We can feel safer now

The terror bill vote was the right result - and could even help deter any future threats of extremism

Published in the Evening Standard 10 November 2005

The first reactions are always political. Instantly, ministers, their opponents and the commentariat were on hand to decode the true meaning of the numbers 322 to 291– the 31-vote margin of defeat meted out to Tony Blair in the House of Commons yesterday, when MP's rejected his bid to allow terror suspects to be detained for up to 90 days.

Most of those who still use buses or ride the Tube, who live in London and remember the two dread Thursdays of July, will probably have a slightly different reaction. The question we want answered is not “What does this do for Blair?” but “What does this do for us?” We want to know not whether it makes the PM's position less secure, but whether it makes all of us less safe.

The prime minister put that sentiment at the centre of his Commons pitch yesterday. This was not about politics or his authority, he insisted, but about thwarting the men of violence who “want to kill people without limit.” If you cared about the victims of 7/7, he implied, and were desperate to see nothing like it ever again, then you would do as the police asked – and agree to the 90 day detention period. If you were callous with the nation's security, if you simply didn't understand the nature of the global menace we face, then you would vote against it. Despite all that moral pressure – and the weight of opinion polls and large sections of the press behind him – the House refused the PM, defeating this Labour government for the very first time.

Does this mean, as both the prime minister and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police argued before the vote, that we should now sleep uneasy in our beds, anxious that a crucial skirmish in the war against terror has been lost? I think not.

For any war on terrorism is a battle for hearts and minds. In this case, when the chief threat comes from violent Islamism, the hearts and minds that need to be won over are those of Britain's Muslims. That goal is a little more achievable now than if the two Blairs – Tony and Ian – had prevailed.

This is not, despite what the PM said yesterday, to claim that British Muslims somehow support terror, that the “softer” the government is, the happier Muslims will be. Of course it isn't. Muslim Britons know that the bombers threaten them as much as they threaten everyone else: just ask the family of Shahara Islam, the 20 year old bank clerk from Plaistow killed at Tavistock Square. Britain's Muslims want to see the guilty jailed - but they do not want to see the innocent suffer the same fate.

And that was the risk of a rule which would have allowed people to be locked up for three months without so much as a charge levelled against their name: it would have imposed a de facto prison sentence on those guilty of no crime.

Once that actually happened, the reaction would have been fierce. Once an innocent man was released after 90 days spent in a windowless cell at Paddington Green, with a hard plastic mattress on a wooden plank for a bed and a hole for a toilet, his community would have been gripped by fury.

This is not hyperbolic fantasy. We know from experience the radicalising, alienating effect detention without trial has not just on the individual victim but on his entire community. The textbook case was Northern Ireland, where internment achieved a success IRA recruiters had only dreamed of. We've seen a similar process at work worldwide thanks to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay.

By cutting down the pre-charge jail period from 90 days to 28, the House of Commons has made that Guantanamo effect a little less likely on these shores. Now there is a greater chance Britain's Muslims might co-operate with the authorities. And that co-operation is vital; privately, the security services admit they are getting much less of it than they need (though they will have been heartened by the handover of a stash of lurid, Islamist terror DVDs to the police in Dewsbury yesterday).

There are other morsels of comfort in yesterday's vote, evidence that Britain is, if not safer, then a better society than it might have looked had the result gone the other way. We pride ourselves on our tradition of liberty, but wave after wave of counter-terrorism measure – there have been five separate laws under this government alone - has made that more abstract than real. As Walter Wolfgang found when he heckled Jack Straw at the Labour party conference, dissent in today's Britain has to navigate around a whole battery of laws. Yesterday that march away from freedom took a smaller step than it might have.

It's healthy too that parliament refused to be strong-armed by the police. Several MP's resented being told what laws to pass by police officers, as they trooped into Westminster like lobbyists in uniform. That's not how our system is meant to work: our elected representatives pass the laws, the police enforce them.

As for the politics, at first blush it looks like very bad news for the prime minister. His writ no longer runs in the Commons, where he cannot rely on the loyalty of his own MP's, even when he turns every screw. His authority is steadily draining away. And yet, last night's result might grieve him less than you'd expect.

Yesterday he taunted the Tories, asking them if they really were standing where they ought to be. If Blair has to lose, I suspect he doesn't mind losing on an issue where he has the support of police, press and public – and where he is accused of being too tough on terror. Politics is about positioning, and Blair is in a spot of his own choosing. This defeat is not all bad for him – and not all bad for us either.

Posted on November 10, 2005 08:33 PM

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