A World to Win

The Home Secretary's list of "unacceptable behaviours" announced on August 24, a breach of which can lead to foreign nationals being deported, is another plank in the authoritarian state that New Labour is constructing.

Charles Clarke's rules are so widely drawn that they cover much, much more than outright encouragement to terror attacks like the ones in London in July. They can easily ensnare, for example, campaigns to overthrow despotic regimes in the Middle East or to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

Enforcing the rules will require mass surveillance of Muslim communities in particular, to check that no one is making "extremist" speeches or selling books or videos that support terrorism. No doubt both the police and MI5 are rushing through proposals for more resources (and overtime) to cope with the "pressure".

New Labour's supreme indifference to the rule of law and human rights was revealed when Clarke angrily rebuked a UN special official on torture. He had accused the British government of trying to circumvent its duty not to deport people to countries where torture and execution is the norm. But Clarke said the human rights of the victims of terror were more important.

Expelling a few clerics that have no direct connection with the July 7 atrocities only reinforces A World to Win's view that the state has no political answer to terrorism and instead adopts a form of authorised terror of its own. The results are self-evident: a curtailment of democratic rights, out-of-control policing as seen in the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, as well as the demonisation of minority communities and Islam.

These outcomes will please the rabid right-wing press which drives government policy but leaves the majority of the population vulnerable - both to terror attacks and the arbitrary actions of the state. The so-called "war on terror" thus becomes a war on ordinary people.

We are on a slippery slope to an outright police-surveillance state, where "extremism" as defined by the authorities is deemed illegal and judges are instructed to confirm this is so. How long then before it becomes unlawful to campaign for an alternative, truly democratic state to replace the existing one?

But A World to Win will not be deflected from this ambition. To begin to undermine terrorism and deal with other pressing questions like the ecological crisis, will require a democratic, mass transformation of both economic and political structures. Only then could we effectively repudiate actions like the illegal and devastating invasion of Iraq and the exploitation of developing countries by giant corporations. Building support for this campaign is the most positive way forward.

25 August 2005