Tony Blair casually announces on Radio 4s Woman’s Hour (of all programmes) that there are ‘several hundred terrorists’ planning attacks within the UK. Obviously this is something we all need to be worried about, and the best way ‘Teflon’ Tony could think of telling Britain is… putting it on BBC radios women’s magazine show?
Is there something wrong with this image?
Rather than appear anywhere where he might have been questioned by informed and knowledgeable reporters about why this information was being released now by the government and how strongly this warning should be heeded by the public, he instead chose to appear somewhere not renowned for its political bite but more for articles on 19th century women poets and cosy chats on how women MDs juggle their business careers with home life and children. It all feels like a studied release of something purely at a time when it suits him; nothing at all about caring for the people to whom he is prime minister. He and his team have chatted amongst themselves and decided that this would help feed the fear the population feels over Islamic terrorists and immigrants and it wouldn’t actually need any real proof to get the ball rolling.
Hmm. Could there be an election on the way?
This obviously has a connection with the house arrest proposal that has been doing the rounds recently, and which appears to not be going well. To detain people under house arrest is laughable; obviously it is not the same as being arrested and held in a cell, but these people are supposed to be highly dangerous terrorists and if held only under house arrest they could escape and, with their associates having been alerted too, start their wicked deeds early. Yet these people haven’t actually been proven to be guilty – otherwise they would have been arrested already – so bang would go the old ‘innocent until proven guilty’ that is the bedrock of British law (and, by association, much international law). If we are to practise house arrest with some people yet still propose to maintain ‘innocent until proven guilty’ for others then we open ourselves up to charges of racism (since the guilty parties will never be the same religion or skin colour as ‘ourselves’…) and that would ultimately lead to big compensation payouts and moans about that as well. And this is quite apart from associating ourselves with the kind of unsavoury political/military regimes that routinely practised this sort of detention – such as South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, etc – that were widely protested about by the labour party in the 1970s and 80s (although they have gone quiet about this sort of thing recently).
It must be asked if it is needed anyway – even Thatcher didn’t do it and at the height of the IRA bombing campaigns it would have been so easy for her to have applied such drastic measures. If there is enough evidence on these people then get a judge and get an arrest warrant – the government can’t claim that there aren’t enough judges since they have appointed so many, and its not even going to be a case of waiting a couple of days until a judge is available since the media can obtain a judgement on reports and TV programmes in a matter of hours.
But it is the breaching of the long held expectation of being judged ‘innocent until proven guilty’ that would be most damaging to Britain in the eyes of the international community; would any other country instigate such a breakdown to such a respected law?
Flood
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February 28, 2005 at 7:51 pm