‘I feel your pain’: Terrorism,the media and the politics of response

Introduction

It’s the nature of the media exposure today. It’s the 7-day a week, 24-hour multi- channel satellite, instant response which makes the difference. Twenty years ago, we could have put out a statement saying “we are reflecting, we will make a statement soon”. Now, you can’t do that because politicians who don’t respond to the world moving on (which happens now almost instantaneously) are left high and dry because other people do respond (David Blunkett, interview with authors, 8 October 2008).

This article has developed from research into the interaction between a rapidly changing media and the policy responses of UK governments, faced with terrorist violence which has also evolved in form and intent as the focus has switched from the Provisional IRA (PIRA) to Al-Qaeda. ¹ New Labour’s third and final term in office was dominated by the tension between the competing claims of liberty and security, expressed in Tony Blair’s declaration after the attacks on 7 July 2005, ‘Let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing.’ ² We argue that insofar as crime, justice and civil rights are governed by a normative set of rules, they were subverted by New Labour in the mid-1990s for party political reasons. Thus, after 9/11, they needed little reshaping to meet the challenge of 21st-century terrorism.

Our second theme is the opportunistic congruence between the empathic style of leadership of the two key policy respondents to 9/11 – Tony Blair and David Blunkett – and a media which was both privileging the experience of the ‘victim’ (hence, ‘I feel your pain’) and, in its tabloid form, demonstrating a growing contempt for the sluggish pace of ‘due process’ and the legislative inhibitions imposed by the Human Rights Act, as interpreted by the courts.

Our thesis is based partly on primary interviews ³ and partly on analyses of media coverage, parliamentary debates and government responses in the form of, inter alia, press releases and speeches. The interviews are with figures from the world of politics, the police and civil society, including six former home secretaries and their policy advisers; the former head of UK counter-terrorism; the former chief constable of Northern Ireland; the founder of the Muslim Contact Unit at Scotland Yard; leading newspaper commentators; and a number of figures from think-tanks associated with issues around Islamist radicalism. The purpose of the semi-structured interviews was to triangulate the known policy responses to 9/11 with the views and perceptions of these key ‘insider’ figures to assess whether some of the assumptions about the impact of that event on the UK need to be rethought. As Davis (2007: 181) notes, interview-based research can ‘offer some interesting perspectives on the relationship between political journalism and the political process at Westminster’, perspectives which are not always detectable in textual analysis-based research, where ‘political responses may be tallied up during content analysis but are usually more likely to be of a “symbolic” rather than a substantive nature’ (Davis, 2007: 183).

The interviews lead us to suggest that insufficient emphasis has been placed on an important change in New Labour’s psyche as it entered its second term in office in 2001. Tony Blair communicated an intense frustration that too little had been achieved during the first term and that the focus of a government re-elected with a healthy majority should be on ‘delivery’. ⁴ It was an attempt to bring some order and rationale into a world in which social and economic certainties appeared to be crumbling. Fears about asylum and immigration and the breakdown of community cohesion, as reflected in the electoral popularity of far-right parties and, in the summer of 2001, riots in towns and cities with large Muslim communities – Oldham, Bradford and Burnley – fed what we call a pervading ‘crisis of insecurity’. Both of our protagonists, Blair and Blunkett, attest to the impact on the ‘ruling elite’ of these events (see, for example, Blair, 2010; Blunkett, 2006).

David Blunkett’s policy adviser, Huw Evans, put it like this:

We had a view that it was government’s job in times of insecurity, fuelled by 9/11, to reassure people … and one of the most unfair criticisms made of David, in his time as Home Secretary, is that he fuelled this insecurity for his own nefarious purposes to push through lots of legislation that restricted people’s civil liberties. (Interview with authors, 10 February 2010)

But New Labour always operated on more than one level and Evans admits there was another driver at work:

There was a political imperative, which was that, for people at the heart of New Labour, tackling crime and insecurity was absolutely at the core of the project, and distinguished it from the Labour Party of the 1980s, which, frankly, was not very interested in crime and home affairs. (Interview with authors, 10 February 2010)

Thus, we argue that the raft of measures brought in after 9/11 as a declared response to terrorism should be re-interpreted in the light of New Labour’s own neo-liberal evolution, away from its past, in the 1990s.

