Confessing Evangelical

A wonderful article by Matthew Parris on the government's proposed anti-terror laws, in particular the new crime of "glorifying, exalting or celebrating" terrorism.

Parris doesn't like this proposal at all, and he knows exactly where the blame lies:

It won’t have been Mr Clarke’s idea to put people in prison for praising an idea. Home Office lawyers will have told him that it cannot be done and (one hopes) his instincts will anyway have been against the attempt.

No, there is only one possible source of this folly. The notion that you can make the world a better place by making it illegal to say nasty and dangerous things has the intellectual sloppiness, the headline-seeking shallowness, the philosophical carelessness and the creepy mix of the sinister with the sanctimonious, that marks it out as absolutely characteristic of our Prime Minister’s mind.

As Parris goes on to point out, some of the details of this proposal are utterly bizarre:

[T]he proposed law will include powers for government to "certify" past terrorist movements who may, or may not, be "glorified".

What madness is this? Are ministers and civil servants to work through history books, ticking boxes? Are we to have (retrospectively) approved terrorists? Truly, as Paul Flynn MP has said, under new Labour "only the future is certain; the past is always changing".

The main practical objection to this proposal is that it will be unworkable:

Were Mr Blair’s idea to become law, only minutes would elapse before George Galloway tested that law by glorifying terrorism in Commons debate. If parliamentary privilege were to cover such speeches, Mr Galloway would repeat his on the streets of Bow. The effect would be wholly counter-productive...

Some legal nets have to be bigger than their intended catch, and goodwill and common sense may remedy the imprecision. But here goodwill will be absent. People will be actively seeking prosecutions. This law will never work.

But Parris (observing that "the easy way to resist it was on practical grounds like these") also puts forward a principled argument against the proposals:

So now for the hard way. I object to creating speech-crimes even if the legislation could be tightly drafted and made to work. I object to the banning of ideas, theories or arguments. I object to the prohibition of sentiments. Difficult as the boundary is to mark or police, I see the line between thought and action as absolutely central to the rule of law in a liberal society.

Good law ties hands; it does not stop mouths or minds. It is for what we do, not what we think or say, that we should expect the policeman’s knock ... The Prime Minister’s disregard for this most important of distinctions is deeply troubling.

Parris argues that we should retain the current situation in which "a man or woman is free to say they admire a terrorist and support his aims, but not to offer any practical support to him in his work":

The difference is fuzzy and we are doomed to agonies of indecision about the marshy ground which lies between taking stands and taking part, but how we negotiate that marsh, and whether we think it matters, is what marks us out as caring about individual liberty.

Not that this is likely to stop the Prime Minister. For as Parris concludes:

I don’t think Tony Blair cares. I doubt he even recognises the problem. For this he should not be forgiven, and never be trusted. Charles Clarke, who knows better, should feel ashamed to have anything to do with this measure.