Speeches and Statements

Security, Freedom and the Protection of Our Values

A speech by then Home Secretary, John Reid, to DEMOS, on the subject of 'Security, Freedom and the Protection of Our Values', on 9 August 2006

Thank you very much indeed Rachel and the sentiments which you expressed in your brief contribution there about security being something which can only be achieved by the common efforts of all of us is basically one of the themes that I want to point out today.

When I was dealing with defence, both as minister of the armed forces and more recently in the changed world in which we now live, I was always keen to emphasise that combating the new form and scale of international terrorism would require as a necessary means of so doing the preparedness to use military means but that that would never be a sufficient condition for the defeat of international terrorism, which at heart stems from an ideological struggle and would therefore require measures to be taken at the ideological, diplomatic, at the political level addressing some of the root problems of the world; financial, aid, trade and a spectrum of other instruments in our armoury to fight against terrorism and to restore and protect our civilised values.

And similarly and I believe that that is the case at home and I've been thinking about this a little since I went into the Home Office. I haven't been able to address the subject before this because there's been the odd thing going on in the Home Office over the past period which you probably have missed in the press given how kind they are in not emphasising any of our problems and our faults.

I said I would try to tackle these issues, not solve all of them, as one newspaper claimed I had done at the weekend, even I am not as ambitious or ruthless in my objectives as that but I said that I would try to tackle and plan proposals for dealing with some of these problems in 100 days.

I have now issued the plan for the transformation of the Home Office followed by a plan for the rebalancing of the Criminal Justice System, followed by a plan to reform the Immigration and Nationality Directorate which we have I think brought with us today if you want to look at that as I touch upon that in my speech, and that's in 96 days so I am now in my 96th day as Home Secretary and already thanks to the hard work and dedication of my Civil Servants and Ministers above all, we've come a long way in a short period of time.

Not only have we admitted and identified some of the problems within the Home Office, the challenges of today's world, but we have published those practical plans and we have been audacious enough to put out milestones in the plans by which we can be judged.

And that is another area where I know that Demos are interested and that is how we improve and measure the performance of the public sector in this country and elsewhere. So, with endurance I hope and an on-going commitment to the unglamorous work of good government I believe we have to increase competence and public confidence in the three areas which I've mentioned, the transformation of the Home Office, the restructuring of our Immigration and Nationality department and the rebalancing of the criminal Justice System.

Now, I can turn my mind to some of the other problems which face us in the Home Office. Actually the one we are talking about today, although we have little precious time to give to some of those issues, I thought it was worth outlining to you my thoughts on the overarching challenges which face us as a nation and specifically around protecting the public which is our primary objective in the Home Office, and that's where I want to turn today so it's the one other issue which was not substantially dealt with by the three publications I referred to but has been at the core of my thoughts, my business and my time at the Home Office in the midst of everything else that's been happening.

The core purpose of the Home Office is the protection of the public, so it is to the topic of national security that we can now turn and this was chosen as a venue, Demos, because of your interest recently in that subject and I am very grateful that you have made this facility available to me.

This is a more difficult task, this provision of national security, than probably any time in the recent past. The provision of security is indeed probably the major task facing government in what has become an age of uncertainty, the well-motivated but naïve hopes that the end of the Cold War would bring a degree of stability rather than a torrent of instabilities have never been realised and this uncertainty and insecurity is now something that has become a complex woven cloth which spreads across international affairs defence into domestic affairs and runs from international terrorism and migration right down to the level of your local street and the anti-social behaviour on it and the great social changes taking place there.

Even in comparatively recent times, for most ordinary people the word security meant probably two things; one was this general idea of having the desirable objective of financial comfort in old age, people talked about their security in later life, or perhaps the formal description of military power or the authorities of the state that protected us from outward enemies. It has now become a much more complex issue both in security and the provision of security because it is actually one of the highest concerns for daily living of most people running through the gamut of personal experience.

