Ben Hayes (BH): So the ‘suspect community’ may have changed, but the continuity and entrenchment of these structures of power and authority and control remains, as well as the complete impunity with which egregious human rights violations have been carried out, with rendition and torture practised here in the UK as well.
It is the permanence of some of these structures and, as Cori says, the size and scale of these vested interests, that must strike us. The monopoly of violence that the state once had is now somehow augmented or facilitated by the huge technological infrastructure she invokes, which in many ways is changing the nature of both the potential and the current practise of security policies across the world. This scale of development is not just going to be fixed overnight.
"So the ‘suspect community’ may have changed, but the continuity and entrenchment of these structures of power and authority and control remains."
Daniel is clearly right – let’s make states operate within the rule of law; let’s make them human rights compliant and stamp out the human rights violations. That offers us a path forward. But for some of us who have been in this space for quite some time, making these arguments about human rights and maybe those differences between where you are now and where we are in mainland Britain, it kind of feels as if this is just not working for us any more and that states can carry on speaking the language of human rights quite comfortably and setting up human rights commissions – but nothing changes.
So I am going to come back with specific questions for each of you, starting with Narzanin… I’m a huge fan of your work. You have linked the way counter-terrorism operates to the lack of democracy, how it is failing democracy and providing profoundly unjust and undemocratic outcomes. But you have also linked what you have seen of the overall narratives around counter-terrorism and security to the re-emergence of the far right, in this populist moment that we are in now that Anthony Barnett spoke about at the beginning of the Democracy Day. About this, mainstream theory will have it that you have got liberal democracy in the middle and the far right over here and far left over there, and the state just doing its best to mediate this complex terrain in which we regrettably now find ourselves. Your work speaks against that – so I was wondering if you could say more about that.
To Daniel – this is a selfish question from where we are, but the Good Friday Agreement and the Patten Report promised so much in terms of policing reform and maybe offers those of us who are trying to think about what a more just and equitable policing settlement might look like – maybe you can talk to what was promised, what the reality looks like now.
"It is the permanence of some of these structures and, as Cori says, the size and scale of these vested interests, that must strike us."
To Cori – there is so much I want to ask you, particularly about the technology and how that is changing things, but the main question is how do we deal with these structures of power – Special Branch – three times the size that it was during the height of the Troubles? The budget I think for the UK intelligence services is five times the budget for the police in the UK. So with these massively entrenched and completely unaccountable structures, it strikes me that if we are going to talk about alternatives for democratic control, we have got to start with those.
NM: I work in a collaborative project with some of my colleagues on Islamophobia: we look at how this anti-Muslim racism has come about. We turned the question upside down, and found that if you really look at how Islamophobia is perpetuated and maintained, supported throughout society and institutionalised within our everyday practises, the crucial backbone for Islamophobia is the state – and in particular its widespread counter-terrorism apparatus.
But the state works alongside social movements, and there are a number of these social movements, not at all confined to fringe groups like the EDL on the streets. There are different currents: elite social movements like the neo-conservative movement, the counter-jihad movement, parts of the Zionist movement, but also some liberal left movements and there are ways in which these movements overlap.
They begin by lobbying the state, pushing forward more aggressive, rightwing, racist and more authoritarian policies that affect Muslims disproportionately – so for example, much of our counter-terrorism legislation has been heavily influenced by neo-conservative groups. But as they overlap, in funding sources, movements and even ideas, you begin to see a merging between say neoconservative and counter jihad movements. The state enables this by adopting some of the same kind of language and rhetoric as these movements in terms of their policies, but also by how these groups thrive in the context of policies that cite Muslims as extremists and see them as living in suspect communities and so forth.
So what do we do about this? There are a couple of principles here. First we have to think about how we can undo past harms – the longer process of holding people to account for their actions. But in terms of dealing with the racism that the state enables, we have to be able to hold the state to account for these policies, and the way in which these policies are being formed at the moment is profoundly undemocratic – it is a very narrow group of people that are having an input into the discussion about what the problem is, and how we deal with it. Our institutions themselves, our public institutions, need to be democratised and re-educated, so that principles of human rights, multiculturalism, children’s right are enhanced and at the core of these institutions. Mechanisms allowing us to hold them and therefore the state to account would prevent these kinds of social movements from influencing our policy in the way that they do.
"It is a very narrow group of people that are having an input into the discussion about what the problem is, and how we deal with it."
Cori spoke about secrecy and accountability, and within the legislation and practices to do with counter-terrorism and Muslim communities, there is far too much secrecy, even when it comes to civil society. For example, it was recently revealed that RICU, which is the research, information and communication unit in the Home Office, has, with the help of a PR firm, been creating covert Muslim civil society campaigns and covertly supporting organisations which present themselves and engage in activities seemingly as representing grassroots Muslim voices. This, of course, has a profoundly negative impact, in terms of trust, and enabling people to know who and what they are engaging with when it comes to resourcing community activity. For example, in Bristol where I live, I went to a local Muslim community event there, talking about PREVENT and what not – to find that the whole event was run by two organisations heavily funded by the Home Office – though the nature of this support wasn’t actually revealed at the time – but also that it was being run by the local Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Unit. So what was going on? The way it was billed as representing grassroots voices was deceptive. This is intimidation and interference. So those transparency issues are incredibly important and we try to make such information available about who is running what, because it does have reputational implications for people who, say, end up working for the Home Office without realising it.
