Anti-terror Bill: a victory for bin Laden?

What a parliamentarian our PM is! At Question Time last week Tony Blair mustered all his oratorial wiles to persuade MPs to pass a Bill outlawing the glorification of terror. His arguments brilliantly combined naivety and cynicism. His cause was stupid, unworkable, unpleasant, and wrong. And yet he won the day.

In vain Opposition MPs pointed out that the law against incitement to murder already provides for the prosecution of people such as Abu Hamza, or placard-carriers calling for the slaughter of unbelievers. In vain they objected that glorification is a perilously vague term: juries, insisted the Blair, would know it when they saw it. In any case, he added, there was a principle at stake: if MPs voted against the Bill, they would send a massively counter-productive signal to the world. The Bill was duly passed, by a margin of 38 votes.

Alas, how inadequate the defenders of our liberty have proved to be. Osama bin Laden’s greatest achievement was not the destruction of the Twin Towers, or the franchising of Islamic terrorism. It was to strike at the West when its leaders were so callow, so unread, so unversed in the democracies they sought to lead. Tony Blair is, like George Bush, a typical child of the Sixties: ignorant, arrogant and with an awesome sense of entitlement. The glorification legislation is quintessentially Blair: both piffling and dangerous. No would be terrorist will pay it the slightest notice, but a sacred principle of British democracy – freedom of thought – will have been lost. Anyone who celebrates the Easter Rising or makes the case for Basque separatism will, in theory, be liable to prosecution. Blair insists that common sense will prevail, but that is never a sensible assumption under which to pass laws that may last for hundreds of years. Thus, by increments, is our liberty lost – and bin Laden’s victory assured.