We now live in a world where insecurity is a phenomenon that crosses the economic and the social, the domestic and the foreign, the psychological and the physical, the individual and the collective. And this generation has seen massive global changes some of which underlie that incipient insecurity. Up until roughly two decades ago the Cold War froze the world into a relatively static state where borders were inviolable, ethnic tensions suppressed, states were propped up, rather than allowed to fail, wars when they were fought were fought by proxy of the two great powers, migration was absolutely minimal compared to today and religious extremism and ethnic tension was suppressed by Communist regimes in their flanks and indeed in the midst of all those entities, but we now live in an age where we have to confront a torrent of challenges following on from the thawing of the Cold War, borders are no longer inviolable but they are porous, states fail, civil wars and ethnic tensions internally drive people out, ethnic tensions, religious extremists are resurgent and transportation and technology gives the pull factor of the facility when confronted with those push factors.

Globalisation assisted by technology means that decisions taken on the other side of the world and now more than ever, decisions which affect every local community in the United Kingdom. Jobs and the need for particular skills can change sometimes in very short periods and the days when the comforting certainty that you would be in a social position or a geographical position for decades which accompanied the stifling of meritocracy, may have changed bringing huge opportunities but also bringing huge challenges to the comfort that the people normally had that there was a life stretching ahead of them in a secure job. So jobs now change overnight and the skills required creating huge challenges if we as a government are to re-skill our workforce to keep pace and provide the sort of security of employment that once was taken for granted by so many people.

And with the end of the Cold War has also come mass migration on a hitherto unimagined and unprecedented scale, it brings with it huge potential economic benefits but huge challenges as well, there is a greater potential to create wealth and expand opportunities for individuals and for national communities arising out of this flexibility and movement in the world of people, as well as capital but the volume and speed of movement can carry insecurity, sometimes into the very heart of our community, and therefore we have to be explicit and articulate at recognising and discussing both the opportunities and the challenges that brings with it and indeed as I said last weekend, in my view, mass migration and the management of immigration is now the greatest challenge facing all European governments. We have to get away from the notion that anyone who wants to talk about this issue is somehow a racist; they are not, they are intelligent, ordinary people who are interested in the future of their own country, and incidentally they are people who come from all ethnic backgrounds, all different religions and all social areas of our life. Those people recognise as we do that migrants can bring huge skills to the United Kingdom, always have done, look at our health service, it was built on the back of people from the Commonwealth who brought huge contributions here.

The Polish people who have come recently have brought doctors, they've brought dentists, badly needed, they've brought plumbers, they've brought a host of skilled labour to this country. So, we recognise, most sensible people do, that migrants can bring great skills to the United Kingdom but they also want to be assured that immigration will be properly managed and their own public services and benefit systems, schools, hospitals, and other public services, will be protected from misuse by those who come not to contribute but to use and to leave, and at best will be protected from over-demand which means that there is some, in their view, unfair access by citizens of this country. So on all of that, we need to have a mature discussion about these issues, properly informed, in my view, by independent advice, on the impact of migration on our jobs market and in local communities to stop this becoming a matter of increasing concern to the public and to stop it becoming or continuing to be a party political football which is kicked from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Nor is it something we can tackle on our own; we need to work internationally with our European neighbours to strengthen the external borders of the European Union and share information on those who may threaten our security and there are many politicians throughout Europe who are having the dynamism the drive and the courage to face this issue as well. I have spoken a couple of time recently with European politicians in particular Nicolas Sarkozy and they clearly understand the importance of managing this issue, it is a Europe-wide problem, and practical initiatives like those taken forward in partnership between David Blunkett and Nicolas Sarkozy to close the Sangatte camp for instance and to improve border screening at the channel ports have helped immensely, so I am not suggesting that this is something that can only be done here or should only be done here, there is a much wider dimension to this, but we have a challenge as well to lay out our plans to do it, and I have tried to do it in the document that was released eight days ago and will be available to you today, laying out the next steps, our next steps, for dealing with this issue and rebuilding confidence in the immigration system, which is fair, which is effective and which is trusted.