Priming the Response: The Crisis of Insecurity Pre-9/11

Unsurprisingly, the terrorist attacks on America on 11 September 2001 have provoked a raft of responses from scholars of media and politics (see, for example, Jackson, 2005; and Norris, Kern and Just, 2003). As Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira note (2008: 52), much of this research has ‘focused on public response and reaction to terrorist attacks, definitions of terrorism, policy questions, media portrayals of terrorism, and framing across different media and nations’. For their own study, Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira (2008: 71) utilised framing analysis to compare the way in which terrorist issues were portrayed in the US and UK press over a one-year period, and found that ‘the alignment of news frames with corresponding policy in the two nations, [pointed] to the symbiotic relationship between the policy agenda and the press’. In another UK-centred study, Mythen and Walklate (2006: 123) examined the way in which state agencies in the UK have communicated the terrorist threat to the public and how these ‘new terrorism’ discourses are themselves entrenched ‘into broader cultural formations of crime and (in)security’. The epistemology of terrorism is, of course, highly contested but we would concur with Burnett and Whyte (2005: 5) who assert that: ‘The new terrorism thesis sets up an understanding of an enemy that is not only more apocalyptic and dangerous, but also less amenable to traditional forms of control’. Our interviews and the published memoirs of police protagonists such as Andy Hayman and Sir Ian Blair (see Hayman, 2009; Blair, 2010) bear out that this was the predominant view as seen from the heart of the security state.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an in-depth comparison between Irish terrorism before the Good Friday Agreement and Islamist terrorism post 9/11, except to observe that the PIRA’s violence tended to be based on specific political and practical objectives (a united Ireland) whereas Islamist terrorism is much more generalised in terms of the practicality and ideology of its stated aims. A more obvious difference between Irish terrorism and Islamist terrorism is the modus operandi; suicide bombing, for example, is a tactic that was never employed by the PIRA.

This qualitative change has fed into the policy-making process, which has increasingly been based on a ‘precautionary response to threats’ (Furedi, 2009: 197). And, as Furedi (2009: 197) notes: ‘The main accomplishment of this response has been to intensify the sense of existential insecurity’, a sentiment shared by Beck, who argues: ‘what is politically crucial is ultimately not the risk itself but the perception of risk. What men fear to be real is real in its consequences – fear creates its own reality’ (cited in Mythen and Walklate, 2006: 126).

Though its origins are hard to pinpoint, this growing sense of insecurity coincided in the 1990s with a greater transparency within the security agencies. In December 1991, the name of the newly appointed Director General of MI5 was publicly revealed for the first time. The announcement generated a substantial amount of media coverage. As the historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew (2010: 775) notes: ‘Every detail of her unremarkable private life became a news story’ (2001: 244).

In October 1993, ‘another veil was lifted from Britain’s espionage community’ (The Times, 2 October 1993) when Sir Roderic Braithwaite was named as the outgoing chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, with Pauline Neville-Jones named as his replacement. However, it was the appointment of Neville-Jones, the first woman in the post, that elicited the most headlines – with the Independent proclaiming: ‘Second Top Secret Service Post is Given to a Woman’ (2 October 1993); and the Daily Mail: ‘The Spider Queen; Spy Chief at the centre of Britain’s Web of Secrets’ (2 October 1993).

Gender politics aside, this level of media attention also led to an increasingly mediated debate around terrorism and public safety. Thus, the move by MI5 and the Anti-Terrorist Branch towards greater openness, while strengthening democratic accountability, also served to intensify public anxiety.

