Politicians can find public paranoia very useful. With the government banging on about the terrorist threat, suspicion is growing that Blair aims to strengthen the state and cast himself in the role of Benevolent Dictator

When the American essayist and critic HL Mencken wrote in 1918 that the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamourous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary he can hardly have suspected how accurate a prediction that would become.

Last week’s Queen’s Speech, of course, made no mention of hobgoblins. It didn’t need to. On its eve, ITN and the Daily Mail both ran the same “leaked” story of how British security services had foiled a plot by al-Qaeda to fly aircraft, 9/11 style, into skyscrapers at London’s iconic Canary Wharf complex.

Although the government yesterday emphatically denied the leak had come from them, and both media outlets continued to insist the timing of the story’s publication was theirs, the notion of the hidden threatening enemy and dogged survival had been illustrated by the claimed threat.

The text of the sovereign’s speech carried implied threats that only a Serious Organised Crime Agency or no-jury trials or compulsory identity cards could save us from the barbarians.

Al-Qaeda supplies the hobgoblins; Islamic terrorism the complex global organisation, ideologically driven and determined to destroy the democratic West.

Adam Curtis, the writer and producer of the BBC series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise Of The Politics Of Fear insists that “it is this fantasy that is being used to justify many of the extraordinary special measures that the government has outlined.

"It is a price we are told that society has to pay when faced with such an overwhelmingly powerful enemy that is unlike any other terror threat from the past.”

The senior politicians of the government, set out last week to defend the measures outlined in the Lords, almost uniformly explained that their choices were limited by the political reality they faced.

Against the backdrop of the Prime Minister again insisting that al-Qaeda posed a serious threat to the UK and to other western countries, Cabinet ministers almost uniformly asked for faith and belief: faith that the government knew more than it could safely tell us; and belief that it was doing all it could to safeguard our freedom even if that meant limiting the freedom of others.

The bottom line? When Britain is hit by a terrorist attack – we have been told this is virtually inevitable by senior police officers – the government does not want to be seen as having done little to prevent it.

The Queen’s Speech in this analysis is an elaborate political insurance policy, a guarantee of no-blame. The sub-headings in the speech were self explanatory: “Making Britain more secure in a changing world; opportunity and security for all; security built on strong foundations.”

With the vellum of the Queen’s Speech barely rolled up and its anti-terrorist, authoritarian, legally rebalancing themes already being dissected, the former junior defence minister, Peter Kilfoyle, rounded on Tony Blair’s government for trying to win the next election by creating a “climate of fear”.

The newly promoted David Cameron, for the Conservatives, attacked the numerous law and order measures, claiming they were being used to create a “police state” but one, crucially, without enough police.

More police, the Tories hope, will remain only a promise they can make when the election comes. But what else will be left for them to pick over once the Labour manifesto is announced, is slim.

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy attacked ministers for whipping up a climate of fear that would be used for their electoral advantage.

Only the leader of the House, Peter Hain, let slip that there would be no apology for the evident electoral advantage the government would gain for the climate being created.

“If we are tough on crime and on terrorism, as Labour is, then I think Britain will be safer under Labour,” Hain told the BBC.

Earlier he told a group of reporters that there had been politically designed choreography behind the Queen’s speech: “We are crowding out any space [for the Conservatives] on the security agenda and that will make for an interesting political year.”

Tactics against terrorism last week effectively became a party political issue – and many didn’t like it. Former prime minister John Major branded Hain’s comment “desperate”, dismissing the idea that the nation was safer under any one political party.

Former head of the joint intelligence committee Dame Pauline Neville-Jones described it as simply “dangerous” to turn the security debate into a party political issue.

For Hain, however, the security arithmetic is crystal clear. “The Tories and the LibDems oppose lots of our measures on terrorism and lots of measures in tackling crime.

So yes, Britain will be safer under Labour … the whole argument is about building safer and more secure communities in Britain.”

