by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
If you ask government spokespeople today about the protest exclusion zone they will lower their eyes, adopt grave expressions, utter their magic word ‘terrorism’ and expect you to walk away. If you press them for more information they will adopt even graver expressions, shake their heads and inform you that, tragically, the world has changed. If you continue to press them they will look around suspiciously before leaning in and whispering in your ear, ‘You’ll just have to trust us. We’ve seen classified information; we know what we’re doing. The world has changed.’
It’s changed all right. It’s changed to the point that you can now get a criminal record for reading out the names of dead British soldiers by the Cenotaph.
Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary at the time, thought that anyone who found Maya Evans’s arrest frightening was being ‘hysterical’.91 find it frightening, but I don’t consider myself to be ‘morbidly or uncontrollably emotional’ about it, which is how ‘hysterical’ is described in the dictionary. It’s an interesting word to have chosen. Perhaps someone who advocates criminalizing an act of remembrance because of the threat of ‘terrorism’ is the one being morbidly or uncontrollably emotional.
No-one wants to trivialize the anguish and pain suffered by those who have been killed in, or who have lost loved ones to, an act of terrorism. Sudden inexplicable death and brutal murder must be an agonizing burden to bear. The media coverage of 7 July and accounts by bloodied and terrified commuters will be remembered by all who read, heard and witnessed them. And no-one would want to exploit the pain of the families concerned. Except, it seems, the government.
Terrorism is a frightening word. It’s bandied around as the justification for ID cards, the increase in stop-and-search incidents, the illegal protest zone in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act and many other laws that pop up later in this book, but how frightening is it in reality? The simple answer is that it’s as frightening as you and the government allow it to be.
Lots of worrying stories about terrorism have appeared in the press since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. Old Trafford, the home of the richest, most widely known football club in the world, Manchester United, was recently at risk from an act of terrorism according to the frenzied coverage in the newspapers. That story turned out to be based on the fact that the police found posters of Old Trafford and a ticket to a United game in the bedroom of an asylum seeker who was arrested on suspicion of terrorism. The idea of the Theatre of Dreams being blown up was so horrifying that it became the headline story on that night’s ITN news. The fact that the man in question was later released without facing a single charge received little publicity. The police and the government made no attempt to allay the public’s fears when the story was blown out of proportion. They knew they had the wrong man but couldn’t say anything because it would jeopardize their legal case.
Then there was the chemical weapons factory in London where terrorists were producing the deadly toxin ricin. Chemical weapons had arrived in Britain, or they had according to the Daily Mirror, whose front page featured a skull and crossbones over a map of the country under the headline they’re here!, and the Sun, which led with the terrifying headline factory of death. Tony Blair told reporters, ‘As the arrests... show, this danger is present and real, and with us now, and its potential is huge.’10 When the Prime Minister confirms the existence of terrorists making chemical weapons in London, we all get scared. You see, Tony has access to secret information, so we all slept a little less easily in our beds when he confirmed our worst fears. But there was no ricin. The police and the government knew there was no ricin within three days of the arrests (the mysterious substance turned out to be Brylcreem) but they didn’t put the public’s mind at ease for another two years because they didn’t want to undermine their legal case in advance by revealing that they had no evidence. Needless to say, when the charges were dropped against four of the five defendants and it became clear that the ricin ring didn’t exist after all, the Sun and the Mirror forgot to lead with the headline don’t worry, there was no ricin here to make us feel safer.
No-one is suggesting that the government actively seeks out ways to terrify the public; newspaper editors are quite happy to do that by themselves. Anything goes if you’re in the middle of a tabloid circulation war, but it all feeds into the greatest fear of all. The fear we all harbour. The fear that stops us shouting too loudly when the government suggests legislation that takes our freedom away. The fear that makes us all more and more dependent on our leaders, giving them ever greater power until they start to behave with impunity.
The unspoken fear we all share is a terrorist getting his hands on a nuclear or chemical bomb and choosing to use cither of them in Britain. London vanishing underneath a mushroom cloud, or a chemical attack on the tube - that’s what everyone is really afraid of. That’s why so few of us grumble when the government start taking liberties. When Tony Blair stated ‘The rules of the game have changed’, we all knew that that was what he meant. But how serious is the risk of such a large-scale assault on London? Alter all, if Saddam Hussein couldn’t get his hands on weapons of mass destruction what chance does a religiously challenged maniac from Dudley have? Or, for that matter, a millionaire on kidney dialysis who lives in a cave?
The only recent use of chemical weapons was on Tokyo’s underground system by the Aum Shinrikyo sect in 1995. They spent billions of dollars building a massive chemical factory to produce nerve gas that killed a total of twenty-seven people, twelve of whom died on that one attack on the underground. Tragic though these cases were, they bore no relation in terms of scale to the scenarios the words ‘chemical’ and ‘weapons’ can conjure up if we let our imaginations run wild. Suddenly the thought of a group of men holed up in a small flat in Wood Green with a few bottles of Domestos and some hair wax doesn’t seem so frightening. As for the nuclear threat, Dr Theodore Rockwell, a nuclear expert, stated in 2004, ‘I don’t think it [a dirty bomb] would kill anybody ... You’ll have trouble finding a serious report that would claim otherwise ... The American Department of Energy has simulated a dirty bomb explosion and they calculated that the most exposed individual would get a fairly high dose [of radiation], not life-threatening.11 It should be noted that in order to arrive at that level of exposure the test results were based on the assumption that the individual remained at the site of the attack for an entire year.