I have spoken recently about immigration and I want just to turn now to the subject which Demos has been giving so much attention to and that is in the general area, the more traditionally defined matter of the national security of our country. The first thing to say is that just as the world has gone through rapid change, so too, politicians in Britain, in particular my predecessors, have been prepared to change and are alert to the need for change over the past decade or so. We have for instance in the last decade changed the way in which we approach national security in this country, previous Home Secretaries have led innovation, and I mention in particular Jack Straw's lead in protecting the critical national infrastructure from electronic attack and putting our anti-terrorism legislation on a permanent basis through the Terrorism Act 2000, or David Blunkett's work which I have just referred to on Sangatte, but in particular in the aftermath of 9/11 when counter terrorism civil contingencies including the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act measures passed within months of 9/11 and Charles Clarke's advances with his memorandums of understanding concerning the difficult matter of deportation with the assurance of introductions of control orders.

None of these cleared, none of the accepted by anybody, none of them perhaps understood by everyone in terms of their necessities which is something I will come back to at the end but all of them important issues to be raised, developed and actioned forward from my three predecessors. We have also, I would want to assure you, increased the funding available for our traditional national security, the government has more than double the funds available for counter-terrorism work in the United Kingdom from around £900 million to £2 billion, indeed in December the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that a further £85 million would be given, and last month an addition £39 million was made available.

So, it is not simply a matter of resources, indeed, in terms of resources, MI5 for instance have got everything they have asked for, but there are limitations to the expansion of skilled personnel with the right understanding of background cultures, languages and expertise, they can't simply be replaced overnight from agencies which were looking for solving or facing down Russian, Soviet or Irish terrorist threats not that long ago, but they have got those resources and by 2008, MI5 personnel for instance will have doubled from pre-9/11 levels. So I want to build on the work that has already been done, and in recent weeks I have announced to the House of Commons our next steps in developing the contest strategy as well as a revised approach to threat and response levels.
These are never difficult decisions, it looks simple to take a decision, to put a threat level into the public domain, I can assure you it is not because the complications and consequences downstream of so-doing may be beneficial but they may also raise problems in a whole plethora of areas about the independence of the judgements, about the effect of making them public on how they cross or don't cross operational activities which are going on, but we have tried, so far as we can, to respond to public concern about the nature and threat and level of threat, we've always responded of course to the intelligence and security committee's report. I want to have just one word on closer coordination before going onto my main theme; effective coordination and intelligence and in security, particularly national security is essential, and that's why I'm pleased there is now closer cooperation and coordination than ever before. I do not say here it is perfect, I do not say any more than other areas are perfectly satisfied but I would want you to know that there has been a step change in the cooperation and coordination between our security services.

There is a chain of command, there is a permanent secretary for intelligence, security and resilience, Sir Richard Mottram, who sits at the centre of the Cabinet Office and is answerable to the Prime Minister and to me. He ensures that the intelligence community has a clear strategy and a system for prioritising collection and analytical effort and that the resources provided for the intelligence agencies are used appropriately. He also chairs the Joint Intelligence Committee, the JIC, which provides a cross-community view on issues to senior officials and ministers. And in addition, JTAC, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, brings together counter-terrorist specialists from the intelligence agencies, the Police and government departments to produce assessments on terrorism, a model that's been looked at by other countries because they recognise the benefits of such coordinated analysis and approach. So we have gone a considerable way to improve our coordination.

As ever, I do not regard any given state as being perfect, even if it were, the world tomorrow would be a different place than it is today and therefore we keep such matters under constant review and the events of 7/7 showed the importance of good coordination and I just say that I am prepared to listen and to look into whatever may need to be done as are the services in order to continually improve. However to come to the main theme, as Demos and its members yourselves have pointed out, national security is not a task the government can do on our own, it is not a task that can be accomplished even by the security services working in perfect coordination with themselves and with the government.

You are right to say that we need to join forces to a far greater extent. Effective security now relies on the participation of a much wider range of actors; from governments to public bodies, to companies through to people. Security cannot be outsourced governments but networks of public and private organisations have a joint role in guaranteeing local, national and international security. It is only by joining forces that we will develop an effective response to today's global security threats. In this sense, what Tony Blair said last week about the necessity and requirement to build an alliance of moderation to combat those who would destroy the values that underpin that moderation and progress towards democracy, freedom, choice, so on. That needs to be replicated at home as well, there is no way we can make our domestic situation secure unless all of us are involved in the common effort so to do. So closer coordination is a continuing item in our agenda.