Hain isn’t offering an argument, he’s offering a political fix that in times of uncertainty an electorate might be reluctant to question.

After the attacks in New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, former US president Bill Clinton said the psychological impact of the destruction couldn’t be under-estimated.

“When people are insecure, they’d rather have someone strong and wrong, than someone weak and right.” He thought that in a climate of fear and insecurity, Republicans were able to appeal to voters by appearing strong on national security.

Blair has so far been proved very wrong over his given reasons for taking Britain into the US-led war in Iraq.

While he continues to skate over the damaging conclusions of both the Hutton and Butler inquiries, the failure to uncover any weapons of mass destruction inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the post-war insurgency chaos, the political reality is that Blair is damaged goods, his credibility and trust at times almost running dry.

In Clinton’s analysis, Blair may have been wrong, and his only option now is to appear strong.


A former Downing Street adviser said: “This is likely to be one of the game plans, one of the options.

“Tony didn’t create al-Qaeda, but he may be identified with creating the uncertainty that now exists. Therefore, he has to show he’s dealing with it, has a solution, has a way back to normality if you like. And if the way back has to be tough, fine ... the British people will understand that.”

Another analysis is that a “climate of fear” is created and extended not because of the real fear of the enemy outside, but because the senior politicians of the US-UK coalition, Bush and Blair, recognise and sense the erosion of their own legitimacy and security.

Bush won the election against the chaos of mounting US troop deaths in Iraq and amid the ongoing deterioration of the US economy; he won by appealing to basic fear and the belief that fundamental Christian values were needed to survive.

If the Queen’s Speech is an indication of what is to come, Blair is happy to gamble all on defending the predicted insecurity ahead, rather than be forced to defend the mistakes he made in creating that insecurity.

Climate-of-fear politics, however, comes with a high price tag and leading civil liberty and human rights campaigners are already indicating the reluctance to buy into Blair’s new regime. Shami Chakrabati, the director of the human rights group Liberty, is wary.

“Tough talk and tougher legislation is cheap. It doesn’t make us any safer from crime, terrorism and the other great causes of fear. What it will do is undermine the very democracy that this government and its allies across the Atlantic say they want to defend.”

Home Secretary David Blunkett rejects the idea there is any fear-based design, insisting: “This is about taking sensible and commonsense measures to protect people.”

But which people does Blunkett want protected and which legal principles is he willing to put out to tender to achieve the desired protection?

Fear and insecurity worked in helping put Bush back in to the White House. And similar electoral tactics have worked elsewhere.

The leading Labour peer and barrister, Baroness Helena Kennedy, and one of the leading critics of the government’s increasingly authoritarian policies, points to globalisation as a root cause of generating feelings of vulnerability.

“People are easily alarmed by the idea that barbarians are at every gate in the form of terrorists, asylum seekers and criminals. They are prepared to sacrifice a significant level of freedom and privacy in exchange for greater security.”

Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Kennedy, claimed that what the government was now trying to put in place was “the rebalancing of power towards the state” and she claimed that what was being introduced today for terrorism “almost invariably enters general usage thereafter”.

In a scathing attack on Blair, she said: “Fundamental shifts are taking place in our justice system with barely a whimper of opposition. On June 18, 2002, the Prime Minister claimed that the ‘biggest miscarriage of justice in today’s system is when the guilty walk away unpunished’.

"In that statement he sought to overturn centuries of legal principle ... whereby conviction of an innocent man is deemed the greatest miscarriage of justice. For Tony Blair there is no such thing as legal principle, as we saw in the rejection of international legal principle in relation to the Iraq war. For him, everything is negotiable.”

But the most crucial negotiation for Blair is perhaps only five months away when he will try and win his third general election in a row. In the past two, he has promised the electorate a better future with the state intervening only to assist in ensuring the positive. This time the role of state is changing to that of protector, ensuring it will deliver us from the unknown horrors of the days ahead.

Tony Blair’s campaign to become the Father Who Watches Over Us may have just started.

James Cusick @ Sunday Herald