security services. This has a direct bearing on our operational capability, choking off vital ‘community intelligence’, which is critical to counter-terrorism investigations. Even the government’s own impact assessment, accompanying the proposal for forty-two days, acknowledges this: ‘Muslim groups said that pre-charge detention may risk information being forthcoming from members of the community in the future.’

The real risk is that further extending pre-charge detention will not just sacrifice the fundamental freedoms of the citizen but also harm our security, both by increasing the radicalization of disaffected young Muslim men, and alienating the local communities whose active cooperation is pivotal to the counter-terrorism effort. Far from involving a delicate balance between collective security and individual liberty, as a security measure forty-two days’ pre-charge detention is unnecessary, if not counter-productive. That is not a trade-off – it is just lose-lose.

In contrast, senior counter-terrorism officers report that one of the most positive developments, helping to combat the climate in which radicalization thrives, has been the recent string of criminal convictions in terrorism cases. Nervous Muslim communities were alarmed by the armed raid in Forest Gate, London, in 2006, which was based on mistaken intelligence relating to a potential chemical bomb attack. Wild conspiracy theories circulated suggesting that the raid was part of a propaganda exercise to hype up the public perception of the terrorist threat. As spurious as these claims were, the subsequent public conduct of trials in other terrorism cases – and the convictions that followed – helped demonstrate, to even the most sceptical quarters, that the UK’s struggle against terrorism is all too real. That in turn has improved the confidence of, and cooperation from, Muslim communities. Peter Clarke argues: ‘The series of terrorist convictions in recent years has been a victory for the rule of law and sends out a strong, positive signal to all communities.’

Again, it is striking that the open and transparent conduct of these criminal cases – through a British justice system that respects fundamental rights – has not only resulted in the long-term incarceration of dangerous terrorists, but also had a positive impact on the climate in which police counter-terrorism operations take place.

It is a popular myth that we now face the dilemma of weighing security considerations against the liberty of the individual. In fact, the publicly available evidence on both sides of this debate points broadly in the same direction. Sustaining the fundamental liberties every individual enjoys in this country as of right provides one of our most important tools in refuting propaganda from Islamic radicals and terrorists. Protecting the fundamental freedoms of all British citizens is critical to puncturing the myths propagated by extremists and ensuring cooperation between local Muslim communities and the police, which is in turn vital to the UK’s counter-terrorism capability.

In addition to these security risks, the government’s fixation on pre-charge detention has also distracted its political focus and energies from a range of other much needed measures, which could strengthen our operational counter-terrorism edge. If the government had expended a fraction of the political capital that it has squandered on forty-two days on these measures it could have strengthened national security without sacrificing British liberties.

Take just three examples. First, removing the ban on using intercept evidence in court would help the police gather evidence that could be used in trial proceedings. Almost every other country in the world has overcome security concerns to allow the use of intercept evidence in court to prosecute terrorists. In the UK, intercept evidence can be used in deportation proceedings, control order cases and applications to court to freeze terrorist assets. But despite numerous reviews, British prosecutors – virtually alone in the world – are still banned from using intercept evidence to convict terrorists in court. In its obsession with forty-two days, the government has neglected a valuable tool that would put terrorists behind bars without undermining the freedom of the innocent.

Second, allowing police to question terrorist suspects after they have been charged would take some of the pressure off the police during the pre-charge investigation period. There have been calls for the introduction of post-charge questioning for several years, but the government inexplicably delayed until 2008 before making any formal proposals in this regard.

Third, one of the arguments used to support the case for extending pre-charge detention is that evidence on computer hard drives may be encrypted and take time to decipher. In response, Parliament created a criminal offence for withholding encryption keys and computer passwords, allowing prosecutors to charge and imprison suspects for obstructing an investigation in this way. By the time of the vote on forty-two days in 2008, there were still no convictions under this new power, despite repeated reliance by the government on the volume and encryption of computer data in terrorism investigations as part of its case for extending pre-charge detention.