The traditional reticence of the security agencies to engage in public and political debate on security issues changed considerably during the 1990s. Indeed, prior to this period, security policy was neither a politicised nor a heavily mediated issue. As Douglas Hurd confirms: ‘We would have done something about security gaps if the police or MI5 had come to us saying there were flaws, but we did not think of that in media terms’ (interview with authors, 21 July 2008). On 16 July 1993, MI5 held its first press conference to launch a new publication detailing the operational activities of the Service. Stella Rimington explained the reasoning behind this new approach to greater openness post-1992:

Part of our thinking behind the move to openness was, let’s try and get rid of the MI5 blunders thing and James Bond, and let people see what kind of service this is and what job it has to do in a democracy … Our objective was not to seduce these guys [journalists], but to put more information into the public domain. We never thought we were going to get a good press, but what we wanted was a greater understanding of what the issues were, so that we could be judged in a more sensible context. (Rimington, 2006)

By 2006, statements by the Director General of MI5 were no longer a rarity, and the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch was a familiar figure on television screens. And the messages emanating from both echoed the ‘alarmist’ discourse of the UK government. Eliza Manningham-Buller’s public statement on 9 November 2006 is a prime example of this:

My officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas … I do not speak in this way to alarm (nor as the cynics might claim to enhance the reputation of my organisation) but to give the most frank account I can of the Al-Qaeda threat to the UK. (The Times, 10 November 2006)

Various motives can be ascribed to the delivery of such messages – one being the need to justify increased resourcing of MI5 to meet the terrorist threat. Another factor is that, having emerged from the ‘shadows’, the security service could not escape the obligation to play its role in an increasingly mediated environment, as reflected in 24-hour TV and radio news, increased Internet access among the UK population and, in the late 1990s, millennial panics, such as the Y2K ‘bug’ which became an unfounded media obsession (see Davies, 2009: 9–12).

This social anomie was given concrete expression in a number of ways in the 18 months or so immediately prior to 9/11. The first significant issue was the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais, France – which opened in 1999 and closed in 2002. During this period, the British media carried intensive coverage of the asylum seekers who were attempting to enter the UK illegally via the Channel Tunnel. The second issue was the so-called race riots that took place in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001.

The furore surrounding Sangatte was to have an immediate impact on the government’s asylum and immigration policy and, by extension, its security measures. As Blunkett notes, during this period ‘the Home Office wasn’t functioning terribly well’ on asylum and immigration, and policy in this area was an ‘obvious shambles’. He also highlights the role of the media in ‘fuelling this insecurity around immigration and asylum’ (interview with authors, 8 October 2008). Indeed, media headlines – especially in the Daily Mail and the Sun – defined the Sangatte ‘immigrants’ as a mass of ‘illegals’, who were ‘swarming’, ‘plaguing’ and ‘flooding’ Calais in an effort to come to ‘soft touch’ Britain. More significantly, asylum seekers were portrayed as ‘uncivilised’, ‘criminals’, ‘violent’, ‘sexual deviants’ and thus the threatening Other. Understandably, the Opposition also exploited Sangatte, with William Hague accusing the government of being ‘unfailingly weak’ on illegal immigrants (Mail, 1 February 2001), while both the tabloid press and the Conservatives urged ministers to take a harder line on asylum and a more militaristic approach in securing British borders. Blair (2010: 204) admitted that his party ‘had come to power with a fairly traditional but complacent view of immigration and asylum’ and that, ultimately, New Labour ‘were unprepared for the explosion in asylum claims through 1998 and 1999’.

This marginalisation of policy-thinking on asylum/immigration was deliberate, although a serious oversight, as Jack Straw acknowledges:

On asylum, I made the judgement quite explicit in opposition that we were having to turn so much around on the crime side that I’d better just travel as light as I could on asylum. But what I did do when I came in was to publish a white paper and then introduce the 1999 act, which was starting to bite, because the system before that was chaotic … The other thing I did, which I shouldn’t have done and I regret now, is agree to a write-off which was essentially an amnesty for about 30,000 people who frankly were never going to get sent back … but the problem with doing the write-off is it did send out a message. (Interview with authors, 21 September 2010)

The focus on crime, at the expense of immigration, was partly because it better suited New Labour’s aim of reconnecting with those voters who had shifted allegiance to the Conservatives over a generation and partly because Blair was convinced that his brand of social democracy needed underpinning by a moral agenda, pace Etzioni (1995: xxi):

The best time to reinforce the moral and social foundations of institutions is not after they have collapsed but when they are cracking. Does anyone truly believe that they have not yet cracked in the United Kingdom?

