Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
I have just taken a stroll along Haymarket, outside the 'Tiger Tiger' club, and noticed that a double yellow line adorns the highway at this point. Trivial, I know, and yet the following thought occurs to me. Once upon a time, the centre of theatregoing London was patrolled by police officers on foot, day and night.
These were men who knew their beat in detail and would instantly have spotted something odd, like a car parked on a double yellow line. Yet so far as I can gather, it was ambulancemen who actually noticed something unusual about the Mercedes. I'd add here that the earliest account I read of this incident, in the London 'Evening Standard' of 29th June, contains another detail I haven't seen in other reports of the event.
It quotes a bar worker saying " I have been told there was a Mercedes driving along Haymarket at around 1.30am when the driver swerved and hit some bins outside Tiger Tiger. The driver then got out and legged it. The bouncers had a look at the car and they found gas cylinders and nails in the boot. And that's when they called the police."
Since then a rather different version, of ambulancemen seeing gas filling the car, has become the generally accepted one. But what about the car hitting the bins, and the driver running away? If these things happened, mightn't they have caused an alert constable to act?
Luckily, it doesn't matter this time. For whatever reason, the car was discovered. And for whatever reason, the planned explosion didn't happen. But remember that this place is one of the most intensively watched areas on earth, thanks to a great multitude of Closed Circuit TV cameras. When I was making my recent programme on the assault on civil liberties, I visited an underground control centre from which such cameras were controlled. There's no doubt the area is intensively monitored. But those who watch the screens will not necessarily see or hear everything as it happens. That would be physically impossible. Nor, as they are not on the streets themselves, would they have any chance of bumping into witnesses who had seen something a bit strange, not strange enough to make them call 999, but strange enough for them to tell a passing copper
Did the operators notice the car, illegally parked, or the clumsy driver running away among all the other incidents of a Central London midnight? Were these things even picked up? Comprehensive as the coverage is, it cannot catch everything that happens. I wonder what the footage shows. The other car, interestingly, was towed away from Cockspur Street by parking enforcers who had no idea how dangerous it might have been - though they did notice the smell of petrol and called the police - after they had taken it away. So, while police deserve credit for their bravery in defusing the Haymarket Bomb, they did not actually spot either car. That was left to ambulancemen and parking wardens.
Why do I stress this? Because it increasingly seems to me that a return to proper foot patrolling would, in many ways be our best safeguard against terror - far better than stupid laws abolishing English liberty, or wasting yet more millions on ridiculous self-important organisations such as MI5, who (despite their laughable fictional portrayal in 'Spooks') appear unable to penetrate a wet paper bag, let alone an Islamist organisation.
Pc Plod would have spotted both cars in central London. Pc Plod, slowly, repetitively treading the streets of urban and suburban Britain, getting to know shopkeepers, petrol station attendants, the vendors of gas cylinders, nosey neighbours and the rest, would be quite likely to hear about the funny people who have moved in at number 94, who never have a barbecue but buy a lot of gas, who are visited at odd times by unfriendly types in Islamic dress; or about the strange bloke who recently bought several cans of petrol, but hardly drives. Why would someone like that want a big SUV anyway?
That's my plan for greater security, plodding, banal, boring old police work, getting to know a place and its people, so well that you notice when something is a bit out of the ordinary, listening to gossip that at first seems trivial but may contain the decisive clue. You could be grandiose (like MI5 and the 'security' correspondents who love to belabour us with jargon) and call this 'intelligence'. But I don't care what you call it. I think it would work.
Whereas I have never understood what connection there is between the things the government wants - more intrusive security services, more restrictions on law-abiding people, identity cards, detention without trial and the rest, and serious action against terrorists. I have yet to see any proof that our new security apparatus has ever predicted a serious terrorist attack, or prevented one - though it has picked up the occasional fantasists, and grossly inflated their importance. In one recent trial, a man was jailed for 30 years (originally 40 until it was reduced on appeal) for making plans in exercise books. They were wicked plans and his intent was villainous. But that was as far as he had got and I am by no means sure he would ever have got much further. In another case, an alert shop employee had reported strangely large purchases of weedkiller. What if he hadn't bothered? It was that alert citizen, not the apparatus of 'security' that achieved the breakthrough.
As for the response to the attack on Glasgow airport, I absolutely fail to see why cancelling dozens of flights, detaining passengers on their grounded planes, and forcing thousands of wholly innocent people to queue in the rain for hours did any good at all. On the contrary, it greatly increased the disruption caused by the attack. This is just trying to look effective, long after the event.
The same goes for the restrictions on vehicles approaching airports, introduced once more too late to do any good. Had it really never occurred to anyone before that airports might be targets, and that suicide bombers might drive up to them in cars? Well, of course it had. It was a matter of proportion. It just hadn't seemed worthwhile to do much about it, any more than most of us look up as we step out of our front doors each morning, to check that an eagle is not about to drop a tortoise on our heads
If one of your neighbours were slain by such a dropped tortoise, you probably would check the sky for a few days afterwards, but you'd know as you did it that the chances of it happening again were slight. Anyway, you'd increase your risk (already much greater) of being run down by a youth riding his bike on the pavement, as you looked up. These ritual responses just make life more miserable and inconvenient, without making it safer.They can even divert you from more important vigilance.
But what I really can't bear are the 'security correspondents', propagandists for more attacks on our liberty, prosing on with their jargon about 'clean skins' and 'Al Qaeda' and 'improvised explosive devices'. I have heard and read several of them claiming that the idea of putting explosives in cars is something that British-based terrorists have learned from Iraq. What garbage. The IRA were using car bombs for decades before Anthony Blair even knew where Iraq was. People do seem to have forgotten completely that we endured years of IRA terror, with very little increased 'security' and a great deal of sensible stoicism. Worse, people have started laundering the IRA's reputation. I recently heard a senior policeman say that the IRA 'gave warnings'. Well, sort of, and sometimes, but not so as to avoid killing a large number of people, including small children.