The lack of commitment to these kinds of practical measures reveals serious shortcomings in the government’s security strategy. Equally, while the government has been all too willing to deploy senior police officers to try to make its case for forty-two days, it has failed to listen to – let alone act upon – the operational concerns now being expressed publicly by senior officers like Andy Hayman. In its obsession to force through controversial extensions of pre-charge detention, the government has neglected or overlooked valuable law enforcement measures capable of attracting political – and a wider national – consensus.

The presentation of a crude trade-off between security and liberty is at odds with the basic facts. The government’s sustained assault on the right of habeas corpus has exacerbated the terrorist threat rather than reduce it, and distracted it from other practical counter-terrorism priorities. Fifty-four per cent of those asked in 2008 said that the government’s main motivation for pressing its proposals on forty-two days was ‘to look tough on terror’ rather than national security. That is not a balance or a trade-off – but rather a hijacking of security policy for political ends. If the government is eventually successful in its stubborn attempt to extend pre-charge detention to forty-two days, it would set a dangerous precedent – with nothing to stop it from returning to seek yet further extensions in the future.

This pattern is mirrored more widely in the recent approach to counter-terrorism in the UK. The government has passed broad powers with inadequate safeguards and checks, which are prone to overuse or abuse in practice. Stop and search, under new terrorism powers, is running at 41,900 cases per year. Between 2001 and 2007 there were 1228 arrests on suspicion of terrorism. The rate of convictions over the same period remains, at forty-one, comparatively low in terms of overall numbers, although the proportion of terrorism prosecutions resulting in a conviction is now over 90 per cent.

A broad brush approach is open to abuse. It was disclosed that during one month in 2007 police at Gatwick airport conducted hundreds of random searches outside the (already wide) rules, without the required ministerial authorization. And the wider the powers, the greater the risk that innocent people will be caught in a security net so widely cast. In one case, in 2005, Sally Cameron, a thirty-four-year-old property developer from Dundee, was arrested and detained for four hours as a terrorist suspect. Ms Cameron, who used to walk to work to keep fit, was arrested under the Terrorism Act. Two police cars were called to apprehend her merely for walking along a cycle path restricted to cyclists under security regulations – even though there was no visible signpost indicating any restrictions on access to the pathway.

In another episode, a disabled twelve-year-old boy and his parents were detained under the Terrorism Act, police accusing his mother of people-trafficking her mixed-race son. The family were surrounded by ten police officers and detained for two hours, until officers resolved the misunderstanding.

Other security measures have undermined liberty, with minimal countervailing security gains. The government has been forced to continuously fend off legal challenge to its control order regime, rushed through Parliament in 2005 after the House of Lords struck down its attempt to detain foreign terrorist suspects indefinitely without charge. The control order legislation created wide powers that allow severe restrictions to be placed on those merely suspected of involvement with terrorism. While an order made by the Home Secretary must be confirmed by a judge, it can be imposed on people who have not been proved guilty of any criminal offence. The orders may include controls on who a person can meet with or speak to, bar access to the internet or telephone and impose restrictions on when a person can leave his home and where he can go – amounting to virtual house arrest for up to sixteen hours per day.

Control orders impose what amounts to a criminal punishment, but circumvent the basic rights of an accused to a proper trial. This deliberate evasion of one of the most basic foundations of British justice not only undermines liberty, but also generates acute resentment amongst the local community affected, with little extra security guaranteed in return. Only thirty individuals have been placed on control orders – while MI5 estimates that four thousand people pose a terrorist threat in Britain. Paradoxically, as the terrorist threat rose, the government’s reliance on control orders declined. There were eighteen control orders in force in 2006, fourteen in 2007 and just eleven by the first quarter of 2008. This trend suggests that, for all the ministerial hype, control orders have proved to be a relatively ineffectual tool in practice – otherwise the government would have made greater use of them as the terrorist threat level rose.

This inference is supported by wider experience. A fifth of those placed on control orders have escaped. A recent government review found that control orders were only suitable for a ‘small number of cases, in the absence of a viable alternative for those few instances’. Lord Carlile, the government-nominated reviewer of the control order regime, has acknowledged the difficulties in monitoring and enforcing control orders, even suggesting that anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), used by the police to tackle yob culture, might work just as well in practice. Other measures, to strengthen border controls and intelligence are likely to achieve far more in terms of public protection, at far less cost to individual liberty. The government should focus more on bolstering law enforcement through the courts – by using intercept evidence and post-charge questioning – not weakening safeguards designed to protect the innocent.