And then there’s Chernobyl. It’s hard to imagine that a dirty bomb could kill more people than that reactor meltdown in 1986. Despite only two people being killed in the actual explosion, the world became convinced that those living in the region would die of horrible radiation cancers in the decades that followed. In fact, Chernobyl has been cited as the direct cause of only fifty-six deaths over the last twenty years, according to the UN agency the World Health Organization, despite press projections at the time running up to the 200,000 mark. And forty-seven of those were men from the clean-up crew who went to the site immediately after the explosion.12 Nuclear weapons, of course, are a different matter entirely, but only renegade states determined to throw their weight around can afford those. Terrorists will find them much harder to get hold of - providing we don’t sell them any, of course.
At the moment the most pressing risk to the public from terrorism has come from our government’s response to it. We might not know much when it comes to terrorism, but we do know some things. We know that there is no way you can stop a terrorist detonating a nuclear or chemical bomb by searching anti-government activists outside the Labour Conference. Even advocates of ID cards — including Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary at the time -admit they would not have stopped the London bombings of 7 July. Only a lobotomized man in a straitjacket would expect to find evidence of terrorism by searching the bicycle of a thirteen-year-old girl outside an American military base, but that didn’t stop her being searched under the Terrorism Act. And people eating a picnic in Parliament Square every Sunday for
months on end? They’re pretty unlikely to be secretly planning to throw anthrax at Tony Blair’s passing limousine, especially when you can watch every second of their protest live on CCTV. It’s also a pretty safe guess that if someone really does want to detonate a conventional bomb badly enough, no legislation that takes away our freedom will prevent it from happening.
We certainly can’t search every single cargo ship or flight that comes into this country to look for weapons of mass destruction. You can’t stop and search everyone in the country every single day of the year in case they’re carrying a bomb. On the other hand, you might be able to stop a terrorist getting his hands on a weapon like that in the first place through intelligence and diplomacy. You might be able to stop him wanting to do it in the first place by examining your nation’s foreign policy, ending arms sales to some of the most hostile regions on earth, or putting money into the research of new energy resources so that we aren’t reliant for fuel on an area of the world controlled by dictators. You might even be able to knock a dent in terrorism and lessen global instability by removing subsidies that protect a few thousand jobs at home but consign developing countries to the endless grip of biblical poverty. Terrorism is inevitable as long as we are dependent on cheap oil for energy and have to safeguard that oil supply through military action. But the power to solve these problems lies with our government. When it comes to the war on terror all we, as individuals and communities, can do is fight terrorism in our minds. How frightened we should actually be depends on evidence and statistics, and as enemies go, in terms of its body count, terrorism is actually pretty pathetic. In 2005 terrorism killed fifty-two people in Britain. Each one of those deaths was as violent and tragic as each of the nine deaths that occur every single day on Britain’s roads. Fifty-seven times as many people died on the roads in 2005 as died as a result of terrorism. So even in the worst year we’ve known for terrorist-related fatalities since 1945, you should find the car in your garage fifty-seven times more frightening than the threat of a suicide bomber. Moreover, the fifty-two deaths caused by terrorism in 2005 represented a 5,200 per cent increase on the number of deaths in the UK from terrorism the year before, which was zero. Even if you took a figure of fifty-two deaths as the annual average it would still be dwarfed by the 132,000 killed every year by cancer, the 3,500 who commit suicide, the 1,300 killed by asthma, the 1,168 killed by MRS A and the 550 killed by flu.13
It’s even outdone by the seventy people killed every year while at home doing DIY.14 It’s unlikely that the government would attempt to introduce measures to fight the evil menace that is B&Q^but the facts prove that we should be more afraid of putting up shelves than of suicidal religious fanatics. Take ladders alone. Ladders kill one person every single week and another 100,000 people a year are so seriously injured as a result of using them that they require hospital treatment. Perhaps the government’s next piece of legislation will force us all to live in bungalows. Ridiculous? Not when you consider the danger to public health posed by a flight of stairs.
You may well laugh, but stairs are a true modern foe, ten times as likely to kill you than terrorists were in the year Britain suffered its worst attack since the Second World War. So where, we must conclude, is the government’s war on stairs? And if you really want to live in fear of something that is statistically terrifying, try being afraid of your job. According to the UN, work-related deaths kill over two million people a year around the world. That’s two 9/11-scale disasters every single day, and far more than the 650,000 people killed globally every year by war.
