The Woolwich killers don’t threaten the state, yet are treated as warriors in a new cold war | Simon Jenkins
The murderers of Lee Rigby are criminals. But it is the defence lobby, not the police, that reaps the rewards of British paranoia
The most serious threat to Britain’s peace and security is from a few crazed Islamists indulging in a religious vendetta. The killers of a British soldier in Woolwich said they were “justified” because such soldiers had killed thousands of Muslims abroad. The reasoning is specious. A court has jailed a British soldier for just such a death, and Woolwich is not a war zone. Such acts are crimes.
But countering these crimes now underpins much of the case for Britain’s £35bn annual defence expenditure. Terrorism lay at the heart of “Blair’s wars” and is even used to justify the British nuclear deterrent. Yet the essence of terrorism derives from its inability to topple regimes or occupy states. It seeks to undermine them by instilling fear. The sure defence is not to be terrified.
The “war on terror” has had dire consequences. It has killed tens of thousands of innocent people. It has fuelled the lurch by Britain into aiding US kidnapping and torture of suspects, as revealed by a retired British judge on Thursday. It mesmerised GCHQ into complying with the secret surveillance activities of America’s NSA, which proved anything but secret.
In addition it has come so to distort budgetary priorities that even the chief of the defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton, now warns that Britain’s security is being “hollowed out”. Costly and fashionable procurement is indulged at the expense of boots on the ground. The defence budget has been used “disproportionately to support the British defence industry”. Private profit has been guiding strategy.
It is near impossible to understand what “national security” means to Britain any more. The country is existentially safe, and so is Europe as a whole: safe from invasion or conquest, and vulnerable only to its own financial incompetence. While Russia may lurk as an unknown military quantity, the chief external menace is from fanatics like the Woolwich murderers.
The threat from terrorism is to Britons individually, not to the British state or its constitution. We need police and spies to guard against them, guarding that can never be complete. Yet we contrive to spend on police less than a quarter of what we spend on defence.
The effort made by the defence lobby to embrace and adopt terrorism as a successor threat to the cold war has become desperate. Yet it is hard to know how to deploy modern hi-tech weaponry against an enemy as low-tech as terrorists. You cannot send a frigate against a Woolwich killer.
Terrorism has been used as a justification for most of the “wars of choice” that the British have been encouraged to fight in recent years. The wars are given a light dusting of humanitarianism until the death rate starts to climb. How those wars have made Britons feel more secure is a mystery. While the Woolwich killers appear demented, it is hard to …read more
