Building a consensus on ‘national security’ in Britain: Terrorism, human rights and ‘core values’ – The Labour government (a retrospective examination)

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. Introduction In many ways this 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. This sociology of security is in turn related to the emergence of critical counter-terrorism studies in the inter-disciplinary social sciences. It is from these perspectives that we can ask particular questions, for example, what is security? Whose security? And, what is the relationship between the security of some and the insecurity of others? There has been a great deal written on Britain's post-9/11 counter-terrorism legislation and its impact on British society. In this chapter I want to explore developments indirectly linked to the controversies over indefinite detention without charge, control orders and the extension of pre-charge detention to forty-two days. One aspect of this chapter will be the exploration of the relationship between particular developments associated with two of Britain's recent Labour prime ministers – Tony Blair (who had a parliamentary majority) and Gordon Brown (who did not have a parliamentary majority) – and their very different attempts to create a consensus (both in terms of cross-party and a wider ‘national’ consensus) on ‘security’, especially with regard to counter-terrorism policy. However, the primary purpose of this chapter is to explore what could be described as the emergence of a securitized conception of ‘British shared values’ and human rights in the context of social threats to ‘national security’.