Tony giveth, Hazel taketh away
You’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a shiver of Gleichschaltung in the air right now. These are, after all, paranoid times: war, terrorism, house arrest, an imminent flu pandemic.
And now this:
The Guardian: Muslims face increased stop and search
Hazel Blears, the minister responsible for counter-terrorism, said yesterday that Muslims will have to accept as a “reality” that they will be stopped and searched by the police more often than the rest of the public.
…
“If a threat is from a particular place then our action is going to be targeted at that area,” she said, adding: “It means that some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community.”
I bet Nick Griffin just loved that. I bet he gave himself a little hug and danced around the room.
She’s probably single-handedly wiped out any scintilla of goodwill with the Muslim community and party activists generated by Tony Blair’s conference with Mamoud Abbas yesterday. Indeed, with Blair needing to get Muslims and the activists onside and being anxious to salvage anything from the abbatoir that is Iraq, there was more than a hint of desperation in the air at the meeting. It’s difficult to see what anybody else got out of the less than grandly titled “Supporting the Palestinian Authority” conference.
I bet Milburn and Campbell are fizzing. You can probably expect Blears’ statement to be “nuanced” over the next few days.
UPDATE: Number 10 Press briefing: 11:00am Wednesday 2 March 2005
Asked if the Prime Minister was happy with the message given out to British Muslims yesterday by Hazel Blears the PMOS said that you had to be clear about what it was that Hazel Blears had been saying which was that she understood if there was a perception that stop and search powers were aimed at one particular community but that was not what was happening. What was happening was that those powers were aimed at those who were suspected of carrying out or planning certain activity. They may happen to come from a particular community but it was not a police policy to aim those powers at a particular community. Therefore it was important that people looked at what Hazel Blears had said in the right context and perspective. Asked when the Prime Minister referred to several hundred potential Islamists engaged in terrorism whether it was right to assume that the majority were not British citizens the PMOS said that was not right and if you considered the case earlier in the week that would indicate that you should not make that generalisation, but he would not get into the detail of who those people were. As he said yesterday what the Prime Minister was reflecting was a group of people who were a concern to the police and the security services but with varying degrees of concern. Therefore he was simply alerting people to the fact and the fact of why we all had to be alert.
I think Hazel can consider herself nuanced.
I like the “therefore he was simply alerting people to the fact and the fact of why we all had to be alert” bit as well - it’s like someting The Sphinx would say in Mystery Men.
“Do not doubt your powers, or you will give power to your doubt.”
Posted on March 2nd, 2005 at 7:36 am
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But isn’t what she says actually, um, totally reasonable?
The terrorist threat that Hazel Blears is in charge of countering, well, it is coming from fundamentalist muslims, generally.
So it does kind of follow that muslims are going to be searched somewhat more than non-muslims, as muslims are more likely to be fundamentalist muslims than non-muslims.
Just because it makes Nick Griffin hug himself and dance doesn’t bean it must remain unsaid.
But all this does is solidify in people’s minds the fear of the “other” - like Blair’s dire warnings of “hundreds” of terrorists readying fire to rain down upon us.
I’m not denying that the threat is coming from a militant sliver of Islam but this doesn’t help relations with the rest of the Muslim community who have been made to feel a little more like threatening outsiders this morning when they could be the lynchpin in countering these threats.
To be slightly melodramatic, this is a slippery slope to nasty places. It does nothing for “social cohesion” (horrible phrase) and plays into the hands of the far right and The Sun.