Twenty years ago, a backbench MP called Jeremy Corbyn criticised a new Terrorism Bill that Tony Blair’s Labour government was introducing to parliament. Corbyn said the legislation would curtail the traditional right of those in exile in Britain to campaign for change. The Terrorism Act (2000) became law the following year. And since then, we’ve had a near-annual parliamentary ritual of ratcheting up the powers available to the police and intelligence agencies. There have been fifteen new Terrorism Acts in the last 20 years, together creating a shadow world of state powers in which the legal rights enshrined in the regular criminal justice system are set aside.
The new Left that has blossomed under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has been largely silent on this legacy of counter-terrorism policy-making. In a 2017 speech at Chatham House, Corbyn argued that “the war on terror is simply not working”. Opinion polling suggested a majority agreed. But there has been little discussion in Labour circles of what a progressive alternative to the War on Terror might look like. Indeed, there is a general reluctance to take seriously questions of state racism, whether enacted through counter-terrorism, border powers, or initiatives nominally aimed at tackling gangs or drugs.
The Left needs to be ready to propose concrete alternatives to the prevailing orthodoxies of counter-terrorism, as I argue in a report published this week, co-authored with Ruth Blakeley, Ben Hayes, Nisha Kapoor, Narzanin Massoumi, David Miller, Tom Mills, Rizwaan Sabir, Katy Sian and Waqas Tufail.
