Anderson writes: "What are the risks for a nation seeking to protect its citizens from violence? Is there a point at which a society can become so bunkered, walled off, and restrictive that it begins to forfeit its essence?"



'Going forward, I wouldn't be surprised if we see arguments over the blurring of the lines between what the Army and police traditionally do,' a senior member of the British security establishment said. (photo: Rex Via/AP)

The UK Inches Toward a Security State

By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

hat are the risks for a nation seeking to protect its citizens from violence? Is there a point at which a society can become so bunkered, walled off, and restrictive that it begins to forfeit its essence? Something like this, to various degrees and in different ways, is happening in Erdoğan’s Turkey, Netanyahu’s Israel, Modi’s India, and Trump’s America. For much of the past forty-five years, the United Kingdom, too, has intermittently had to answer questions of national security and civil liberties—and even human rights—in dealing with the threat of terrorism. Last week, it had to ask them all over again.

The British are rightly proud of their tradition of remaining stoic in the face of horrific adversity. The so-called “7/7” attacks of 2005, in London, when four young jihadis set off bombs on trains and a bus, killing fifty-two people in addition to themselves, is a notable case in point. When children are the target of an attack, as they were in the gut-wrenching atrocity at the Manchester Arena, last Monday, stoicism is much more difficult to maintain. Even so, a decorous calm has mostly prevailed in Britain, notwithstanding an ongoing security alert triggered by fears that other terrorists might be preparing to strike.

After meetings with security officials, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, announced that Britain’s terrorist threat level had been raised to “critical”—meaning that a new attack was regarded as “imminent”—and that she had ordered the deployment of thirty-eight hundred Army soldiers to key sites across the United Kingdom, from Buckingham Palace to sports stadiums. For Britons, the measure has elicited mixed feelings: on the one hand, a sense of reassurance that the security services are at the ready to forestall a new attack; on the other, consternation over the prospect that such heightened measures might be anything other than temporary.

On Wednesday, in the Guardian, the columnist Jonathan Freedland expressed his hope that the troops would be gone by June 8th, when the United Kingdom goes to the polls in a general election. Despite the particular horror of the attack, he wrote, “It has not besieged our democracy; it has not struck our political system with a blow we cannot sustain. We are still standing. What’s more, the notion of an election under siege, a ballot conducted under the gaze of armed men, also gives these pathetic young men—men so frightened of life that they make a target of little girls—far too much respect. It grants them too much power.”

Freedland’s concerns underscore one of the key questions looming over Britain’s future. Beyond the Manchester response and the upcoming election, the British government, heading as it is toward “Brexit” and disengagement from the European Union, faces important decisions about how to deal with security challenges. Does it outwardly maintain the “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos while temporarily stepping up security at strategic sites, or does it begin to close off vulnerable public spaces and ramp up security in more permanent ways? (A temporary state of emergency imposed after the November, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris has already been extended five times, making the sight of armed troops across France a constant. For the time being, it will continue: President Emmanuel Macron has said that he will ask France’s parliament to extend it beyond its current July end date, to November 1st.) A senior member of the British security establishment told me that the Manchester attack posed a “new threshold” in a debate taking place about the future of security and defense. He said, “Going forward, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see arguments over the blurring of the lines between what the Army and police traditionally do.”

Last week, in London, a British friend expressed her apprehensions. “Manchester was, of course, absolutely horrible,” she told me. “But it’s important to keep things in balance. How many people have been killed in this country this year by terrorism, compared with those killed in traffic accidents?” Her point was that it was important not to succumb to the kinds of security fears that could erode the atmosphere of public trust that has long been a cherished feature of British society, including its tradition of having unarmed policemen patrol its streets. Nevertheless, it’s clear that ISIS sleeper cells, and the so-called lone wolves who take up the group’s calls to action, have set a strategy of attacking public spaces where crowds of people gather together in what used to be called the pursuit of happiness. We saw it in the Paris attacks, which targeted a football stadium, cafés, restaurants, and the Bataclan theatre. We saw it, also, in the attacks on the Pulse night club, in Orlando; the Reina night club, in Istanbul; and now in Manchester. The truck attack in Nice on Bastille Day of last year heralded a similar attack on a Berlin Christmas market and, most recently, in March, the mowing-down of pedestrians by a self-appointed jihadist driving across London’s Westminster Bridge.

This strategy has developed in tandem with new forms of attacks on the freedom to travel. The train bombings in Madrid, in 2004, were followed by the 2005 ones in London; the attack on Glasgow Airport, in 2007; and the coördinated strikes in Brussels last year, at an airport and a downtown metro station. Since 9/11, new techniques to bring down commercial jetliners have included the December, 2001, effort by a passenger to ignite explosives packed into his shoes; a plot, in 2006, by British-based jihadists to detonate explosives concealed in liquids; and an attempt, in 2009, by another jihadist convert to set alight his underwear, laced with explosives, on an airliner above Detroit.

None of those latter attempts were successful, fortunately, but we have all become habituated to the security responses they elicited: the removal of shoes at airport security checks, the prohibition on liquids in carry-on luggage, and full-body scans at most Western airports. In a new development, in March, the U.S. and U.K. governments banned travellers from several Middle Eastern countries from taking laptops and tablets into plane cabins, after intelligence suggested that jihadist technicians had devised a way to turn them into explosive devices. (Details of this information is allegedly what Trump divulged to the Russian visitors to the Oval Office.) The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering expanding that ban to all international flights to and from the U.S.

In recent years, meanwhile, Britons have grown accustomed to being under video scrutiny to a degree unheard of in most other Western nations; there are CCTV cameras literally everywhere, with the average Londoner captured on video hundreds of times each day. This was once a source of public controversy, but nowadays it has ceased to be a topic of conversation, much less debate. The issue is not really whether the latest security measures are excessive, because there is no way to know that yet. It is that, with every new attack, some of our essential freedoms are being chipped away in the name of security, and that trend will almost certainly continue. (By a similar token, in Britain, messy and mostly unresolved political debates have taken place over what to do about the country’s Islamist hate preachers and British jihadis returning from places like Syria and Libya, as the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, did, apparently without hindrance from British authorities.) Liberal democracies are inching toward security states, and the full consequences of that will take some time to become apparent.

Last November, the Investigatory Powers Act, which Theresa May had introduced a year earlier, when she was the Home Secretary, was passed by both houses of Parliament. Known as the Snooper’s Charter, the law obliges Internet and telecommunications companies to preserve the browsing histories and phone conversations of their users for twelve months—and to allow the police, security services, and other government agencies access to them. The law came into effect on December 30th, to a generally muted public reception, though the European Court of Justice ruled that the “general and indiscriminate retention” of communications is illegal. May has also said that, if she wins the election on June 8th, she intends to set up a “commission to counter extremism” to help the government root out radicalism in Britain while campaigning to promote “British values.”

In light of such developments, it seems a good moment to recall something George Orwell wrote in his essay “England Your England,” published in January of 1941, at the height of the Blitz. “England, together with the rest of the world, is changing,” he wrote. “It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.”