A dependence on such an alarmist diagnosis could lead in only one direction. And it is difficult to disagree with Jordan (1999: 203) when he writes that New Labour policy ‘was forged in an atmosphere of moral condemnation and mistrust’, relying on ‘top down, authoritarian methods to achieve its ends’. In short, the prescription for ‘precautionary’ policy-making which was applied so profligately to terrorism post 9/11 had been written out even before New Labour came to power.

Terrorism and ‘Community Cohesion’

Although ‘Irish and Muslim communities in Britain have, to varying degrees, been constructed as “suspect”’ (Nickels, Thomas, Hickman and Silvestri, 2010: 2), we argue that the terrorism of the PIRA period did not lead to any significant introspection about British identity in the way that Islamist terrorism has. It is certainly the case that, especially in the 1970s after the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings, sections of the British media fomented anti-Irish sentiment (Nickels et al., 2010) but there is little evidence of a sustained discourse around a threat to the fabric of British life. In their comparative study on the construction of suspect communities, Nickels et al. (2010: 19) found

religious difference is a key element of the contrast between the representations of the Irish and Muslim experiences, with Catholicism/Protestantism being made invisible or assimilated in news discourse, and Islam/Muslims being made highly visible and constructed as outside British culture.

Indeed, Islamist terrorism has had a profound impact on the debate around issues of ‘Britishness’ and ‘social cohesion’, which has been exacerbated by the changing media environment.

For the past several decades, asylum and immigration in Britain has been the subject of considerable division among and between the media, politicians and the public – particularly in relation to the impact migration has had, and continues to have, on issues of nationhood and social integration (later to be rephrased by New Labour as ‘community cohesion’). As Husbands (1994: 191) notes, during the 1970s, debates on ‘national identity…had been stimulated by populist fears about “swamping” and cultural dilution’, but that by the 1980s, these fears had largely been quietened due to the then Conservative government’s ‘restrictionist immigration legislation’ (Husbands, 1994: 191). Indeed, when she was leader of the opposition, Margaret Thatcher capitalised on the media-stoked anxieties over asylum and immigration in the lead-up to the 1979 election. In an interview with Granada Television on 27 January 1978, Thatcher quotes a committee report which states that failure to tighten up immigration laws will result in an influx of ‘four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan’ by 2000, which resulted in her infamous ‘swamped’ statement:

Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers. (Thatcher, 1978)

By the early 1990s, as Britain edged closer to joining the European Monetary Union and in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair, a new wave of mediated panics surrounding asylum seekers and the perils of multiculturalism ensued. But it was the reaction of British Muslims to the publication of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses that proved to be the defining moment with regard to the questioning of national identity, with a series of protests by British Muslims being used by some sections of the media, as well as by some right-wing politicians, ‘to justify suspicions about the “Britishness” of the country’s Muslim population’ (Husbands, 1994: 194).

In retrospect, because it provoked protests carrying threats of violence, both at home and abroad, the Satanic Verses episode can be seen as a key bridge between the culturally/ethnically defined debate about identity in the early Thatcher era and the overt linkage of asylum and immigration issues to terrorism from the 1990s onwards (See Malik, 2009). Far-right parties, such as the BNP, undoubtedly benefited from this linkage in some voters’ minds as they steadily gained seats in local elections.

