Terrorists want to erode our freedom—we shouldn't do the job for them

There’s a refrain Liberty has had to repeat too many times over the last decade or so. But it bears repeating: you don’t beat terrorism by voluntarily abandoning the very values and freedoms terrorists seek to attack.

You don’t respond to mindless violence and hatred by hurtling into a race to the bottom—flouting the rule of law, disregarding human rights, writing decency and fairness out of politics and making laws that discriminate and divide.

If you do, you hand these murderous criminals a victory. You give them the power to undermine the foundations on which our country is built.

On Sunday, we looked to our Prime Minister for a steadfast defence of our shared values of freedom, fairness, compassion and humanity – to respond with an unswerving commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

When she took to the lectern outside No 10, Theresa May paid tribute to those values. But in the next breath, she gestured to policies that would undermine everything she claimed to defend.

It was chilling, with ominous echoes of Tony Blair’s speech after the 7/7 bombings—not long before he launched his campaign for 90-day detention without charge.

Theresa May’s speech raised the spectre of a return to the bad old days of counter-terror. Not just lengthy pre-charge detention, but control orders too.

Control orders and their successors, TPIMs (Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures), were supposed to be a temporary departure from our adherence to the rule of law.

They let the Home Secretary impose an almost unlimited range of restrictions on anybody they suspect of involvement in terrorism, without the need to charge or prosecute.

These orders are unsafe. They leave dangerous terrorists in their living rooms, rather than convicted and imprisoned. Controlees can remove tags and disappear—and have done.

They are unfair, subjecting potentially innocent people to years of punishment without trial, based on suspicion rather than evidence.

And they are unnecessary. There are alternatives to TPIMs that would keep us safer, protect justice and liberty and be far more successful in securing prosecutions: greater use of the myriad criminal offences designed to target terrorist activity, letting police impose restrictions on those suspected of terrorist activity—and the long-overdue removal of the ban on using intercept evidence in criminal cases.

It is a crime to incite violence. People suspected of terrorist activity can be stopped and searched by police. Suspected terrorists can be held by police for 14 days without charge. People who aid terrorists are sent to prison and people convicted of plotting a terrorist attack can be locked up for life.

This is the rule of law in action and it is a good thing. It means you can’t be locked up on a minister’s say-so. Police can’t break into your home without suspicion of wrongdoing. If you’re charged with a crime, you know the case against you and face a fair trial. If you’re convicted, you are sentenced by a judge who is independent of politicians.

Jeopardising these principles puts us all at risk. Look no further than the telling rhetoric in the Prime Minister’s speech on Sunday. She spoke not of violent extremism, but extremism; the difference between freedom of speech and conscience, and a war against ideas waged by politicians who want to police thought.

Aung San Suu Kyi was a “political extremist”. So were Martin Luther King and Ghandi. Peaceful extremists, on the right side of history.

Freedom to criticise the status quo—whether it’s a rant about foreign policy in the classroom or a Facebook debate on Marxism—is the hallmark of a healthy democracy. If ideas are enough to put you behind bars or on a watch list, none of us has liberty anymore.

The scary thing is that the tools for Theresa May’s thought police are already there for the taking: they are contained in the Investigatory Powers Act, a law that allows the state to harvest innocent people’s data. As well as making our privacy a thing of the past, this law flies in the face of expert evidence that gathering vast amounts of data on every citizen makes it harder for spies to keep tabs on the criminals. The perpetrators of the tragic events of the last three months were all known to the intelligence agencies. That means we need a better, more targeted surveillance system of suspects, not a mass surveillance regime of innocent people. Rather than making the haystack bigger, politicians should be helping security agencies find the needle.

Of course, our government wants to keep us safe – we want that too. But our future leaders must do so in a way that works, and puts respect for the rule of law and human rights front and centre. We have to call time on that complacent false dichotomy of freedom versus security. The next Prime Minister of this country must keep us safe and free.