The government introduced legislation providing for a national identity register coupled with compulsory identity cards with similar enthusiasm. The proposals epitomize its clumsy, authoritarian approach to security.

In 2003, the government announced its plans for ID cards amidst great fanfare, another eye-catching initiative designed to portray a Labour administration taking tough measures to improve security, at the cutting edge of modern technology. The proposals involve taking nearly fifty categories of personal information on each and every citizen, to be stored on a Home Office database and shared with other government departments, agencies and even foreign governments. Privacy campaign groups like Liberty and NO2ID warn that the ID cards will intrude into our privacy, enabling government departments and companies liberally to share masses of our personal data – including name, date of birth, addresses, identity records, photographs, signature and fingerprints – allowing the state and businesses continuously to track the movements and transactions of every citizen. While the government has sought to give assurances about privacy protection, safeguards and limits, the ID cards legislation gives the Home Secretary wide powers to extend the scope and remit of the ID cards regime by order, adding a further risk of mission creep once the system is fully operational.

Privacy concerns have been further exacerbated by growing doubts about the government’s ability to implement the ID cards project. Fear of wide state powers to collect data on the citizen have only been made worse by the reality that careless and unaccountable civil servants will be charged to run the system. Government-managed databases have an appalling track record when it comes to protecting personal data (see Chapter 4), which means ID cards threaten to make us less – not more – safe.

At a more fundamental level, compulsory ID cards reverse the traditional relationship between the citizen and the state in this country. While historically in Britain the state has been accountable to the citizen, ID cards mark a significant shift, making it the presumption – rather than the exception – that the state has the right to peer into an individual’s private life and keep tabs on every citizen. Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, a privacy watchdog, has expressed ‘increasing alarm’ that ID cards are: ‘ …beginning to represent a very significant sea change in the relationship between the state and every individual in this country’.

Ministers have tried to overcome widespread concern by touting ID cards as a way of solving benefit fraud, illegal immigration and terrorism. Yet, one by one, the government’s claims for ID cards have dissolved under examination. First, it was claimed that ID cards would tackle benefit fraud. However, the overwhelming majority of benefit fraud involves people lying about their personal circumstances – only a fraction of cases involve misrepresentation of identity. Besides, the technology ID cards use is itself highly vulnerable to cloning and, therefore, fraud. So, far from protecting against scams, Microsoft’s National Technology Officer has warned that ID cards could trigger ‘massive identity fraud on a scale beyond anything we have seen before’.

Next, it was said that ID cards would prevent illegal immigration. This was difficult to sustain in light of the exemption from ID cards for all short-term visitors (under three months) to the UK. Even if that loophole was closed, independent tests have shown that the IT used in both biometric passports and ID cards can be cloned within minutes, a vulnerability that those profiting from illegal immigration are bound to exploit.

Finally, it was claimed that ID cards would help prevent terrorism. This assertion proved equally flawed since the vast majority of terrorists do not hide their identity, but rather actively seek notoriety. Spanish ID cards did not stop the Madrid bombers in 2004, Turkish ID cards did not stop the Istanbul bombers in 2003 and German ID cards did not stop the Hamburg terrorist cell that planned 9/11. In Britain, ID cards will do little to stop British-based bombers since it will not be mandatory to carry and produce the card on request. Nor could ID cards protect Britain from foreign terrorists – because short-stay visitors will not be required to hold one. Ministers have now openly conceded that ID cards will do little to prevent terrorism or crime, the Home Office website listing, as popular ‘myth’, that ‘ID cards can stop global terrorism and crime’. As the Home Office’s Security Minister candidly accepted: ‘Perhaps in the past the Government, in its enthusiasm, oversold the advantages of identity cards. We did suggest, or at least implied, that they may well be a panacea for identity fraud, for benefit fraud, terrorism, entitlement and access to public services.’

Unsurprisingly, as the ongoing debate has exposed the flaws in the government’s plans, public enthusiasm for, and confidence in, ID cards has plummeted – with support dropping from 78 per cent in 2003 to 43 per cent in 2007, with 48 per cent of those asked opposed.

