ANOTHER VOICE
The real danger of the IRA is in expanding police powers
AUBERON WAUGH
It seems more likely than not, even mak- ing every allowance for Irish incompetence and lack of nerve, that the IRA will succeed in exploding one of their big bombs in a heavily populated area of London between now and Christmas. They may even have succeeded by the time this article appears. Their failure rate to date has been most impressive, with bombs failing to go off or being discovered in Canary Wharf and Bethnal Green, Stoke Newington and Tot- tenham Court Road. It makes one wonder whether one of the bomb-makers may not be suffering from a certain ambivalence of purpose. But, as I say, our luck can scarcely hold, and we might as well get ready for the worst. What are the likely consequences, for instance, of a really successful bomb in the West End killing, say, 40 people and injuring another 120?
One remembers various incidents in our recent history. The King's Cross fire of November 1987, which killed 30 people, produced few noticeable consequences, except an instant ban on smoking through- out the whole of London Underground, even those parts above ground. There was never a shred of evidence that the fire had been caused by a cigarette, and the inci- dence of reported fires on the Under- ground has increased since the ban was imposed, but the speed with which the ban was announced revealed how anti-smoking activists within London Transport had been waiting their opportunity. We must not for a moment entertain the idea the fire was deliberately started by anti-smoking fanat- ics, but their purposes could not have been better served if it had. More recently, I learned that among the Health and Safety Regulations which poured out immediately after the tragedy was one forbidding Wheeler's in Old Compton Street to serve crêpes suzettes.
It is a sad commentary on my profession that any untoward incident reported in the news must always be accompanied by cries for government action. Insofar as the pub- lic has any opinion on anything, it seems to accept these dirigiste noises as representing public opinion. Perhaps the system will land us in a costly and unwinnable war in the Balkans before we are through, since the urge to direct and control takes no account of national boundaries. Any disas- ter offers a wonderful opportunity for the regulators in our society.
When, on 19 August 1987, a young man called Michael Ryan went on a mad ram- page in Hungerford with various semi-auto- matic rifles and pistols, killing 14 people and wounding 15 others, it might have been in answer to a policeman's prayer. Enor- mous funds were immediately demanded to pay for special armed response groups, helicopters, Heckler and Koch machine carbines and bullet-proof jackets for police- men, but by far the worst consequence was Douglas Hurd's hysterical Firearms Amendment Act which had nothing what- ever to do with the madman Ryan, but enabled unscrupulous Chief Constables to embark on a campaign of harassment against private shotgun owners which threatens not only to destroy an ancient British liberty but also to leave the country- side at the mercy of rooks, magpies, squir- rels and rabbits.
So now we come to the likely conse- quences of a successful IRA bomb outrage in London (in Manchester or Birmingham, although easier to achieve, its effects would be smaller). On Sunday, the Observer's home affairs correspondent, David Rose, obviously back from a long briefing in Queen Anne's Gate, told us that 'the Gov- ernment is poised to introduce sweeping new police powers to aid mainland opera- tions against the IRA, including the auto- matic right to search vehicles and people at random'.
Other newspapers, which had not had the benefit of Mr Rose's high-level briefing, confined themselves to reporting what Scotland Yard had announced the day before, that police have already assumed these sweeping new powers and had been operating armed roadblocks in East Lon- don for two weeks, searching vehicles at random. One senior officer told Mr Rose, `The officers in the front line are apprehen- sive they are already being asked to exceed their legal powers,' but none of these apprehensions visited the Sunday Times, whose reporter, Andrew Alderson, even found a Bethnal Green businessman who was happy to have been stopped and searched. 'I'm very pleased knowing they're on the ball,' said Thomas McKellar, 35.
There can be no doubt that while we are waiting for the Big Bang we are all happy to let the police behave in this way, espe- cially in the East End of London. What, then, are the sweeping new powers the Government is poised to introduce as soon as the bomb goes off? Plainly, they will give any policeman the power to stop, interro- gate and search any citizen at any time, whether or not he has reasonable grounds for suspecting that the citizen might be engaged in terrorism or any other improper activity. And public opinion, in the context of all those mangled corpses, will applaud.
Let us pause a moment before applaud- ing, too. We are not always dealing with the very best sort of policeman, nowadays. The police already have ways of dealing with what they see as truculence or cheek from the public. If the offender is young, black, unemployed or of the unrespectable work- ing class, they can frog-march him to the nearest police station and beat him up, say- ing that he resisted arrest or threatened an officer, and then charge him with assault. If the offender is middle-aged and middle- class or of the respectable working class, they cannot quite do any of those things yet — although they seem to have made a start on Stewart Steven once, when he was edi- tor of the Mail on Sunday and they mistak- enly thought he had hooted at them from a stationary vehicle. There is considerable evidence from the very top of the Metro- politan Police that they are beginning to find this restraint irksome; they are fed up with the middle class, suspecting them of tax evasion and (more mysteriously) fare- dodging, and can't wait to put the boot in. This Act will enable them to do just that. It may distress people to learn that there are signs within the upper ranks of the police of the same class rancour that inspires the Sun and the Sunday Times — the direct result of socially insecure people being given too much power — but it is something we must live with and guard against. The last response we want to the next Big Bang is to give the police more powers.
What we need, of course, is to revive the spirit of the Blitz: clear away the blood and broken glass, and keep things moving. It is the police who are doing the IRA's job for them by closing down the whole metropolis every time there is a bomb scare. In fair- ness, they have an impossible job against the IRA and are tackling it, for the most part, with resource and intelligence. But there are elements in the modern police which are becoming more vociferous by the month, joining their voices to the brutal proletarian triumphalism of the Sun, Sun- day Times, Daily Express, Daily Mirror and Star. It would be a shame if the IRA won our class war for them.
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