In Whose Hands is Britain Safest?

Civitas, 29 June 2006

‘I hope we will honour the victims [of the London terror bombings last July], and look frankly at what can be done at the European level to give more coherence to the fight against terrorism and organised crime.’
So Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, is reported to have said according to a report in today’s Times.
Few will surely want to disagree with the sentiment expressed in the first half of his assertion.
Many, however, will want to question the suggestion contained in the second half of his assertion about how the memory of the victims of last year’s London tube bombings may best be honoured.

According to the newspaper report, Mr Barroso thinks the best way in which Britain and other member states of the EU can combat terror within their borders is by ceding to his organisation more power over policing and the courts than it currently enjoys. His organisation reportedly wants ‘to speed up the creation of a single “judicial area” by scrapping the national vetoes on law and order issues and transferring decision-making powers to Brussels’. Under its favoured proposals, the Commission would acquire power to train judges, and the European Court of Justice would be where all asylum and immigration cases to EU countries would be heard and decided.
It is understandable, without being acceptable, that a President of the EC might want more power for the organisation over which he presides. For him to justify such a naked power-play by invoking in its support the memory of the victims of last July’s London terror bombings takes some gall, however. The suicide-bombers were home-grown British-born citizens. How could making over more to central European authorities more power over law, order and immigration possibly have helped Britain to prevent last July’s bombings? It beggars belief.
Contrary to what Mr Barroso maintains, it has principally been Britain’s surrender of national sovereignty to supra-national European authorities that has posed the biggest threat to its homeland security in recent years, as was made clear yesterday by the decision of a High Court judge that control orders imposed on terror suspects are no less in breach of current human rights legislation than their detention without trial had earlier been found to be.
Although the present Labour government tightened the bonds by which such laws had tied its hands in fighting the war against terror when it enacted the Human Rights Act in 1998, the ultimate source of its present difficulties in this matter stems from the manner in which the European Court has latterly come to interpret the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights.
If, as I believe, the prime duty of the government of any state is to promote the security and well-being of its citizens, then for the government to cede still more power to European supra-national agencies is for it to be steering the country in anything but the right direction.
Finally, and on another but not altogether different subject, as we move toward the first anniversary, Friday week, of that fateful day last July, our thoughts will increasingly turn to the victims of the events of that appalling day and to the members of their families who will surely still remain deeply traumatised by the manner of the untimely loss of their loved ones.
Some, like Mr Barruso who rightly would wish to honour the memory of these victims, might well want to question the sensitivity of the timing of a large two day exhibition due to occur at Alexandra Palace on that and the following day next week designed to show off the charms of Islam.
Of course, not all or even most Muslims support Islamist terrorism. But it surely cannot have escaped the notice of the exhibition organisers that the acts of terror carried out last July were undertaken in the name of their religion, however ill-conceived those who carried them out might have been to think they could find inspiration for them in it.
Indeed, without wishing to question their entitlement to choose those particular dates for their exhibition, some might wonder as to what motive might have led them to choose to stage it to coincide with the anniversary of that appalling tragedy. A recent survey has reportedly found British Muslims the most anti-western in Europe, with as many as one in five backing suicide- bombings in certain circmstances. That so many do not reciprocate the good-will which the majority of their non-Muslim compatriots have also been found to feel towards them suggests that some British Muslims, if not, of course, the exhibition organisers will, given its timing, sieze the occasion for a triumphalist celebration of last July’s bombings in a way that one might have expected the organisers to have been able to anticipate and have been anxious to avoid by staging it at some other time.
After all, if we are to be encouraged to join with them in celebrating their religion of peace, as clearly the organisers are hoping we will do, could they not have chosen a better day on which to hold their exhibition than one of national grief, especially when being held in the same city as that in which the tragedy occurred?