In response to widespread criticisms, Home Office ministers decided to phase the roll-out of ID cards. Revised plans announced in 2008 will first target airport workers, then foreign nationals and subsequently students and other sections of the population. Rather than cancel an increasingly discredited policy, the government has shifted its approach, looking to introduce a national system by stealth.

ID cards were presented as a trade-off that would create a small amount of inconvenience but make us all much more secure. The evidence shows that the policy is a fraud – ID cards will impinge on individual liberty and jeopardize our personal security. Given these flaws, and independent estimates that the programme could cost up to £19 billion, the government should scrap its plans for a national ID card register and focus on practical security measures – including improving the integrity of the biometric technology used in visas and passports.

In addition to inroads on habeas corpus, the erosion of the presumption of innocence and reckless intrusions into personal privacy, national security has been used as a pretext for a further government assault on free speech and peaceful protest.

Freedom of speech dates back to the Bill of Rights of 1689. It has been protected by the common law in Britain for centuries, and serves as one of the hallmarks of liberal democracy. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘the liberty of speaking and writing…guards our other liberties’. Nevertheless, freedom of speech has never justified violence. Mill’s classic exposition of liberty explicitly acknowledged that the exercise of individual rights can be limited where it would involve doing harm to others. In short, liberty tolerates those expressing obnoxious or offensive views, but not those who stir up violence or otherwise direct harm against other people. This distinction marks the dividing line in a free society that tolerates free speech but outlaws incitement to violence. In marked contrast, since 1997 the government’s contorted approach has curtailed legitimate free speech on spurious security grounds, but ignored – or been slow to act against – those posing a real threat, such as fanatics who preach extremism and call for violent jihad against Britain.

Widely drawn new security legislation has been over-zealously enforced by police officers against soft targets like peace activists, students and other peaceful protesters in a wholly unnecessary and disproportionate manner. New powers were used to fine the sellers of ‘Bollocks to Blair’ T-shirts (£80 per offence) and arrest, search and eject Walter Wolfgang, a refugee from the Holocaust and member of the Labour Party, who heckled ‘nonsense’ at the Foreign Secretary as he was making the case for the war in Iraq during his speech at the 2005 Labour Party conference.

New security laws have also been used to stifle free speech and protest within one kilometre around the Houses of Parliament. Originally introduced as a precaution against security threats or disorder close to such a sensitive location, new legislation has been relied upon to suppress peaceful protest no matter how small the number of people involved. In May 2006, the Metropolitan Police spent £110,000 raiding and removing Brian Haw’s one-man anti-war protest against British operations in Iraq. The same legislation was used to prosecute and convict two anti-war protesters who read the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq at the Cenotaph on Whitehall. In response to widespread opposition, the government announced a review of the legislation in March 2008, but left it unclear what security restrictions on free speech will remain in place.

ASBOs have also been used to muzzle free speech. Philip Howard, a street evangelist who regularly preached on Oxford Street, was ASBOed in 2006 by Westminster Council after receiving complaints. Mr Howard became famous for his quirky religious catchphrases – such as ‘Don’t be a sinner, be a winner’ – and was generally tolerated by passers-by shopping in central London. His public preaching may have irritated a few people, but was harmless. The use of ASBO legislation by local authorities to silence him is yet another abuse of new law enforcement powers at the expense of free speech.

In 2005, the government again cited security as the basis for its efforts to enact a crime of ‘glorifying’ terrorism. It introduced legislation that aimed to ban public expression of views that indirectly give encouragement to or condone terrorism. The offence was challenged by opposition politicians and civil liberties groups, on grounds of free speech, because it went well beyond even indirect incitement to terrorism. The final law was watered down from the original proposal, so much so that it has never been used in practice. However, critics insist that existing law for prosecuting incitement to violence is perfectly adequate, and that the new definition risks stifling legitimate debate – with legal experts arguing that the new offence is broad enough to prosecute people commemorating the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa or the Easter Rising of 1916 against British rule in Ireland.

