DEMOS

Ok, so I have to mention this. I watched John Reid's speech on telly by pressing the red button on BBC News 24 where you can choose the feeds from various events and this morning John's speech at Demos was one of them. I guess I was probably one of, oh, 6 people watching.

The strange thing was that about half way through the speech, the footage from Demos was replaced by a clip from Thunderbirds of bad guy The Hood doing something evil. Glitch I thought, but then realised there was a strange similarity between Mr Reid and The Hood.

It turns out other people have noticed this too so I'm wondering whether the beeb let the kids on work experience loose on the feed from Demos this morning? Or of course, it could have been an entirely innocent mistake...

John Reid's speech was a bit of a glowing endorsement of the firm position we've taken on security in recent years. We've been telling anyone who'll listen that we need to get beyond the silly idea that governments can do security to us or for us on our behalf - lasting and genuine security will only be achieved through partnership.

Nice words. But is the government really ready to embrace partnership in practice?

Partnership involves opening up decision-making processes,  being less squeemish about sharing information, listening rather than talking, being ready to follow rather than lead in some cases and, importantly, realising that partnership does not mean dictating the terms of debate and telling people what to do.

If the government wants to realise the ambition of partnership it will have to meet people half-way.

Watch this space.

Grahame is right in saying that we were very pleased to welcome John Reid to Demos this morning, especially to have a more informal conversation with members of community groups that Demos has worked with. 

Certain aspects of his speech, however, seemed to rest on a set of questionnable assumptions about the trade-offs that citizens have to accept in order to live in a safe and secure society.  On the one hand, the message of his speech was that the UK is under threat from groups of people who reject the principles of equality and freedom that are the cornerstone of the society in which we live. 

But conversely, he seemed to suggest that the only way to tackle this threat was by accepting that certain aspects of the human rights agenda - on which most liberal democracies are at least partly based - were designed for another age.  Rather than resisiting threats to our liberty by celebrating and building on the strengths inherent in a freer, if riskier, society, we should accept the premise that our safety can only be ensured by ever greater impositions on our individual freedoms.

Like much government policy at the moment, the shortfall seems to lie in their nervousness about engaging with grey areas created by the constantly changing context of implementing new ideas.  In seeking out a solution that will work in every eventuality, policymakers create a climate of fear and an erosion of freedoms that is counterproductive for generating real, community-based solutions to the threats that we face.  There is a fundamental difference between expressing extreme views and actually carrying out terrorist attacks.  Our approach to guaranteeing security whilst also guaranteeing our liberty should reflect that vitally important distinction.  Fighting some threats to our freedoms through the removal of others seems a dangerously limited solution to the problems we face.

And there is the practical problem that if your approach alienates the people you want to partner with, there's not that much of a chance they'll want to cooperate with you.

If commentators can agree on ONE thing about the fall of the Soviet Union, it is that the final collapse started in Helsinki in 1975, when East and West agreed to a series of so-called baskets (more here).  These baskets (economic, human and security) led to the liberalization of Iron Curtain relations.  That's how East Germans got access to West German radio and TV broadcasting, and were able to understand for themselves the power and importance of fundamental liberties.

The PM has been giving a number of speeches articulating why, in his view, the current struggle against Al Qaeda is an existential one, in the sense that islamist fundamentalism is after the values that "the West" embodies.  He isn't the only one.

But as the Cold War showed, in cases such as these (and it is left to debate whether Al Qaeda poses such a threat to our lifestyle), the solution isn't necessarily more control orders and more extraordinary renditions (of course, when it has been judicially deemed necessary, with all due respect to the rule of law, such measures are useful and do enhance our security as well as embody those very values).  The solution, in my view, should be more student visas, more exchange programs, more Wilton Parks, more British Museum exhibits such as this one, etc.  Basically, what we're trying to argue in our Cultural Diplomacy programme.

More on this soon, as I'm struggling with our first seminar report.

Indeed, thanks for this Hannah and Rachel. The feeling that I should automatically advocate the erosion of civil liberties, fought for and protected over the years, just because I am not in favour of certain oppressive regimes abroad has been bugging me all day.

Trying to split the complex issues that John Reid addressed at Demos today into such a sharp dichotomy left me feeling backed into a corner, and even further confused about whether the government actually wants to address the challenges it faces sensibly or just engage in exercises of propaganda and scaremongering.

Your comments suggest how government can begin to approach these challenges, fairly and effectively, while maintaining the trust and respect of the citizens that elected it. Now I am some way clearer to understanding what should happen next...

This (security) is a difficult topic – more difficult for those who actually have to take decisions than for commentators who can maintain a theoretically pure position on issues either for the sake of argument, or because they don’t have to worry about the politics/operational realities of the situation. That said, though, four things bothered me in the speech:

1. Can you ‘misuse freedoms’? Isn’t that the point of them?
2. If we hold some freedoms to be universal – i.e. that they apply everywhere in the world and we shouldn’t settle for any less – then is it right that they should shift over time?
3. If we acknowledge the need for government to join forces with communities/other actors, then why is the debate so often about giving the state more powers to solve the problem for us?
4. The suggestion that some people just don’t ‘get it’. He asked for a debate on these issues – and to his credit stayed to actually debate them with people from a range of backgrounds afterwards. But is framing that debate as people who ‘get it’ vs people who don’t a helpful way of doing this?

I think Rachel's point about not alienating people you want to create partnerships with is an important one. Reid suggested that some asylum seekers and students enter the UK with the aim to 'plot for more repressive regimes' and 'express contempt for the intellectual freedoms that have been the bedrock of our academic institutions'. However he did not mention that the most catastrophic example of the security threat he was talking about was not carried out by immigrants but by people born in Britain. Rather than looking to protect British citizens by restricting entry to the UK for foreign nationals, perhaps a closer examination of the context in which the three young UK born 7/7 bombers felt alienated enough from their own country to commit such atrocities.

John Reid said in his speech (and repeated several times later on) that he didn't believe in a Huntingdonesque "clash of civilisations". Rather, he said, it is a case of "the terrorists" on one side and "the rest of us" on the other. But he then spent a lot of the second half of his speech talking about values, and the threats currently posed to the values widely accepted in Britain. In particular he focussed on beliefs about the position of women in society, and used the example of the Taliban in Afghanistan as an oppressive Islamist regime with minimal respect for women's or other civil rights. His speech came dangerously close to conflating the holding of values other than our own, including some pretty abhorrent views on women and on how society should be run, with the advocation of terror and violence against civilians. This is increasingly common within the government, which frequently equates terrorism with “extremism” or “radicalization”. Quite apart from matters of principle, in practical terms criminalising people simply for the views they hold and express, however much we disagree with them, can only be counter-productive, and make some people more likely to turn to violence as a means of expressing views which the government is increasingly refusing to allow them to express peacefully.