Too Tolerant of Terror?

The November terrorist attacks in Paris heightened concerns across the Channel. London has already endured its own experience of Islamist terror, in July 2005, though Britain has long faced terrorist threats. In the 1880s the Fenians, precursors of the IRA, bombed several targets in the capital, including the Tower of London and the offices of The Times. Around the turn of the century there was a widespread scare about anarchists, who had murdered innocents in Parisian cafés and a Barcelona theatre, as well as judges and heads of state. They were also active in Britain: a bomb-making factory was discovered in the West Midlands town of Walsall in 1892 and a device exploded prematurely near Greenwich Observatory in 1894, killing the bomber himself. That campaign gave rise to a plethora of sensational novels, the best-known of which is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Another, George Glendon’s The Emperor of the Air (1910), even anticipated 9/11. That is without going back to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 or forward to more recent IRA bombings. Reactions to these threats, however, have varied. It is worth remembering how and why.

Victorian Britain was wedded to two great principles, which were supposed to distinguish her as a nation. The first was that she welcomed – or tolerated – foreign refugees, due to the lack of any effective legal means of denying entry to any foreigner who arrived, or the capacity to expel any immigrant, certainly any ‘political’ one. Victorian Britain put up with fierce foreign critics, including Marx and Engels, for many years and dozens of Continental anarchists. Added to this ‘free entry’ principle was another: massive public opposition to ‘espionage’. This made it difficult to find out what bombers and other malcontents were doing in Britain (not Ireland and the colonies, though, which were more rigorously policed). The latter principle was sometimes broken: at the beginning of the 19th century, against democrats and Chartists; in the middle of the century, when one man – Sergeant John Sanders – reported on French refugees; and from the 1880s, with the help of a new London Police ‘Special Branch’, charged with preventing Fenian attacks. These however were exceptions and usually rather incompetent. (The Special Branch was still keeping a watch on Marx two years after his death.) They also kept themselves hidden from the public, Parliament and even ministers (Gladstone once deliberately absented himself from a Cabinet meeting because he knew the subject of surveillance was coming up). 

If hints of underhand police activity ever got out, there was usually a public outcry. One government got into serious difficulties in 1844 when it was discovered that the letters of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini were being opened at the Post Office; another fell (though this was not the sole reason) in 1858, when Palmerston tried to pass legislation enabling foreigners in Britain to be tried in the country  – though not expelled, which was out of the question – for terrorist acts committed abroad. That was because foreign governments were increasingly irate at Britain for sheltering these desperadoes, almost as if – as one French propagandist claimed – it was deliberately using them to undermine its European rivals.

Many of Britain’s rulers sympathised, though they could not admit this in public. They had a lot in common with their aristocratic cousins overseas – more perhaps than with most of their fellow subjects. The latter viewed espionage as intrinsically dishonourable and prone to corruption. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police’s earliest plain-clothes branch seemed to bear that out when it was implicated in a betting fraud that it was supposed to be investigating. In the 20th century, when the secret services finally emerged, albeit mistily, agents were suspected of plotting against governments they did not like. You could not trust them, nor any government that resorted to such practice. And trust was necessary to keep the populace loyal. ‘Should the practice of spydom become universal’, pronounced The Times in 1859, ‘farewell to all domestic confidence and happiness.’ 

Indeed, ‘spydom’ was held to be one of the causes of much of the unrest to be seen on the Continent. Terrorism was nurtured by what today we would call ‘police states’. It followed (a) that it was the fault of foreign governments, if terrorists caused them problems; and (b) that they could do little harm in Britain. Palmerston expressed this concept picturesquely in 1852:

A single spark will explode a powder magazine, and a blazing torch will burn out harmless on a turnpike road. If a country be in a state of suppressed internal discontent, a very slight indication may augment that discontent, and produce an explosion; but if the country be well governed, and the people be contented, then letters and proclamations from unhappy refugees will be as harmless as the torch upon the turnpike road.

This boosted Britons’ amour propre immensely; which was perhaps the main reason why they neglected the most obvious counter-terrorist measures – secret policing and the power to exclude or expel foreigners – until 1905 (the first modern Aliens Act) and 1911 (when MI5 was born). It showed how superior Britain was.

Happy days. Circumstances are different now. If 19th-century anarchists and modern jihadists have much in common – chiefly a bestial disregard for human life – today’s suicide bombers’ disregard for their own lives, encouraged by a perverted form of their religion, makes them more dangerous, as does their access to far more dangerous and efficient weaponry. (The Greenwich bomber did not intend to blow himself up; the advance of terror is an example of history beginning as farce and ending in tragedy.) So Britain’s ‘surveillance state’ (with its accompanying CCTV cameras, largely absent in Paris) and the new counter-terrorist powers sought by governments may be justified. Even so, Britons should be aware of what they have lost as a nation by embracing such measures: an essential part of their historical identity, no less. They should also ponder the reasons for Victorian objections to secret domestic surveillance, in particular. Some of these may still stand.

Bernard Porter’s latest books are British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t and Empire Ways, a collection of essays (both IB Tauris, 2015).