DH: Overall, going back to your question, going back to Good Friday and the Patten Report – and not just in terms of the police but also the justice system, this is a good news story. Those who say nothing has changed are wrong. This is one of the good news stories of the peace settlement. It had to be fought for every inch of the way over three different pieces of legislation. Even now we are fighting every day against roll back from all this. But the police have been very significantly reformed.
It is not just issues around composition. But take having to work with a human rights compliant framework. The European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) is not only embedded as part of the Good Friday Agreement, but it is then incorporated within the binding Code of Ethics for police officers, and we have a very powerful oversight institution in the Police Ombudsman that has full police powers to investigate police officers. We have an oversight architecture in the shape of a Policing Board, and we did have an independent human rights adviser role until last year when the opportunity of the collapse in power sharing was used to cull that role, and we hope that now will come back. So it is a running battle to keep this level up, and there are caveats, but on the whole it is a good news story.
"ECHR is not only embedded as part of the Good Friday Agreement, but it is then incorporated within the binding Code of Ethics for police officers."
The running battle has involved attempts by the UK to insert police and law enforcement bodies into Northern Ireland that sit outside that oversight architecture. There was a huge battle over the National Crime Agency where fortunately both of the nationalist parties blocked it being legislated for fully with police powers until the Home Office agreed that it would fall under the Ombudsman and the Policing Board and everything that has been set up.
The one body that isn’t is MI5, which has been estimated to have something between 500- 700 officers here (that is two thirds of the strength of RUC Special Branch), sitting in a base down on the Belfast Loughshore. Mi5 sits outside all of these oversight provisions. That is very worrying. We do know, through other litigation in which we have been involved, that MI5 do now have guidelines on the involvement of informants and crime and criminal activity, and authorisation processes. When I say we have those Guidelines, they have been put into the public domain, but ninety per cent of the page has been blanked out. But the last sentence is very telling. It says, something along the lines of “informants shall not be authorised to entice or be involved in a serious criminal offence, unless it is authorised under these guidelines.” So at first you think, yes that sounds like a democratic society, but it’s only when you read the second half of the sentence that you think, hang on, that’s a bit of a problem.
"Mi5 sits outside all of these oversight provisions. That is very worrying."
It has already been mentioned that we have been spared PREVENT. I imagine that someone from the Home Office went to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and asked, “Would you like to go into classrooms around Belfast and tell people that we are the forces of law and order and that they shouldn’t become evil terrorists?” And that the PSNI said, “Er, no, I don’t think so”. In relation to such State intervention programmes in general my sense is that the overwhelming feeling would be one of gross hypocrisy, especially when States are themselves involved in illegal wars of aggression and in human rights violations in different places.
We are a human rights organisation and opposed to all forms of violence, and that’s why we won’t use the word “terrorism”, because that term is just an ideological concept for separating out ‘good’ violence from ‘bad’ violence. And that’s a problem for those of us who are opposed to all forms of violence.
"We won’t use the word “terrorism”, because that term is just an ideological concept for separating out ‘good’ violence from ‘bad’ violence."
We were spared the Counter Extremism Strategy because the Home Office knew they couldn’t legislate for it here, because again, the representatives of past ‘suspect communities’ were quite vocal about how they would block this from going through the NI Assembly. It also contained a vague concept that it would target extremists, and it defined ‘extremism’ as not abiding by British Values.
That was always going to be an interesting concept here, because of course we don’t have to be British. We can be Irish or British or both and so forth… When you looked at what British Values were, there was a problem. Not with the values themselves… they were all about tolerance and democracy and this, that and the other. But the problem was that they weren’t British Values, they were universal human rights values, and the problem was that they were being projected as if they were only embodied in British Values and weren’t held by the undefined foreign Other. That’s how they were being projected and that was extremely problematic.
One of the British values extolled there was tolerance of people with different sexual orientation, and we thought, “Right, that’s why they are not implementing it here, because they would have to arrest the DUP”. But of course they would never have applied the legislation in that way. But it would have been used to target the community that was going to be the ‘suspect community’. A lot of these interventions have to be called out for what they really are. It was essentially thinly-disguised British nationalism. That’s all it was – about isolating a particular set of values that weren’t held by the Other and then targeting that Other, whilst ignoring the patterns and practises of the State both at home and overseas.
CC: I have two families of answer that I have been chewing on since you approached me. One is to answer on the security state’s own terms, which was to say, if your objective was to reduce the risk of ‘jihadist violence’, you have failed under your own terms. If MI5’s Eliza Manningham-Buller can herself see and say that the single greatest driving factor for recruitment to armed groups was the invasion of Iraq, then the point is made. It is at least partially the case that you can draw a line between the invasion of Iraq, the creation of the Islamic State, the refugee crisis and the rise of the far right. It is not the whole story, but it is a line that it is legitimate to draw and a part of the story that people need to think about. So there is one answer that goes, even by your account you have failed, and you have increased the risk.
The answer I am more interested in is the exciting thinking that is going on about what progressive foreign policy and progressive national security policy might look like. It reframes the question and asks, what is security policy actually for, what is the purpose of security policy? – i.e. if it is actually about trying to preserve a way of life, an open and tolerant and pluralistic democracy – if you ask that question instead – then I feel that whole new vistas open up for you.