08:20 (on the Today Programme): 'I'm not convinced we need to hold terror suspects longer than 28 days'
09:05 (having had breakfast with Gordon Brown): 'Actually, I am convinced'

Not even the PM’s spokesperson could manage a decent explanation as to why Lord West had changed his mind – so Lord West was asked to. As the Guardian reported he claimed that :

"Being a simple sailor not a politician maybe I didn't choose my words well ... Maybe my choice of words wasn't very clever,"

As the Guardian noted this was from the man who had been chief of defence intelligence, commanded three frigates, and is the holder of a distinguished service cross.

Liberty have created a useful graph to illustrate how long the UK already hold terror suspects in comparison to other countries.

On Newsnight last night Patrick Mercer (Conservative MP advising Lord West) also claimed that there was a lack of evidence.

The government suffered an embarrassing defeat in 2005 when it tried to increase the number of days in detention to 90. Why the government is choosing to go down this path, when there is no clear evidence for doing so raises numerous questions – not least - who is giving them this advice in the first place?

Today the Conservative Party will publish their national and international security policy paper. Brown’s sharp piece of political maneuvering will leave Cameron and his national security adviser Pauline Neville Jones only a few recommendations to choose from. In his statement Brown was able to announce the creation of a unified border police (the centre piece of the Conservative's proposal), propose a £70 million pound fund for local communities to resist violent extremism and announce 2 further things the government should have done 3 years ago

Take for example the issue of the Intelligence Security Council – last week Brown said ‘we will consult on whether and how the Intelligence and Security Committee can be appointed by, and report to, Parliament…’ This week he said ‘the Government is consulting on how in future the ISC should be appointed and should report to Parliament.’

Last week Brown said we have created a new National Security Committee (he actually said Council and this was, according to a senior Cabinet Office official, so as not to confuse us as there were lots of references to committees in his statement). This week he said we have created a new National Security Committee.

Last week he said the Government will regularly publish, for Parliamentary debate and public scrutiny, our national security strategy. This week he said let me confirm to the House that in future we will publish a national security strategy; he also added it would be published in the autumn – a precious Whitehall document then…

Last week he said… you get the point…

Brown also mooted the idea of a single security budget. However to date no one seems to be able to tell me precisely what this will entail. Could it mean a single national security budget (i.e. the budgets of MoD, FCO, DFID, Intelligence agencies, etc) or (and I think more likely) a single budget for counter terrorism.

He also said that the Government would separate the position of Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee from policy adviser to the government as called for by Lord Butler in his inquiry into WMDs. It is I think important to note that Lord Butler’s inquiry was 3 years ago. It’s hardly new.  

Brown said the Government has created a new National Security Committee to oversee the new Office for Security and Counter Terrorism… but the new committee is an amalgamation of three former committees on the EU, DOP and Security and Terrorism (the last one being a result of John Reid’s counter terrorism review and created by Tony Blair a few weeks before he left). So surely the new committee will oversee much more? After all national security is not just about counter terrorism.

Finally Brown gave ID cards the green light and said that the identity scheme will help prevent people already in the country using multiple identities for terrorist, criminal or other purposes. The majority of experts still don’t agree with this.

Brown also said the UK’s watchlist would be linked to the Interpol database of lost and stolen documents – why the Government is only doing this now is beyond me.

And to round it all off he stated that overall 4000 foreign prisoners are likely to be deported this year. This is going to be tricky – given that last year Lin Homer, the director- general of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, admitted to MPs that it could take “a number of years” to turn around the department and that 1,019 foreign national prisoners involved in the deportations scandal were likely to stay. Unless there has been a change in policy or the law.

The report noted that terrorist attacks in London in July 2005 and the March 2004 attacks in Spain had "taught many in the law enforcement community worldwide to pay more attention to the important role that a local police officer plays by engagement with the community and ethnic groups". An issue we highlighted in the Demos pamphlet Bringing it home.

Perhaps the most interesting observation is by the Police Chief of Providence, Rhode Island, who describes the government’s response to terrorism as that of a “Cyclops,” which can only focus its attention on one thing at a time.

