Opinion Soup

Opinion Soup To the Everyman Cinema last night with Tom Brent for a public meeting on current affairs. BBC presenter Emily Maitlis chaired a brisk discussion in which Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, outshone distinguished panelists Sir Leon Brittan, Simon Hughes, and Daniel Finkelstein.

Hughes remarked that half of the Britain’s current laws have been enacted since 1970; and Brittan pointed to six anti-terrorist bills since 1997. Brittan, a former Home Secretary, remarked that new laws are rarely required; issues are more commonly administrative than legislative. Chakrabarti spoke of the public’s complicity in this: we respond to outrage and tragedy by demanding action from politicians, who, faced with a choice between diagnosing deficiences of their administration or of inherited legislation, propose new laws.

Terror is not our enemy, nor even our enemy’s cause, but a tactic used by people who consider us enemies. The panel, either sceptical of or hostile to the government’s anti-terrorist measures, acknowledged that the new willingness of such people to die for their cause requires an escalated response from us. So much conversation about escalated responses to terrorism — but silence about how we acquired such enemies. Is this country’s political class as out of touch with this issue as France is with its rioters?