Given the increasing move towards more punitive policies, or ‘populist punitiveness’ in the past two decades, it is hardly surprising that New Labour embraced the hitherto Conservative approach towards assimilation politics – a trend also fuelled by the destabilising effects of modernity, which Richard Garside (along with Anthony Giddens and Tony Bottoms) associates with ‘the rise of individualism, technological innovation and the disorienting impact of globalisation’ (Garside, 2007: 32). The commentator, Peter Oborne, argues that, as a result, New Labour ‘has ended up as very populist, anti-immigrant, opposed to the rule of law, pro-market … and they have ended up quite close to the far right’ (interview with authors, 14 December 2010). As Bagguley and Hussain (2006: 4–5) argue:

since the 2001 ‘riots’ there has been a shift away from multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in New Labour discourse. This has been replaced by an atavistic assimilationism that demands integration reminiscent of the failed policies of the 1950s and 60s. We are confronted by a contradictory mix of valuing diversity and opposing racism with policies restricting the movement of refugees. This is linked to New Labour’s ambivalence about Britain’s national identity as a post-colonial power and its liberal opposition to social injustice.

In April 2002, David Blunkett (2006: 370) made headlines when he used the word ‘swamping’ in relation to asylum seekers and how public services close to dispersal centres were struggling to cope with extra numbers of people ‘speaking not English as a second language but no English at all’. Interestingly, he refers to the media’s role in stoking this controversy in a way that would not have happened in the Thatcher era. He reflects on ‘how difficult it is to deal with not just broadcast but new forms of news media that politicians from even a few years ago did not have to engage with’ (Blunkett, 2006: 371).

A key finding of the review into the Oldham riots was the ‘recognition that communication between communities at all levels is an essential part of creating a mixed community. As part of this, there needs to be adequate understanding of the English language across communities’ (Ritchie, 2001: 7). This particular recommendation was a mainstay of later social integrationist policy. For example, the 2002 White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain states that the ‘English language is a vital skill for refugee job-seekers and an important tool for successful integration’ (Home Office, 2002: 72). In September 2002, Blunkett took this a step further in his essay Reclaiming Britishness, where he suggested that ‘those long settled in the UK’ should ‘converse with their children in English, as well as in their historic mother tongue, at home and to participate in wider modern culture’ (Independent, 16 September 2002).

In the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the government set out to win the hearts and minds of Muslim youth, most notably in the form of the Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda – a policy that has been mired in controversy ever since its inception. Thomas (2010) argues that the PVE strategy ‘has been a vehicle for a significant growth in state surveillance of Muslim communities’, which is contrary to the aims of ‘other key governmental priorities such as Community Cohesion’. Daud Abdullah, the former deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, agrees that the PVE ‘was counter-productive, it was alienating Muslims’, but acknowledges that:

There were people within the establishment and the security services who took a very balanced and fair approach to this thing, but they were in a sense driven by the politicians. They had to deliver, they had to show that they were tough and then the politicians also somehow had to play to the gallery and show that they are tough also. So it was a vicious circle. (Interview with authors, 26 April 2010)

Robert Lambert, one of the founders of the Metropolitan Police’s Muslim Contact Unit, also describes how unhelpful certain Home Secretaries have been in tackling the issue of Islamist extremism, and the impact this has had on fostering good relations between the police and Muslim communities post 9/11. Describing an incident when John Reid visited a Muslim community in Leyton, East London in 2006, he states: ‘his guidance to parents “to be shepherds for their children”, looking out for signs of radicalisation which seemed to include increasing religiosity, less interest in cricket etc. I found this to be extremely unhelpful’ (Interview with authors, 14 June 2010).

Indeed, the political emphasis on the social integration of Muslims under the ‘community cohesion’ agenda has arguably resulted in a greater cultural polarisation within communities, and thus greater social segregation.

The Discourse of Victimhood

A changing media has undoubtedly had an impact on the way in which the public perceive and relate to politicians, especially in today’s highly visual age where the image predominates. Television, more than any other medium, has been instrumental in the drive towards ‘personality politics’ – a phenomenon that would serve Tony Blair very well during the first few years of his premiership. Tony Blair’s ‘visual’ response to the London bombings on 7 July 2005, where in the immediate aftermath of the attacks he is photographed ‘standing alone, head bowed, and body stiff as though in genuine shock’ was, according to Tulloch (2006: 49), ‘a performance, a photo opportunity to gain empathy by a politician who, because of his illegal, media-spun military entry into Iraq, was deeply unpopular … it was a posture well-practiced, an attitude thought about and rehearsed long before’.

