From The Guardian yesterday:
The Department for Education has drawn up a series of proposals which are to be sent to universities and other centres of higher education before the end of the year. The 18-page document acknowledges that universities will be anxious about passing information to special branch, for fear it amounts to “collaborating with the ‘secret police'”. It says there will be “concerns about police targeting certain sections of the student population (eg Muslims)”.
There are two things I find fascinating about this. Not that it explicitly suggests staff may want to report students to the authorities for “using a computer while Asian” – something which if followed would bankrupt every scientific, economic and medical faculty in the country, from the postage and staff time used in denouncements – but the institutional presumptions involved, and the political context. First, institutions. It appears most of this document is more of the same general-terms bloviation we’ve seen before about “radical Mulsim groups recruiting on campuses” from tame ex-spooks in academia with research grants to foster. As if it were novel or significant. Young middle-class people toying with extreme ideas? Whatever next? (The Cambridge spies did inestimable damage; fellow ’30s commie intellectuals Denis Healey and Alfred Sherman changed their minds, and respectively maintained Western defences and laid the foundations for the resurgence of liberalism. Student fervour is no guide to future performance.)
The meat is in the way delation on flimsy grounds is justified, as not harmful:
Special branch are aware that many HEIs [higher education institutions] will have a number of concerns about working closely with special branch. Some common concerns are that institutions will be seen to be collaborating with the ‘secret police’.
HEIs may also worry about what special branch will do with any information supplied by an HEI and what action the police may subsequently take […] Special branch are not the ‘secret police’ and are accountable.
Given that Special Branch is in the course of absorption into the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, perhaps this assertion is just irrelevant, but it is hard to see what it might mean in respect of either institution. In what way are Special Branch operations not secret? And how does “accountable” help? If you ask, accountable to whom? the only plausible answers are: to themselves, and to the Home Office [Department of Internal Security].
Doesn’t sound any different to a traditional secret police to me. I’m perfectly prepared to believe that Special Branch, or a successor organisation, is necessary to anticipate underground threats to the Queen’s peace. But its manner of operations, controlled by law, responding to real dangers to the people not cultural threats to the state, is what should distinguish it from the Stasi. The Department for Education is dressing up, “You can trust us”, in the procedural language of human rights.
Second, politics. Why is this leaked now as a pre-announcement of something due later? I suggest timing is significant. It follows a week after a speech from Gordon Brown on ‘Meeting the Terrorist Challenge’ in which he called for “cultural action against terrorist extremism”, and explicitly referenced a surprising announcement by Jack Straw of a week earlier still that he is uncomfortable with the niqab and asks constituents to remove theirs when they talk to him.
Plenty of inconsequential fuss has previously been made about the influence of the barking but mostly harmless Hizb-ut-Tahrir on campuses. (Somehow HMG has never got round to outlawing it, despite repeated sabre-rattling. Could it be a lightning-rod?) Mr Brown has adumbrated his totalitarian vision before, though he repeats the message more as he approaches the succession. Mr Straw has been interfering privately with his Muslim constituents’ habits for many years, we are to believe, but never felt the need to mention it before. Islamism has been a pest in the West for twenty or more years, but we’re not significantly more under threat from it than we were this time last year.
What is more under threat than it was this time last year is the Government. This is part of a rolling broadside of media presentations to indicate that the government is “doing something” about a putative Islamist threat. It is designed not to make us be more secure (as was old-time Special Branch activity, quietly gathering intelligence) but to make us feel less secure. Fear favours the incumbent. The Government is hastening to squash Mr Cameron’s timid, discreditable, flirting with anti-Muslim sentiment in his (rather silly) policy announcement on quotas for faith schools by going all-in, knowing he cannot check, let alone raise.
A Big Theme distracts from the failures of the government that were beginning to trouble the polls of late. Liberty and justice to individuals be damned, if the mob can be fed.
I would have thought that universities were the last place that Hamza and his ilk would be recruiting from. Surely by now the state must have worked out that the vast majority of suicide bombers tend to be simple, immature and impressionable young men with very low education achievment and lacking in any self-esteem, thus ripe for picking by the imams of terror.