Our reaction to terrorism is disproportionate in other ways too. After 9/11, I distinctly remember being asked to hold a three-minute silence for the victims of the Twin Towers disaster rather than the one-minute silence we have on 11 November for the millions massacred in both world wars. Is there now a pecking order for acts of remembrance? Victims of terrorism get three minutes and war casualties get one? Why the sliding scale? What are we so afraid of?
If the facts prove that we should be more afraid of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen than Osama Bin Laden, what does terrorism really threaten? To steal a phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ On 20 September 2001, nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, George Bush addressed Congress and the American people. Towards the end of his speech, after outlining the new kind of war they were facing, he said, ‘Americans are asking, “What is expected of us?” ’ Before urging them to pray, he pleaded for them to go out shopping. ‘I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity; they did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work and creativity and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before September 11, and they are our strengths today.’ Shopping became an act of patriotism in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. After the suicide bombings on the tube in London on 7 July 2005 there was a call for Londoners to show their defiance to the world by, er, going back to work. That’s the way to show the handful of terrorists who are prepared to turn themselves into human bombs that we’ve got fire in our bellies. That will really show them we mean business. When we’re under attack our leaders rally round and tell us to keep shopping and to go back to work. Those are the two foundations of our modern way of life to be safeguarded at all costs. That’s what ‘freedom’ obviously means to our leaders -the freedom to work and shop. It’s hardly ‘we’ll fight them on the beaches’, is it?
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but while the government is busy eroding our personal freedom in the name of ‘terrorism’ the rights of economic interests seem to be getting stronger and stronger by the day. It’s almost as if the people of Britain are less important to the government than the people who want to make money here. Conspiracy theory nonsense, you may think. Well, don’t take my word for it. Go and see the evidence for yourself. You could start by walking through your local town.
While I was compiling the book Crap Towns, two main themes emerged. One was that Hull really is the most turgid, desolate armpit of a town, and constantly smells of death. The other was that people felt councils and the government were more interested in the needs of those who wanted to make money in their town than the people who actually lived there. It was the same from Glasgow to Dover and Liverpool to Thorpeness. Britain used to be the land of Albion, but now it’s Britain pic.
You’ve probably noticed a change in your own life. You should have, because the statistics about life in modern Britain make depressing reading. We spend more time propping up Britain’s economy than we spend with our families. The surprising thing is that so few of us seem to have a problem with it. We now work an average of forty-three and a half hours a week, which is longer than any other country in Europe. Sixteen per cent of full-time workers put in more than sixty hours a week. This takes them into what’s known in Japan as the Karoshi zone. Karoshi means death from overwork. According to the Department of Trade and Industry, twice as many UK workers would rather cut down their hours at work than win the National Lottery but the Confederation of British Industry say that the real problem is that we’re not working hard enough. The CBI is always bleating on behalf of their members about the cost to the economy of people throwing sickies. They’ve worked out that the loss to the economy as a result of fake illnesses stands at around £1.75 billion a year. The Trades Union Congress, on the other hand, sees things a bit differently. They think unpaid overtime is a more pressing concern, and put its value at £23 billion a year. That’s £5,586-worth of work everyone in Britain does for their boss every year for nothing.
Things are even more depressing when we’re not working. Western society values busyness above all else, and they don’t want any of us slacking off just because we don’t happen to be at work. When we’re not working we should be shopping. It’s a patriotic duty, remember? And we’ve been taking our duty very seriously indeed. Now we’re in so much debt we don’t even unde
rstand what the numbers mean. As a nation, Britain is over £1 trillion in the red, and that figure is rising by 8 per cent a year. That’s over £7,000 per household, and the figure excludes mortgages. I don’t understand economics, but if we’re supposed to be richer than ever before but we’re in more debt than ever before, hasn’t Gordon Brown, or anyone else for that matter, appreciated the fact that maybe we’re not actually financially better off after all?
Remember the figure for suicides? It was 3,500 a year. That’s nearly ten self-inflicted deaths every single day of the year. Derek Rawson, a forklift truck driver, owed £100,000 on sixteen credit cards and killed himself because he couldn’t cope. Stephen Lewis owed £65,000 on nineteen credit cards before taking his own life. Ian Beech killed himself after the Halifax won a court order to evict him and his family from their home. He owed them £4,714.66. He was in the process of re-mortgaging to pay them what he owed but they wouldn’t give him enough time. He killed himself because he thought his life insurance policy would leave his family better off financially, but of course the small print pointed out that an act of suicide rendered the policy worthless. Perhaps a war on suicide might be a good idea. It was sixty-seven times more likely to claim you in 2005 than an act of terror, according to the Office of National Statistics. Unless you’re a pensioner, of course, then it’s much more likely. According to the Prudential building society, 2 per cent of pensioners - among them the generation that was prepared to ‘fight them on the beaches’, no less - have contemplated suicide because they haven’t got enough money to retire on. The government have lots of targets for economic growth, but what about the basic happiness of their citizens? Is that of any concern to them? Is that only achievable through an ever-expanding economy? You’d think so by the amount of time they spend talking about it.