He said, “I think the United States is this great giant, and that when it focuses on a problem it can tackle it. But that sometimes, I fear this giant is a Cyclops and has but one eye, and when it pivots to address a new problem it loses attention on what it was looking at.” 

Summing up what most of Westminster and Whitehall is thinking, The Guardian (among others) argues, ‘the secrecy of planning for change, a deadline that looks more political than practical and the pall of confusion still shrouding who does what, all suggest its first objective is evidence of action, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the intended benefit of a sharper focus on fighting terrorism.’

Publicly the changes will allow the Home Secretary to be seen taking the threat seriously by adapting parts of the national security system. Privately he and his advisers will be toasting their success. In one move he has hived off everything that was in a state of disrepair, bad publicity or too difficult to manage.

According to the email, since 2005 Jonathan Evans has served as the Security Service's Deputy Director General. Prior to that, the main focus of his work has been on counter-terrorism, both domestic and international. He served as the head of international counter-terrorism investigations from 1999 to 2001, and was appointed director of international counter-terrorism only ten days before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. Since then he has played a leading role in tackling the threat of al Qaida and related terrorist networks.

This is the first of three seminars focusing on national security and part of a 12 month project looking at the public value of security. The seminar is by invitation only.

Speakers:
Dr Wendy Piatt, Director General, Russell Group
Dr Paul Cornish is the Carrington Chair in International Security and Head, International Security Programme, Chatham House

Chair
Charlie Edwards, Head, Security Programme, Demos

An essential element of SSR to address is a National Security Strategy, required to provide direction and strategic objectives to each of the security portfolios.

Elsewhere The Independent leads with a question about Freedom of Information, more precisely What Freedom of Information? Separately the two articles are newsworthy items of some interest. Read together they raise interesting questions about what information the Government is prepared to make public.

The interview in The Times is very open. According to Sir Glenn Tornado jet fighters are being scrambled on intercept counter-hijacking operations every month to check on commercial airliners flying into British airspace.

Apparently, four quick-reaction alert Tornado F3 planes are on permanent standby to investigate any plane that has not conformed precisely to accepted flight control procedures. Furthermore, we are told two Tornado’s are based at RAF Marham in Norfolk and a further two at RAF Leuchars.  In addition, RAF fighter crews are kept in close proximity to royal flights in case of terror emergencies (which might help answer the first of the FOI requests from the Independent).

We are told that the RAF’s new Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft will take over the role of guarding airspace from hijacked airlines in the southern approaches for the first time and that they will operate from RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire.

Finally (if this wasn’t enough) it is revealed that although the Prime Minister would normally have to give personal authorisation for an airliner to be shot down, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Transport Secretary also have the necessary authorisation.

But would we have been able to solicit such detailed information under the FOI Act.

I doubt it. The Government is exempt from providing information from such a request if it would adversely affect defence, national security or public safety. But I take it that the point of the Times article is to demonstrate how the Government is preparing for such a terrorist attack, highlight the scale of the threat and reassure the public that things are under control (and if I were a cynic to highlight the importance of the RAF at a time when the media is focusing on the British Army).

Such a schizophrenic approach to information by Labour can only harm Government in the long term.

Put simply, broad access to information promotes better decisions. It permits public understanding of the activities of government and promotes more informed debate and accountability. And such access to information provides ground in which the public’s faith in its government can flourish.

On the other hand, the side effects of secrecy are numerous, the most obvious being the leaking of information.

As the scope of secrecy grows the prospect of leaking, nearly always on an anonymous basis, does as well.  But as Sissela Bok argues leaking has a symbiotic relationship with secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no need to leak information. As government secrecy grows and comes to involve more people, the opportunities to leak from within expand; and with increased leaking, governments intensify their efforts to shore up secrecy.

As the US Congress Report of the Commission on protecting and reducing government secrecy suggests, An organisation with a secret will hold to it unless there is some exchange for releasing it. The Government becomes a market. Sometimes the exchange is quite palpable: I will exchange my secret for your secret. Sometimes less tangible: the willingness to bring along secrets can provide access for other purposes. But whatever the coinage, there are considerable transaction costs, as economists use this term. These are sluggish markets and highly imperfect ones; true prices are rarely known and impossible to determine.

