Building a Consensus on ‘National Security’: Terrorism, Human Rights and ‘Core Values’

Abstract

In this chapter the focus will shift from the examination of ‘security’ in the form of new border controls and new preventative policing strategies ‘with’ local Muslim communities to focus on ‘security’ in political discourse. In this chapter I will explore political discourses with regard to counter-terrorism legislation in the context of specific theoretical and conceptual frameworks, most notably the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute’s securitization thesis and the broadening and interpenetration of ‘security’ in International Relations theory. The chapter, following on from Chapter 1, will also explore the role that ‘British core values’ and human rights protections are being called to play in the UK’s wider counter-terrorism and ‘national security’ strategies. In many ways this chapter (and the previous chapter) contributes to the recent trend in sociology, in which ‘security’, and more accurately the mutations, redefinitions, effects and complexities of securities are being critically examined (Carter, Jordan and Watson 2008; McDonald 2008; Bauman 2006). This sociology of security is in turn related to the emergence of Critical Counter-Terrorism Studies in the interdisciplinary social sciences. It is from these perspectives that we can ask particular questions, for example, what is security? Whose security? And, following on from the previous chapter, what is the relationship between the security of some and the insecurity of others? These questions provide the backdrop for the analysis contained in this chapter and some of the chapters that will follow.

Last year when I took on this job I said it was my earnest hope that agreeing the answers to these questions could be above party politics. And the Home Secretary, Justice Secretary and I have sought and appealed for a consensus on these issues — not just on terrorism legislation currently before Parliament, but on constitutional reform and on the broad range of issues covered in our first ever National Security Strategy.

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