But what distinguishes the New Labour government from previous governments in terms of their response to the terror threat, and how were these issues communicated to the public? New Labour’s move towards an emotionalistic political discourse is, as Gaffney (2001: 131) notes, ‘a rhetorical device to reach out past the office in order to connect at an imagined “more human” level’. Television has been a vital medium in terms of creating an ‘imaginary proximity’ between politician and public (Gaffney, 2001: 128). Tony Blair, in particular, addressed the electorate with a ‘new’ level of intimacy and ordinariness. Moreover, the political ‘first person’ oratory of New Labour – Tony Blair and David Blunkett in particular – paralleled the tabloid focus on victim-driven first-person narrative. This new style of political rhetoric served to show the electorate that not only were the politicians listening to them, but that they were being proactive in their response. As Richards (2007: 107) affirms: ‘One thing that was new about “New” Labour was arguably the attention paid to the emotional tasks of political leadership, to intuiting the anxieties of the public and seeking to respond to them.’

If the visual media highlighted the importance of the image in political life, the advent of 24-hour news was to create a climate whereby politicians needed to be seen to respond more rapidly than they had done before. Put simply, the ever increasing news cycle has meant that governments now need to respond to issues round the clock. Online news and information sites have also intensified this trend.

As Garland (2001: 157) notes, the changing media has not only had an impact on the speed at which politicians respond, but has heralded a new style of political communication. He states: ‘The TV encounter – with its soundbite rapidity, its emotional intensity, and its mass audience – has tended to push politicians to be more populist, more emotive, more evidently in tune with public feeling.’

Adopting a psychological approach to the context of terrorism, Richards (2007: 107) uses the term ‘emotional governance’ to describe the deliberate attention paid by politicians to the emotional ‘dynamics’ of the public. It is a useful aid to understanding the transformation in approach from the Home Secretaryship of Douglas Hurd to that of David Blunkett at the time of 9/11. When the IRA resumed its mainland bombing campaign in 1988 (with the attack on the Mill Hill barracks) there was shock in government and security circles that a four-year hiatus in mainland terrorism (since the Brighton bomb in 1984) had ended, and extra powers were added to the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA 1989). But there was no government-initiated public debate about the balance between security and civil liberty. As Douglas Hurd says: ‘There was no real feeling that the IRA could overwhelm us all. Even if the Prime Minister had been knocked out in the Grand Hotel [Brighton] bombing, life would go on. We thought the law was about right’ (Interview with authors, 21 July 2008).

Nevertheless, Hurd admits surprise that there was not ‘more media or public pressure over the IRA’ (interview with authors, 21 July 2008). Contrast this with the frenetic, mediated clamour for action after 9/11, which was followed by an almost immediate government response (most notably in the form of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security legislation, which was drafted within weeks of the attack). In the 13 years since the two events, the UK media – both print and broadcast – had, according to Andrew Bridges (2008), Chief Inspector of Probation, become ‘increasingly values-opinionated and “position-taking” … making it increasingly difficult to conduct a rational debate on the criminal justice system’. The Guardian columnist, Julian Glover, who left the journalism profession in 2011 to become a speechwriter for David Cameron, wrote: ‘One reason I welcome the chance to get off the sidelines for a few years is that I fear comment, like a strangler-fig, is getting stronger than the politics on which it feeds’ (Guardian, 24 October 2011).

Both Blair and Blunkett never passed up an opportunity to stress that their criminal justice policies were intended to put victims ‘at the heart of the criminal justice system’. But the period after 9/11, when tackling terrorism became the number one priority, coincided with a series of spectacular failures in public protection which showed up the hollowness of the pledge. If, as Boyd-Caine (2010: 22) argues, ‘the state’s legitimacy turns upon how effective the government can be in showing its receptiveness’ to public sentiment, then, as each failure was laid bare, another thread in the mandate claimed by the Home Office and its agencies unravelled. That, in turn, led ministers and media to strike out wildly against those they would have the public believe were jeopardising its safety – probation officers, defence lawyers and judges.

