As a result of the escapes that were publicised last week, the Home Secretary (interior minister) John Reid stated that the UK might have to opt out of some of the clauses of European human rights legislation that limited the scope of control orders. He promised tougher anti-terrorist measures would be introduced before parliament by the end of June, when he and his boss Tony Blair step down. Tony Blair himself pitched into the fray yesterday (Sunday 27 May) by arguing in favour of a new police power to stop and interrogate suspects on the street. The prime minister stated, “We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong”. Well, that all depends on what qualifies you as a suspect, I suppose. And are the civil liberties of 'foreigners' any less important than those of UK subjects?
The control order regime, and the fact that it was sufficiently lax to allow these three suspects to escape, is another illustration of the British approach to dealing with radical intolerance, discussed in my last entry in connection with the Shilpa Shetty episode in Celebrity Big Brother. Control orders bear all the hallmarks of a process of suppressing and censoring people and ideas that are 'beyond tolerance', rather than dealing with them in a more publicly accountable way, or even in a more ruthless, systematic fashion that would definitely put them out of circulation. In this sense, control orders already do represent Britain's equivalent to Guantanamo Bay, a direction in which the Northern Ireland minister Peter Hain yesterday warned that the new proposed anti-terrorist measures were taking Britain.
Indeed, what more striking expression of the ambiguity of British 'zero tolerance' towards the radically intolerant could there be than control orders? Individuals are not locked up in a judicial limbo, like Guantanamo (which, to give him his 'credit', Tony Blair has argued that they should be); instead, they are 'politely' removed from the public domain and confined to the private realm of their homes. It is as if the intolerance exemplified by supposed terrorists – like the intolerance to which every citizen is prone to some extent – can be tolerated so long as it is confined to the privacy of the home and the individual's thoughts. And like any form of censorship – political or psychological – the setting up of control orders represents a means not just to suppress the individuals and ideas that are intolerable but also to censor the very mechanisms by which those persons and thoughts are suppressed: the process takes place in a sort of judicial no-man's land, outside of the normal operation of justice, where the facts of the case, the names of the individuals involved, and the values driving the activities of the 'suspects' are removed from the public domain.
In other words, control orders are a very British compromise between wanting / needing to act in a radically intolerant way towards those suspected of threatening the very tolerance upon which our liberal society rests, without having to admit that one is behaving in an intolerant manner. Because of this, control orders do preserve some elements of 'liberty' for those subjected to them: the liberties of private association, conscience and speech. We don't in fact seek to exercise mind control like the Orwellian Big Brother or, arguably, like the mental torturers of Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. The specific control order that applied to the three escapees must also have allowed them sufficient freedom to meet or communicate with each other to co-ordinate their flight. There is perhaps even an element of British fair play involved: we allow them a bit of slack, on the basis that our gut instinct is that what we're doing to them strictly isn't fair, and on the assumption that they might have the decency to play fair in their turn and not attempt to abscond – and then we get all indignant when they have the temerity to do a runner anyway!
There's an interesting parallel between the control-order evaders and the lack of editorial oversight on which the Shilpa Shetty furore has now been blamed. When what is involved is censorship of something intolerable rather than acknowledging it and attempting to deal with it openly (whether through honest discussion or due legal process), then what happens is that rather than watching the object of suspicion, it is all too easy to take one's eye off the ball: to stop looking at the real issue and the real danger. And then that real threat, which has escaped your attention because you thought you'd placed it under control and then stopped looking at, can elude you and come back to haunt you.
The evasion of the three control-order detainees represents the danger that their actions and ideas could once again impinge upon, invade, the public domain. But in a more profound sense, their evasion presents the threat of an invasion of our privacy. Our confinement of those suspects to 'their own' private space was a means to keep them away from ours. Our British society is a private society, where the individual jealously guards their right to freely pursue their own personal and professional goals (both ever more exclusively defined in the terms of the market society, or 'private enterprise') untrammelled by the claims that religious or ideological absolutism might wish to impose upon them. The 'terrorist' or the 'racist' extremist is a threat to this tolerance based on mutual respect and pursuit of each other's private goals. They must therefore be suppressed, and their intolerance (as is ours) must be relegated to its own private space: the control-order detainees' prison-from-prison that is their home, or the prison of the Big Brother House. If they should get out – even more importantly, if their intolerable ideas should get out and gain hold – then, like the 'racist' outbursts in Celebrity Big Brother, this would indeed be an unbearable invasion of privacy.
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