This is a very strange government doing some very odd things. Take Theresa May’s anxiously press-released decision to ban the loathsome, noisome “Muslims Against Crusades”. A vile organisation no doubt, but not, as it happens, one which had hitherto done anything that couldn’t be coped with by ordinary criminal law as and when its members did those vile things they proclaimed themselves so fond of doing. Cynics might well wonder about this decision and the purposes that lie behind it (such as whose credibility is intentionally enhanced by it), but whatever its merits, overt or otherwise, it’s an authoritative, intelligible act for a state to take. It’s thus not inexplicable in the way the Home Office’s pre-emptive, nay, pre-cognitive seizing of members of the self-styled English Defence League on Armistice Day. Their (non? thought?) crime was sufficiently intangible that not one charge has been brought against of the assorted thugs, racists and other lowlife scum who were planning to mill round the Cenotaph. However, ghastly as the EDL plainly are, this is a deeply disturbing development, for where will the state’s newfound confidence in its ability to prevent crimes before they’re committed strike next? Leaving to one side whether actual crimes were actually, seriously contemplated in this actual instance.
Now the same cynics who mutter about why MAC was banned might in fact give a pass to the government in that the BNP and the EDL are effectively MI5’s political wing in Great Britain (with Sinn Fein the same in Ulster), so compromised are they all by state security assets. Hence the government knew full well what, for example, the EDL might have been planning. But that won’t do. And Ulster supplies the reason why. For if laying a wreath to Provo bombers at the scene of one of their failed, self-immolating bombs isn’t exactly the same ‘crime’ Muslims Against Crusades needs to be banned for and the EDL needs to be taken off the streets for, then there’s a problem. And the problem is – those genuinely liable to terrorism in England are not fools: they can see what terrorism worked in the past: and they can see that it was in Ulster. If the state, clever-clever as it so often is, really wants to stop radicalisation amongst a small minority of British Muslims, and a violent, parasitical counter reaction amongst a still smaller segment of the bottom end of the white working class, then they need to demoralise the would-be English terrorist vanguard. That means teaching them that terrorism doesn’t pay. For as long as such people can look to Northern Ireland and see Republicans still getting away with it, that’s a lesson that, entirely correctly, they’re not going to need to learn.