The Guardian view on Theresa May’s proposals to counter extremism
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Version 0 of 1. Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative conference was both highly accomplished and highly disturbing. Ambitious, serious, and much superior to the average ministerial platform speech, it may have lacked the virtuoso egotism of Boris Johnson’s address soon afterwards in the same hall. But it was just as surely the speech of a politician with leadership ambitions. As home secretary, Mrs May has responsibility for subjects that, in the past, have worked Tory conferences into a frenzy: crime, policing, immigration and drugs among them. But she barely mentioned any of them. Perhaps she forgot to do so. Mrs May began audaciously. She was introduced by a black south Londoner, Alexander Paul, who explained to the largely white audience how he felt so “vilified, exploited and angry” after having been stopped and searched by the police more than 20 times in his life – all because he “fitted the description” of a young black male whom the police were hunting for a crime. For any political party to open its home affairs debate with a frank challenge to the police of this sort would have been bold. For the Tories to do so felt like a kind of cultural revolution. It was a smart, aware way for Mrs May to begin a speech which then centred overwhelmingly on an account of the terrorist threat and on the home secretary’s controversial plans to increase the government’s powers against domestic Islamist extremism. The core of Mrs May’s case was the one heard in the Commons debate on Isis last week, which says the threat to the UK from jihadist terror is increasing and enduring, and has to be defeated at home as well as abroad. It is true that, in pursuit of that, she is proposing a number of powers which, in classic abuse-of-civil-liberty mode, could be misused and, in being misused, could become recruiting sergeants for the jihadist cause. We will come back to those in a moment. It is also true that the conventional case fails to take account of the need for the foreign policy response to reflect the natural anxieties of Muslims in Britain more than it yet does. Nevertheless, the overall argument was thoughtfully put together and expressed with nuance and restraint. A studied, careful response was needed, the home secretary said, and she largely delivered on that. Mrs May knows that the powers she seeks must be tough enough to please her party but reasonable enough to persuade mainstream Muslim voters. The Tories only won 16% of minority votes in 2010 and Mrs May understands that the party she hopes to lead must do better. But the likely effect of two groups of measures that Mrs May is proposing is dangerous. They are not supportable as they stand. The first are the banning orders and “extremism-disruption orders” aimed at those who spread hatred without infringing existing laws. The insuperable problem with these plans, as written, is that their net could potentially catch many more political activists than those about whom Mrs May complains. A formulation to prevent “harmful activities” is one such example. A draft which penalises “threats to the functioning of democracy” is another. The creation of “alarm” or “distress” is another. All are very low thresholds. Much too low. They might help stir the very radicalism they are designed to prevent. They are not just illiberal but counterproductive. They need to be rethought. The same applies with even greater force to the plan to revive the communications data bill. This was rightly blocked by the Liberal Democrats two years ago because, just as with the extremism-disruption orders, the powers and definitions were cast too wide. The enhancement of powers to track internet data in very specific, court-authorised cases should certainly not be ruled out. But it cannot legitimately be revived in the over-permissive form that was proposed two years ago. In the past two years, moreover, the whole scope of state data trawling and retention has been blown apart by the Snowden revelations. Any attempt to revive even properly focused powers from the earlier bill could only be seriously justified in the wider context of post-Snowden legislation encompassing GCHQ techniques and purposes. Not even Mrs May was bold enough to propose that. |