If it is correct as the Prime Minister said, that the challenge of rapid change is enormous, then the response has to be fundamental too. It will not surprise you to know that in so many areas I entirely agree with his analysis internationally and domestically. I hope that's largely because I contributed towards it and I've reached the same independent conclusion as that.

And I make this point about the requirement for a fundamental understanding of the nature of the struggle in which we are engaged, which will be wide, it will be long, it will be deep, and it will be difficult, and anyone who tells you otherwise is misleading you. I make it for this reason - because our adversaries in international terrorism are completely unconstrained. The international terrorists of today are ruthless and unconstrained in every direction including in their attempts to misuse our freedoms to undermine our free society. They try to turn to their advantage our society's great strengths in the modern version of what analysts like you used to call asymmetric warfare - identify the strength of your enemy and turn that into a weakness - and in our society, what they want to do is take our society's great strengths, like the free media, ease of access to travel or to goods, and turn them into our weaknesses. They endeavour to drain our morale through the misuse of our freedoms by misrepresenting every mistake or over-reaction as if it is our primary or real purpose. We should not allow ourselves to be seduced by the terrorist who urges to be the quickest to condemn our security forces and police on every occasion and the slowest to understand the problems which they face in tackling a new unconstrained enemy.

Some of them fight for asylum in the United Kingdom, asylum from repressive regimes. Not just for our liberty or the opposite of oppression, but to plan and plot, to establish even more suppressive regimes. Some of them come as students, yet freely express contempt for the intellectual freedoms that have been the bedrock of our scientific advance and academic institutions. Some of them claim to detest usury but fund their plots through fraud, corruption and organised crime.

So let us be aware that the precious freedoms that we wish to protect are always open to misuse in the short term by those who would want to destroy them in the longer term. Since 2000 we have radically reformed our anti-terror legislation and we have introduced four new Terrorism Acts. We have done that, not always with the entire support of everyone in Parliament, or in the political, legal and media establishment, but we have done it. Almost 1000 people have been arrested for terrorism-related offences, of which 154 have been charged, and 60 terrorist suspects await trial. Since 7/7 at least four terrorist plots have been successfully disrupted by our security services. That is the ones that we know. There are, as Donald Rumsfeld famously once said, not only known unknowns, but the unknown unknowns.

Yet in spite of the successes we remain unable to adapt our institutions and legal orthodoxy as fast as I believe we need to adapt. This is an area that puts us at risk in national security terms if we don't develop it fast enough. There have been several contributory factors, including, I have to say, party political point-scoring, during the passage of key anti-terrorist measures, through to repeated challenges under the Human Rights Act or convention, which I continue to contest. But as Tony said last week, the nature of organised crime, social breakdown of part of our community, not to say the threat of global terrorism, bent on mass slaughter, means traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong as made for another age. We are in some ways attempting to fight a 21st century struggle with a framework of thought, culture and international legality which was provided for the mid-20th century. The European Convention, for example, drawn up by British lawyers, of which we are immensely proud, drawn up by British lawyers in the aftermath of the second world war was shaped inevitably by that war and by what was happening, not only during that war in places like Germany but across the iron curtain. And from the struggle to defeat fascism and the fascist state, and stand up to Stalinism, came an understandable focus on protecting the individual from the overweening evil power of the fascist state. That is why we formed those conventions.

So protections from unlawful detention, from forced labour, from torture, from punishment without trial came centre stage, as they should have done - rightly so, given what had gone before. But the emphasis was on the protection of the individual and the individual's rights in the face of a challenge from the state, from the community entrenched in a state structure with fascist inclinations. And over time as the totalitarian shadow retreated from Europe, those rights became a reality for more and more of the 300 million or so living within its borders; indeed they became an essential prerequisite for a country to be considered a member of the European family.
But now we are faced with a slightly different challenge, you see, perhaps greater than any faced in the last 50 years. And it's a challenge for this new consensus, it's a challenge for discussion and debate around the core values of a free society - and the challenge is this: what happens when the threat to the nation and hence to all of us as a community, represented by the state in a particular sense, comes not from the tendencies of a fascist totalitarian state, but from what might be called fascist individuals? How is it that we protect ourselves from the individuals, who through networking, as non-state actors, can become the predominant threat to our freedoms and values?