Anyway (and let us thank heaven for it) our home-grown Islamist bombers seem to have tried to make their supposedly Baghdad-inspired car bombs without any actual explosive, perhaps because they couldn't get hold of any. This could explain why they didn't go off. I don't know, but the absence of explosive, and of competence in general, in these recent attacks seems quite significant, and casts doubt on the claims about 'Al Qaeda' which we also have to put up with.
Now, if there really were such an organisation as 'Al Qaeda ', with its terrifying reach across the world, don't you think it might have been able to find some explosive for its operatives, if they were its operatives? Listen carefully to these experts and you will often hear them qualifying their use of 'Al Qaeda'. But that's always lower down the story. Always, near the top, they will intone that such-and-such has 'all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda'. What are these 'hallmarks', by the way? So far as I can work out, simply that the incident appears to be the work of Islamists and has a terrorist character.
They know (surely?) that there is no actual centralised body plotting these attacks, that the only uniting thread is an ideology, not a chain of command or even a source of cash. But it suits them to prose on in this way because it avoids having to explain what that ideology is, and what motivates it. It also makes them sound knowledgeable when they haven't really much of a clue. I noticed one of these geniuses once again parading his standard theory of British-born Muslims being trained in Pakistan and returning here to do their dirty work. Yet the alleged culprits of the current events don't seem to fit this pattern at all.
Part of the motive of the Islamist ideology which is the only thing that actually unites these terrorists is the West's perfectly correct past support for Israel. Another part of its motive is the West's more recent reduction of that support and its decision to put pressure on Israel to make territorial concessions. This policy change was brought about by a long campaign of terror, by the PLO and others. Concessions to terrorism breed more terrorism, for they show that it works.
Which leads me to another reason for there being so much terror in this country. This stems from the encouragement our government has given to every terrorist in the world by our abject surrender to the Provisional IRA. Anyone who wishes to alter our government's policies knows that its 'tough' rhetoric dissolves into compliance and negotiation, once they have hit us hard enough. I am always amazed that people still regard this disastrous collapse, a signal to all our enemies that we are vulnerable to violent pressure, as some kind of non-partisan triumph worthy of prizes and smiles.
And then of course there is the issue of Iraq, our role in the invasion and bloody war in that country, bitterly resented by Arabs and Muslims. To a lesser extent, though it will grow, there is also resentment of what is happening in Afghanistan, where each week brings more accounts of civilians being killed, mainly in American bombing raids. Might these things possibly lead unhinged, vengeful and murderous minds to do terrorist acts in Britain, rather than in countries not associated with the Iraq and Afghan interventions? It seems at least possible. In which case, the argument that we might block up the wellsprings of terror by intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan is not merely undermined, but actually reversed. And that is why the authorities are so reluctant to discuss it. How they prefer to claim that Islamists want to destroy us because they ‘hate our way of life'. And they may well do so. I don't like our way of life much myself, and my reaction to the drunken, debauched late-night streets of a British city is not far distant from that of a devout Muslim. But I do not imagine for a moment that bloody murder and bombs would make things better. Do Muslims? In most cases, I really rather doubt it.
If people in Britain really fear the increase of Islamic influence over our society, then they should be much more concerned about reversing the multiculturalism that has encouraged and enabled Islam to extend its influence here. They should be much more concerned about the mass immigration that is establishing Islam here as a significant force. Yet many of the neo-conservatives who rail against Islam are keen supporters of open borders and mass immigration. And they should be much more concerned about the collapse of our own Christian religion, which some supporters of the Iraq and Afghan wars belittle and attack. Do they really prefer Sharia law to the Sermon on the Mount? For this may be the choice they have unwittingly made.
Just in case anyone tries to avoid the arguments above, by claiming that my words are some sort of justification or excuse for terrorist acts, I should add the following. I hate terrorism with a passion. It poisons and corrupts every cause that adopts it. Only recently I was pointing out to an Israeli friend just how much Zionism had been damaged by the terror of the Stern Gang in the 1940s, and how much Israel has been damaged by the rise to power of former terrorists there, and its continued refusal to condemn, unambiguously, such events as Deir Yassin or the murder of Lord Moyne.
The cause of Irish nationalism, with which I have much sympathy, has also been gravely damaged by the resort to terror. A British patriot and an Irish patriot actually have much in common (I think the possibility of the two getting along together is beautifully, if fancifully, portrayed in Patrick O'Brian's wonderful historical novels about the profoundly British, Protestant Captain Jack Aubrey RN, and his close friend, the profoundly Irish Roman Catholic, Dr Stephen Maturin), and an immeasurable amount of good things has been lost in the sad war between our peoples. But, once terrorism seized the leadership of the Irish cause, the British patriot had to turn away, and fight in defence of his own.
I think I was prevented for many years from appreciating the justice of the Arab complaint against Israel, because that case was made only by men who preferred death and blood to compromise.
Great harm will be done to the cause of those of us who view British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as wrong, by terrorist murder or attempts at it, supposedly justified (as if grief at the deaths of innocents could be assuaged by the deaths of more innocents) by 'anger' at these things.
But that does not excuse silly attempts to make terrorism into a pretext for an attack on irreplaceable liberties; nor does it excuse an intellectual laziness which keeps us from examining the real nature of the problem, by churning out flannel about 'Al Qaeda' or the 'War on Terror'.