“First they came for the Muslims” … to misquote Pastor Martin Niemöller.
Good post, and probably right. I remember when I was at Uni the London Church of Christ was an unwelcome extremist organisation. The university had no trouble drawing up its own policies regarding this bunch of nutters and their techniques for separating lonely students from their cash and families. The university was able to effectively combat them without the need to pass information to special branch, and without the government draft new laws about religious extremism.
Julian Taylor “I would have thought that universities were the last place that Hamza and his ilk would be recruiting from….suicide bombers tend to be simple, immature and impressionable…with very low education achievment”
Obviously you havent been to UK university recently …
I assume that the graphic is a photo-shop job, but these days there’s the nagging feeling that it might not be.
Can someone re-assure me?
Right!
Julian: At least one of the 7/7 bombers was quite well off, a medical student I think, nor was Atta some low life Joe.
Heres an idea, if the Uni’s wont pass info over fine; if one of their students blows people up, the head of the uni, all the lecturers who taught the creep, their families, friends, dogs, cats and budgies, right down to the fucking worms in their gardens, are identified by photo, address, clubs and favourite pubs.
It is made known that no act against any of these people, however violent, is a crime as they are enablers of terrorism.
Watch the phones glow then.
Thus adding new meaning to the phrase “and your little dog too”
I must admit I had started to entertain the idea that the government may be playing to anti-muslim feeling in light of their own declining popularity. We’ll have to wait and see.
And what’s with this euphemism of “Asian”? I can’t seem to remember many Islamofascists who are Chinese, Japanese, etc.
Asian is the British word for “South Asian”.
Andrew Duffin,
No; it is real. Corner of Upper Wimpole Street, last week, but probably destroyed by now. It is however, what you might call street satire by person or persons unknown that’s been going on around the West End for a while now…
The real thing is frequently exhibited on Samizdata, however. See here, for example. Britain is full of injunctions from the state that you must east five portions of fruit or veg a day, or that the Road Fund Tax database knows where you live, or that giving to beggars funds terrorism.
belomi,
In British English, ‘Asian’ as a racial epithet means South Asian – Pakistani, Indian, Malay, etc… There are a lot of Britons from those backgrounds because of the British Empire covering that region. The Chinese and Japanese would be classed as ‘oriental’, I suppose, but there are relatively many fewer so a general term is not much used at all.
So is the UK the United States’ future or am I jumping the gun a bit?
And that link posted by Guy, my word. Brings meaning to the phrase “hiding in plain sight” doesn’t it?
The UK is winding itself up so that it can have a scandal like this one …………….
http://www.stephentaylor.ca/archives/000694.html
http://www.ararcommission.ca/eng/Vol_I_English.pdf
Half truths, hearsay and inuendo can get you a year long vacation in a Syrian hell hole.
There are posters all over my campus (Ohio State – Columbus) advising that if anyone sees anything “suspicious” to report it at once (I’ve never gotten close enough to see who you’re supposed to report it to, but it’s sponsored by Ohio’s Dept. of Homeland Security, which does operate a tip hotline.) They appear to be mostly after abandoned bags and people poking around in places they shouldn’t, but I wonder what kind of information they’ll be encouraging us to report next.
‘In a smart red pillar-box somewhere in Mayfair…’
http://www.dangermouse.org/sounds/london.wav(Link)
I read that in Kurdistan, they fight terrorism in the mosques. If a nutter imam starts screaching death to everyone but him and his followers, he is brought in for some rather rough treatment. Then he is given his choices of never seeing the sun again, the Iranian border, the Turkish border or the Syrian border. It seems they don’t have as much of a problem anymore over there, and the economy is booming.
this is quite something
[But entirely off topic. – GH]
Watch you neighbor
The government must have a shortage of watchful eyes if it’s outsourcing to the general public.
Isn’t that poster one of the ones they spread around London for the V for Vendetta opening? Logo looks very much like the Norsefire one as well.
I was having a hard time telling if the logo represented Ahura Mazda, or a crypto Reich eaglet. Big … is watching.
tdh…I thought the logo looked like a chopped swastika with a bullseye added.
Appropriate logo.