And how do we face that when not only is that the threat but it is now an unconstrained threat by any definition. Because these are individuals who are unconstrained in their intentions, the first element of threat, by any international convention, any laws, agreements or standards or curtailments of morality. Indeed in their intention, their perverse morality drives them towards the belief that the more innocent civilians they can murder or kill, the more effective they are being.

So in intention we now have an enemy based on individuals with fascist inclinations who are unconstrained in their intention, but they are also potentially unconstrained in their capability, the second aspect of a threat, because individuals who can network, courtesy of new technology, and who can access modern chemical, biological and other means of mass destruction and who have therefore unconstrained capability, as well as unconstrained intention, are an enemy that we have never had to face before. In previous years even those with the most evil intent in Nazi Germany found themselves constrained by the canisters of Zyklon gas. And although they tried to develop faster and faster technological means, what is available now is far higher than has ever been available in its destructive capacity in the past.

So this is the challenge to us, I believe. Individuals who would misuse our basic rights and freedoms, but if they had their way would want to create a society which would deny all the basic individual rights and freedoms which we now take for granted. As the Taliban have shown in practice, and al-Qaeda espouse globally, as do the networks dependent upon them, the society they would want would have no place for freedom of expression, no place for democratic debate, no respect for private life, and certainly no respect for the legal or social or human role of women as we understand the equality of women in our society. They would have no compunction about all unlawful killing or detention. They would have no compunction breaking all the laws of war in the Geneva Conventions while demanding the protection of the Geneva Conventions. That is what we are trying to tackle with the means of an increasingly constrained democratic society - constrained by international conventions and laws, so as the enemy has become less and less constrained in intention and capability, we have become more constrained by the intrusion, inspection and standards which we set upon ourselves in conducting that struggle, rightly so. And at the centre of it is this battle for values.

This is about two different sets of values. Not two different religions, not a clash of civilisations because the dividing line is there between terrorists and the rest of civilised society. And from our point of view, I believe that the biggest achievement of democratic socialism, social democracy, progressive politics, whatever you want to call it, is not just a legal framework for human rights, though that is important, but the fact that real power and opportunity is now exercised by the many in this country, the vast majority, not just the few, in a way that our forefathers could not have imagined. In other words people don't just have rights; they have the means to exercise those rights. It is not the theoretical right to dine at the Ritz, that we were told for centuries we had, or the right to buy a Rolls-Royce, which was modified only by that most sophisticated of rationing systems called money. These are rights which in modern Britain, through the advance of social democracy, have allowed people to exercise, to become substantially involved in the exercise of a right, education, job opportunity, the chance to travel, new forms of entertainment, women's rights. These are all the success of an open to all democratic state run by the rule of law.

What I fear is what happens when this progress is contested by others who don't share those values or our world view. Some of whom do not want to see women educated or accessing courts at all. It is illustrative to study what goes on under the Taliban in Afghanistan where people are murdered for teaching children, where fathers and mothers were jailed for sending their children to school if they were female, where people are stoned to death in some of these societies for having the effect on a man of giving sexual arousal. These are not a set of values that we can espouse or ignore in this great debate. So, many of the people who are espousing that come from beyond our shores and have no real connection with our nation beyond a desire to attack its values so far as I can see.

And at a time when a single terrorist could cause irreparable damage on a hitherto unknown scale to our society, and in our confidence in the entire state, I find myself in a situation where in dealing with foreign national terrorist suspects we can't always prosecute individuals, due to the difficulties in obtaining sufficiently cogent admissible evidence for a criminal trial. Often we can't deport them, even if they have no proper basis for claiming asylum here, due to concerns about treatment they may receive in their home country as a result of European Court judgements when considering whether or not they are safe if deported, which I have to do; I am prohibited from considering whether the other 60 million people of this country are safe if they stay here, I am actually prohibited from weighing that in the balance. And we can't detain them pending deportation, if deportation is not a realistic prospect due to concerns about their treatment on return, as to do so discriminates against them.

So it's not an easy set of circumstances in which to try and protect our country, I have to tell you in all honesty. And it presents me or any Home Secretary who would be charged with the task of protecting the public from international terrorism, in a very difficult position. So when I raise these issues, it is not because they're immaterial, it's not because we like arguments with other politicians, the media, judges or any other section of society. It's because I sincerely believe these issues have to be addressed if we are to get maximum protection for the security of our country.

