In February, nine British Muslims taking part in George Galloway’s Viva Palestina aid convoy to Gaza were arrested on the motorway under the Terrorism Act. They were eventually released without charge. But the impact on support from the rest of the community was naturally chilling.
Last week, reports in the Guardian and by the Institute of Race Relations highlighted how the government’s £140 million (US$232 million) Prevent program, which is supposed to mobilize Muslim community opposition to terrorism, is being used for what Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti calls the “biggest spying program in Britain in modern times.” Schools, community groups and colleges are required to provide information on everything from the opinions to the sex lives of Muslims not even suspected of involvement in violence.
Underlying the abuse of the program has been a dangerous shift in official counter-terror policy, which in parallel with the wider police surveillance of protest group, now targets “non-violent extremism,” rather than simply those who might want to launch bomb attacks on buses and tubes. The idea is that, as Ed Husain of the government-funded Quilliam Foundation puts it, non-violent Islamists — rather than Western wars in the Muslim world — provide the “mood music” for terror groups and spying on them is “good and it is right.”
In reality, both the mass surveillance and the government’s decision to widen its target from the violent to the elastic McCarthyite catch-all of “extreme” is spreading fear and mistrust, intimidating Muslims from taking part in mainstream politics and undermining the very people who can most effectively challenge those drawn towards indiscriminate violence.
Intelligence is anyway notoriously unreliable, because it cannot be properly tested as evidence — whether on the grand scale of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or in more routine injustices, such as the 2006 raid in London’s Forest Gate, in which police shot an innocent man on the basis of groundless intelligence about a chemical bomb.
That’s one of the unwitting messages of the new official history of MI5 by the loyal historian Christopher Andrew. While clearing a faction of the security service of having plotted against Harold Wilson, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Andrew gives credence to absurd claims that the pre-eminent 1970s trade union leader Jack Jones was a paid KGB agent — this on the account of the same defector who once claimed to general ridicule that the former Labour leader Michael Foot had been a Soviet agent codenamed Boot.
Which is a timely reminder of the self-serving tendency to fantasy among intelligence organizations. Unleashing such people on those exercising their right to protest or take part in non-violent politics has got nothing to do with the defense of the democratic process — it’s an assault on democracy.
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