23 September 2005 Blog Home : September 2005 : Permalink
The home secretary has promised the prime minister that he will lock away for five years anyone who "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" a terrorist act committed in the past 20 years. He does not care if glorification was not meant. If someone, somewhere takes anything that I say or write as encouraging to terror, even if they do not act on it, I have committed a criminal act.
Nor is this all. Lest any crackpot thinks he can dance up and down any old high street praising Hitler, Mao or Uncle Joe as outside the 20-year limit, Clarke is preparing a list of earlier terrorist acts that also render their celebrants criminals. After "listed" historic buildings we have "listed" historic terrorisms. To the glorious chronicles of our island race, Clarke is to append an open-ended catalogue of listed events. They may include any acts of violence against people, property or, bizarrely, electronic systems anywhere in the world if intended to advance a political, religious or ideological cause or to influence a government.
Perhaps worse, having made such a sweeping initial plan they then intend to arbitrarily limit itAlready we are told that Clarke's listed events will not include anything Irish. Why? King William's campaign is life and breath to loyalist militants, as is the 1916 Easter Rising to Blair's pet insurrectionists, the IRA. Why should these groups be excused the law? Soon anyone who visits terror on the British people will negotiate a "listed events exclusion clause" as part of their final settlement.
Now I admit that Sir Simon does shortly afterwards briefly veer off the rails in calling Hiroshima "a politically motivated assault on people and property" - a description which either applies every act of war ever comitted anywhere in world or fundamentally misunderstands the anticipated conventional war costs of invasion - but he manages to recover:I have no faith in Clarke's Stalinist historians. If Whitehall bureaucrats are so otherworldly as to find village ponds, conker trees and rare steaks awash in human hazard, there is no telling what they will find in the bloodstained pages of history. They need only to find a dodgy event and someone to praise it and they will pounce.
There are a couple of other places where I disagree with his examples, for example when he talks about the government's "stok[ing] of war fever in 2002/2003" and his curious description of Silvio Berlusconi as "no friend of the press", which seems to ignore that fact that Signor Berlusconi owns the press in Italy, but in the main this is an article that anyone suspicious of government would support.