In a further round of government proposals aimed at prohibiting offensive language being used against minorities, ministers brushed aside objections on the grounds of free speech to produce proposals to outlaw inciting religious hatred. Accused of excessive political correctness, the government was originally defeated when it sought to ban incitement to religious hatred with a definition so broad that it risked having a chilling effect on legitimate topics of religious debate. A diluted version of the law was eventually adopted in 2006. It avoids criminalizing language which is merely abusive or offensive, and requires an intention to threaten another person on religious grounds – which would already render the language unlawful under existing law. However, the dilution of the new criminal offence has not stopped the police from trying to prosecute those engaging in legitimate public debate about religious and political opinions. In one ludicrous case, police issued a summons to a fifteen-year-old boy, threatening prosecution under the Public Order Act, for attending a peaceful demonstration holding a placard describing the Church of Scientology as a ‘cult’.

What makes the government’s position so alarming is that, while taking repressive action against those airing legitimate opinions, it has at the same time cosseted those preaching vitriol and violence. In 2007, the Dispatches documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’ revealed the homophobic, sexist and intolerant preaching of extremist Muslim clerics at the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham. The documentary showed preachers referring to homosexuals as ‘filthy dogs’, justifying the 7/7 bombings and explicitly calling for the death of those who convert from Islam. West Midlands Police recommended to the Crown Prosecution Service that it consider a prosecution – not against the preachers, but, rather, the filmmakers for allegedly misrepresenting the views of the clerics and undermining community relations. Even when it became clear that there was no evidence to back up this unfounded allegation, police and prosecutors still referred allegations against the programme to Ofcom, the media watchdog. Ofcom threw out the complaint, finding that Channel 4 and Dispatches had produced the documentary accurately and responsibly. Channel 4 and Dispatches responded by suing the police and the CPS for libellously suggesting that the documentary had been selectively edited in order to distort the views of the preachers. The police and CPS were forced to issue a public apology and pay a six-figure sum by way of compensation. The case demonstrates how broad public order powers, coupled with a culture of excessive political correctness, can lead to flagrant lack of respect for legitimate free speech, while simultaneously tolerating fanatical extremism – a naïve approach with dangerous consequences both for our security and our freedom.

In another case, a whistle-blower, Derek Pasquill, disclosed sensitive Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) documents which appeared in newspapers, exposing FCO engagement with extremist Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, some of whose members have connections with terrorism. Far from forcing an embarrassed FCO to reconsider its policy on engagement with radical Islamic groups, the government’s reaction to this controversial exposé was to press for a prosecution against Mr Pasquill for breaching the Official Secrets Act. The prosecution’s case collapsed when senior FCO officials admitted that a prosecution could not succeed, because Pasquill’s actions were actually beneficial – encouraging a constructive debate on a serious matter of public interest.

It is remarkable, too, how, having stifled peaceful protest and closed down legitimate debate in the most harmless of circumstances, government policy has been so tolerant of those who stir up extremism and violence. In February 2006, demonstrations were held in London against the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a manner that many Muslims found offensive and insensitive. Around five hundred protesters were involved in the protests that followed, and a small number of people carried placards calling on Muslims to ‘bomb’ the US and Denmark, ‘massacre those who insult Islam’ and urging ‘whoever insults a prophet, kill him’. Four protesters were prosecuted and convicted of soliciting murder in July 2007. As David Perry QC, the prosecuting barrister argued, the words used were plainly criminal: ‘If you shout out, “Bomb, bomb Denmark; bomb, bomb USA”, there is no doubt about what you intend your audience to understand…The prosecution case is that the defendant was clearly encouraging people to commit murder – terrorist killing. This was not simply a demonstration about cartoons. It was a recruitment for terror.’

The court agreed and convicted the accused. Notwithstanding the criminal prosecutions, it is difficult to understand the police decision to allow protesters to proceed with their demonstration in the first place, carrying banners that openly incited violence. The Metropolitan Police said they had allowed the protest to continue for fear of public disorder – itself an astonishing sop to extremism, at the expense of law enforcement. But they then waited a further six weeks before making any arrests. In contrast, the government was quick to condemn the Danish cartoons, which, though offensive to many Muslims, did not incite violence.