The response came in a steady encroachment into principles of ‘due process’, via control orders and extensions to the time police could question suspects. At a deeper level, this expressed what Reiner (2007: 19) has called a ‘zero sum contest between victims and offenders … a key feature of the currently dominant politics of law and order’. By zero-sum is meant the assumption that what benefits the offender is inevitably detrimental to the victim. The Home Secretary, John Reid (2006), sought to finesse this balance when he said:

I want to say a word about human rights … I am not suggesting that offenders have no human rights. But I am suggesting – and rather more than that – that the community has a right to be protected from dangerous criminals … This rebalancing of the system back in favour of victims … ensuring that victims or their representatives get a greater say about the release of offenders back into the community. Their voice must be heard more clearly.

But as the government, especially after the events of 7 July 2005, felt itself under ever greater pressure from a media reflecting a waning public confidence, it was inevitable that the voice of the victim, and the media advocating on their behalf, became even louder.

This then, the ‘politics of response’, was New Labour’s mediated legacy as it left office in 2010.

From 9/11 to Abu Qatada

The news framing of politics and terrorism around the belief that the Human Rights Act weakened parliament’s sovereignty, and privileged the legal rights of convicted prisoners, asylum seekers and suspected terrorists above those of law-abiding citizens and ‘victims’, is one of the key discourses of the past decade. A government which counted the Human Rights Act as one of its most notable achievements found itself imprisoned in this discourse. This section looks at the consequences of that ensnarement, which was a conflict between politicians and judges.

Home Secretaries as different in temperament as David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid and, more latterly, Theresa May, all, at one time or another, fulminated against court rulings and the refusal of the judges to see themselves as partners in ‘the war on terrorism’. Blunkett (2006: 453) described an uncooperative letter from the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, as ‘outrageous … the sheer gall of it was quite breathtaking’, while Clarke condemned as ‘disgraceful’ the Law Lords’ refusal to enter into a dialogue about the law and terrorism (House of Lords, 2007: 26).

This disaffection with the judiciary was mirrored by increasingly hostile comment in the media post-2001, designed to paint the judges as anti-democratic. For example:

Britain’s top judge has announced he will defy Parliament to protect terrorists and illegal immigrants. Lord Woolf … says judges must be prepared to be unpopular in making a stand to prevent the Government from ‘scoring an own goal’ in the fight against terrorism. Lord Woolf said: ‘Such temporary unpopularity is a price worth paying if it ensures that this country remains a democracy committed to the rule of law, a democracy which is therefore worth defending.’ He has a curious interpretation of democracy if he thinks unelected judges should be allowed to prevail over elected politicians. (Sun, 18 October 2002)

Using the European Convention on Human Rights as cover, Mr Justice Sullivan made a ruling which many will regard as tantamount to a judicial coup against Parliament … Britain’s out-of-touch judges are increasingly using the Human Rights Act as a means of asserting their will over our elected representatives. (Daily Express, 11 May 2006)

Such inflammatory language as ‘judicial coup’ to describe a court ruling is, in the UK, regarded as the price to be paid for a free and robust media. But it cannot be denied that such discourse has political consequences. By 2008, the former Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was Justice Secretary, and was writing: ‘I fully understand that Mail readers have concerns about the Human Rights Act. There is a sense that it’s a villain’s charter or that it stops criminals being deported or criminals being properly given publicity.’ (Daily Mail, 8 December 2008). Is there a closer synergy between politician and press to be found than in the admission by an architect of the Human Rights Act, and self-confessed ‘liberal’, that it could be seen as a ‘villain’s charter’?