One of Labour’s New Year resolutions should be to (re)create a culture of openness in government; it may well prove to be profitable in the long term.

Fast forward to today and Patrick Mercer has accused the government of being "hugely complacent" about a further terrorist attack on London. In an interview with the Parliamentary Monitor magazine, Patrick Mercer has condemned Labour for failing to appoint a cabinet level figure in charge of anti-terrorist measures. "The government does not have anyone prepared to take on this job with both hands, and that is why we need a single minister at cabinet rank to deal with this."

The problem I have with calling for a Minister is that it is fundamentally a political not operational issue. The Government has a plethora of people prepared to take on this job with both hands, in the Cabinet Office, Home Office, Ministry of Defence, DCLG and the Treasury. Herein lies the problem. We know the system is not working as it should. The UK’s ability to foresee and respond to increasingly complex and networked threats is handicapped by an archaic and compartmentalized interagency system that dates from before the Cold War. We need to think about redesigning the system.

The Conservative Party really believe that having a Minister in the Home Office (at Cabinet level) will solve the problems of coordination, collaboration, mixed messages from departments, the duplication of resources, all the while reassuring the public that all is in hand (or not). It is an ill thought out, short term and unworkable solution to the greater problem of system reform.

Pauline suggests that, "it's been clear for some time that the capacity of the UK system for long range strategic thinking needed strengthening."

I’ve got a bit of a problem with more committees and new structures not least because I don’t think the main problem when it comes to the government's security policy is an institutional crisis. I think it is one of culture. That is not to say the two are mutually exclusive, and I think the system needs change. But  I sense that advocating institution building as a response to system failure is a relatively easy option for the short term – but it doesn’t necessarily lead to extra capacity in the system – let alone support strategic thinking. Instead it can, and I think will, lead to a mess, of messages, of structures, and of accountability while serving to strengthen a civil service culture that is resistant to adopting new ways of thinking. 

What is needed is a culture founded on openness and transparency – and while I understand that some secrets must be kept private we should question the validity of the phrase – ‘on a need to know basis’. The present system is opaque, both for those people who work in it and for the wider public – changing that must become a priority.

However it is worth noting that some senior officials have long made private their disdain for using the military terminology to describe the strategy, though I always found it rather amusing that in speeches or seminars they would pepper their arguments with the phrase but with the qualification, ‘I hate that term’.

I wonder how significant the consequences of this shift will be. In a prophetic article for the journal International Affairs, Paul Rogers (Professor of peace studies at Bradford University) noted how the US Government is beginning to shift their rhetoric to incorporate a new phrase – the long war, in a conscious echo of the paradigm it was seen as replacing - the Cold War. Other academics have suggested that the war on terrorism will be the defining paradigm in the struggle for global order, while Government officials can be sometimes heard talking about a new normality.

Our search for a concept, a phrase, even a description to illustrate the current security environment is not, however, simply a superficial endeavour. If we are not fighting a war on terrorism what are we actually doing? How are we trying to achieve our aims? And perhaps even more important when will it all end? The FCO was right to suggest that the concept of war should be avoided as it could be counter-productive but in deleting it from the lexicon of politicians it will have to find a suitable replacement to describe the threat of international terrorism and what everyone’s role is.

By the way – in the Observer article Burke suggests that neither Blair nor Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, has used the term 'war on terror' in a formal speech since June. True - but Tony Blair referred to the war against terrorism in a Q&A session at the NATO summit in Riga last month…

Most of the newspapers in their digest of the Queen’s Speech noted that Labour Government has introduced more than 50 Home Office Bills since 1997. Some of these are important (if not controversial) but once again (the FT says) more does not necessarily mean better (or safer). This law-making frenzy will make no impact on crime and national security if there is a shortage of effective administrators to run the services over which it provides.

We are soon to begin a project on the public value of security which aims to review the UK’s security architecture and identify whether it can meet the threats of the 21^st century. While legislation will be one important tool it will by no means be the answer – something John Reid, I think, has been distracted by. The Home Office and other relevant security agencies have got to become much smarter about how they operate in the future.  

Some senior officials within Government believe that it is the Home Office’s culture which must change. Yet faced with the choice of major reform or ‘action’ through legislation the department will most likely opt for the latter.