You see, I believe in our values. I have no doubt that those values are shared by the vast majority of people throughout our country, from all social, religious and ethnic backgrounds. But I equally have no doubt that it's these very values which are the target of the terrorists. And that is my message today to everyone in here and to a wider audience. We need to understand the depth and magnitude of that threat; all of us, each of us, across the whole political, media, judicial and public sectors, right across the spectrum of our country we need to understand the threat that faces us. It doesn't just sit as a threat to democratic Muslim leaders in Iraq, or democratic Muslim leaders like President Karzai in Afghanistan. It is an interwoven cloth, where on this home front we face the same threat from the same types of terrorist to our same types of values as those Muslim leaders are fighting for in their own country.

I believe that the majority of the public, wherever they are coming from in social spectrum or politics, do indeed get the seriousness of that threat, but I have to say that when I see the opposition among our politicians in many cases, to the measures which the police and security agencies say are necessary to combat this threat to our community and values. When I see the nature of the Chahal judgement by European judges, that we ought to be prohibited from weighing the security of our millions of people in this country, of our own people, if a suspected terrorist remains here when we are trying to deport him. When I see so many of our commentators apparently give more prominence to the views of Islamist terrorists rather than democratically elected Muslim politicians like Premier al-Maliki or President Karzai 41.12 When I see and hear these things then I sometimes feel that so many people who should be foremost in recognising the threat that exists and the serious nature of that threat, I can't help feeling that they don't get it. They just don't get it. We can't afford for people not to get the measure of the threat that faces us. We cannot afford any misunderstanding or any quarter about the nature and scope of the threat which we are facing.

Darwin once wrote, "It isn't the strongest of the species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." That is the same with institutions, and indeed I would argue, with countries. That is why I believe we need to see national security in a new context, and all of us, politicians, businessmen, lawyers and citizens, need to evolve our thinking for this century rather than basing it on a framework, conceptually or otherwise, of the last century. There are of course other aspects from the end of the Cold War: organised crime and the reach and impact of that, and of international terrorism. But my main message today is that as we continue in that debate in respect of terrorism there should not be one inch of complacency in any of our thinking. I understand perfectly that we are preoccupied thinking about events in the Middle East - in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But never for one moment forget that we now live in a world where there is that seamless web that runs through foreign, defence and domestic events. None of us should be anything other than vigilant. And that vigilance is the price of securing our freedom. So let us be in no doubt that there is no room for complacency, and that's why I am emphasising several things today. We are probably in the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War. I also want to emphasise that while I am confident that the security services and police will deliver one hundred percent dedication and a hundred percent effort, they cannot, they cannot guarantee, nor can I, one hundred percent success. It cannot be done in any human organisation. And furthermore, our security forces and the apparatus of the state and the security agencies here in this country, while they are an absolutely essential prerequisite for defeating terrorism, can never be sufficient on their own. Our common security in this country will only be assured by a common effort from all sections of society and everyone irrespective of their backgrounds who accepts the common series of fundamental values which underpins our democratic and free society in this country.

And finally, the challenge to all of us: sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the long term. It is therefore not an easy time to be discussing these matters. There is never an easy balance to achieve, it can often be difficult and complicated - it can be controversial and complex, but it is an essential discussion. And it is up to each and all of us to ask the questions. What price our security? What price our freedoms? At what cost can we preserve our freedoms? What values are at stake? And what is the cost of making the wrong choices in the short term?

Rachel, thank you for the invite here today, amidst people who have been giving a lot of attention, discussion and thought to this issue, and it is right that we do so in theory, and do it with a degree of intellectual rigour which befits the seriousness of what we are looking at. But the one thing we ought to be absolutely plain in the middle of all this thinking and analysis - this isn't an abstract discussion; this isn't a matter of reaching a conclusion which is graded on some example. It is a matter of life and death. It is one which touches upon the preservations of the values and freedoms, and I thank you for inviting me.

I will be happy to take questions by some of the people who have been working on your pamphlet immediately after this and I just want to say thank you very much indeed for having me. Thank you.