Alphen,
Netherlands. 12 June. A young British soldier is mown down in a
London street and then hacked to death.
Mosques and Islamic centres across England are attacked. The liberal elite in London mouth their
concerns and trot out the usual reality-defying, free speech quenching politically
correct nonsense. And then it is alleged
that the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are using a new computer programme called
PRISM to tap into emails and web-sites and that self-same elite go into
over-drive. Who is the problem here?
In Britain conspiracy
theorists and other assorted nutters are of course having a field day with the
revelation that US and UK security services are basically doing their job. To their mind the workings of the secret
state have been revealed and ancient liberties are being undermined. At GCHQ they are apparently actively
conspiring with the NSA to circumvent English law. And the left-leaning parts
of the media are all too happy to give this nonsense credence.
In fact the total
number of email accounts accessed by GCHQ has thus far been very small. There are 6000 people who work at GCHQ and
nothing like enough of them to deal with the exponential growth in electronic
hatred that spawn some 2000 plots and potential attacks being monitored at any
one time. And, there are more than
enough legal and procedural safeguards to ensure proper accountability under
law.
In the frenzy of false self-righteousness
the big picture has as usual been missed.
It is the failed policy of multiculturalism that has created the broken
and fearful society which extremists are now exploiting. Islamists are telling decent members of the
Muslim community (the massive majority) that white Britons do not want them
there. White extremists are talking of
an immigrant occupation of Britain. The
fact that this patent nonsense is gaining ground across poorer communities is a
mark of the failure of governments of all persuasions to promote the
integration, tolerance and mutual respect upon which any functioning liberal society
must rest. Having created the problem government
has gone AWOL.
The simple truth is
that there are an awful lot of very nasty people out there of all political and
faith hues. The Internet has given them
the means to connect, plan and carry out their campaigns of hatred. Rather than confront these issues and trust
British society with this reality successive governments have simply retreated
behind a cloak of political correctness and at times come dangerously close to
appeasing extremism. Now, Britain is
facing an action-reaction cycle of violence as extremists feed off each other
in an increasingly symbiotic relationship of hate.
The job of government
is to protect the cohesion of society from enemies within and without. Government must ensure and assure the
conditions for reasonable people from across society, Muslim and non-Muslim,
Briton and immigrant to deploy society’s greatest defence – tolerance and mutual
respect. That is why the focus should
not be on GCHQ but rather on how best to bring decent people together.
The paradox is that
many of the people who caused this mess and who talk of the danger to civil
liberties are the very same people who have also helped to create one of the
most oppressive legal regimes in any western democracy. Britain was once famed for free-speech – not any
more. Last week a young girl was
sentenced for doing something teenagers do the world over – saying something
stupid. She sent an utterly tasteless
tweet that suggested people who wear Help for Heroes t-shirts should be
beheaded. It was a tasteless fashion
statement by a naive young girl – nothing more, nothing less. There was a time when the law of the land knew
the difference between criminality and stupidity – not any more.
It is a mark of how scared
society has become that such a girl ends up in court. She had been charged under yet another of
those recently introduced laws placed on the statute book ostensibly to
‘prevent’ hatred when in fact they simply mask the mess that politicians have
made of British society. Britain is not
yet sliding towards a police state although it shows signs of it. The irony is that it is not PRISM or GCHQ
that is pushing society in that direction but those that think that fairness
and respect can be imposed by law.
Who is the enemy? It is the extremists on both sides. Therefore, to listen to the very people who
have helped create the fearful society that GCHQ now must protect complain about
civil liberties is to see them for what they are – hypocrites.
Julian Lindley-French
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