The alignment of politicians and press is perfectly illustrated by the Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, who said that the public ‘still have great faith in the judiciary but there are worries that it is not reflecting their values and instincts’ (House of Lords, 2007: 45). That judges are expected to reflect something as amorphous as values and instincts (which, in any case, can hardly be shared by a population of nearly 70 million people) was, of course, perversely unrealistic. Nevertheless, it infected the thinking of New Labour Home Secretaries to the extent that even less confrontational practitioners such as Charles Clarke went to war with the judges when his overtures about a dialogue on how to reconcile security with liberty were rebuffed. He regarded it ‘as disgraceful that no Law Lord is prepared to discuss in any forum with the Home Secretary of the day the issues of principle involved in these matters. The idea that their independence would be corrupted by such discussions is risible’ (House of Lords, 2007: 26).

The senior Law Lord, Lord Bingham, did not agree and nor did the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution:

His [Clarke’s] call for meetings between the Law Lords and the Home Secretary risks an unacceptable breach of the principle of judicial independence. It is essential that the Law Lords, as the court of last resort, should not even be perceived to have prejudged an issue as a result of communications with the executive. (House of Lords, 2007: 33)

It is a key part of our thesis that this heavily mediated gulf between politicians and judiciary began to open up before 9/11, indeed, before New Labour came to power. The commentator, Peter Oborne, traces it back to the last Conservative Home Secretary before 1997:

Michael Howard attacked judges and tried to get the media onside but he got very little traction for that. He was painted by the media as a bungling Home Secretary who kept getting the law wrong. So, very few people defended Howard when he was slapped down by the courts, as happened repeatedly. But because New Labour had such a good relationship with the media and had a lot of papers on their side, Blunkett got a lot of media support when he was in confrontation with the judges. Papers like the Sun, Mail, Telegraph and Times all took the government’s side in their war with the judges. (Interview with authors, 14 December 2010)

And that analysis is equally true of the more recent attempts by the Coalition administration to deport the radical cleric, Abu Qatada. The media framing of the issue as a contest between the human rights of the preacher and the security of the British people yet again foregrounds the challenge posed by the aberrant individual to the wider community. The role of the European Court of Human Rights in defending the sanctity of a system of justice untainted by torture has been marginalised. It is the triumph of Blairism writ large. And that is the measure of the journey which has been taken since the mid-1990s.

Conclusion

This paper has contended that 9/11 was not the defining step change in terms of the burgeoning ‘crisis of insecurity’ in the UK. Indeed, as has been shown, anxiety over asylum and immigration and the breakdown of community cohesion in communities with large Muslim populations was already evident in the 18 months or so prior to 9/11– most explicitly manifested in the increasing electoral significance of the far-right parties. Moreover, the anxieties triggered by these events also set the parameters for media and political debate on what it meant to be British in a multicultural society.

The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974 existed in various forms until it was eventually replaced with the Terrorism Act 2000 – a permanent piece of legislation introduced by the New Labour government partly in response to the Omagh bombing of 1998. In the wake of 9/11, Blair’s government brought in an unprecedented amount of further terrorism legislation in the form of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, the Terrorism Act 2006, and finally the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. Many of the measures contained in these Acts, such as control orders and increased detentions, provoked fierce debates over civil liberties, as well as conflict between the government and the judiciary – a feud that was duly played out in the media.

However, as this article has argued, many of the authoritarian measures found in the later legislation (for example, greater powers of the police to ‘stop and search’ terror suspects and more intrusive surveillance measures) were not a consequence of 9/11 but were already entrenched in New Labour’s general approach to crime and security from as early as 1995. One only had to review the legislation which has been enacted prior to 9/11 – the seminal Crime and Disorder Act 1998; the Terrorism Act 2000, with its notoriously malleable Section 44; the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000,which allowed greater powers to covertly monitor suspects communications – to find many of the trace elements of the post 9/11 response – such as a willingness to give the police greater powers, a reliance on hearsay evidence and anonymous witnesses, and an obsession with surveillance and CCTV. And, running through it all, a general belief that summary justice was in many ways preferable to due process.

So, Tony Blair’s famous redefinition of the ‘game’ after the 7/7 bombing in London was another manifestation of ‘smoke-and-mirrors’ politics. This was not the start of a new approach to crime and liberty but the advanced stage of a process which had been going on, with the approval and connivance of sections of the media, for a decade.