Minister for terror
Cameron v Overlord
November 14, 2006 10 comments
Cuddly, youthful, video-podcastin’ Conservative leader David Cameron has slapped his balls on the table, giving notice at the weekend that he is fully prepared to compete with Labour as an anti-terror hard man:
I’m also convinced that we need to change our attitude to human rights. The Human Rights Act was a new Labour flagship but its totemic status has made ministers unwilling to acknowledge how much it is hampering the fight against terrorism.
We need to change our attitude to human rights. Interesting how “change our attitude to” is used to mean “abandon”. But what is wrong with human rights? Well, they lead to alarming situations like the following:
It is almost impossible to deport even the most ruthless foreign terror suspect from Britain.
Let us admire how Cameron squeezes in three terrifying epithets before the admission that the hypothetical person he is talking about has not been found guilty of anything. The most ruthless! Foreign! Terror! Er . . . suspect. Cameron wants “a Home Office minister for terrorism” – or, as headline puts it more snappily,
Gordon Brown, however, disagreed. He can do it all, promising that as prime minister he would make terrorism his “first priority” – or, as the headline put it (these Sunday Times subs are quite satirical, I think),
[…] They do like to make it difficult, do these politicians. Just when I was thinking that, whatever else might be wrong with them, the Conservatives’ promise to scrap ID cards would make them the obvious people to vote for come the next election, the boy David comes out with nonsense like his article in the Sunday Times, to which my attention was drawn by an excellent piece by Stephen Poole, at Unspeak : I’m also convinced that we need to change our attitude to human rights. The Human Rights Act was a new Labour flagship but its totemic status has made ministers unwilling to acknowledge how much it is hampering the fight against terrorism. […]
It would’ve been so nice if he’d been contrary, and played down the terrorist threat. He could’ve run a few party political broadcasts exposing the downright offensive and wrong things Blair assumed about his ability to make Britain ‘secure’.
I also liked the admission by Cameron that it is “almost” impossible to deport those ruthless suspects. Cameron appears to be saying that it is in fact possible to deport them, which is why we need to review the entire Human Rights Act to make it… possible to deport them.
From the same article:
They’re not the only ones, David.
So, being a moderate Muslim equates to loving Britain; presumably it’s okay not to love Britain, as long as you’re not a Muslim. “Those who distance themselves from terrorism while seeking to radicalise Muslims… are part of the problem” – it’s not enough to denouce terrorism in public, you must not hold political views that are “radical” or try to persuade others of those views. I think he threw in Hizb ut Tahrir because he’d heard of them, but none of this actually goes much distance towards clearing up any confusion over what a fundamentalist is.
Trying to peer beyond the confusion, it seems that Cameron probably believes that fundamentalists equate to terrorists. Considering how many Muslims consider themselves fundamentalists, that could help us to expand the war on terror farther than ever before…
David Cameron, like Tony Blair, speaks almost exclusively in false dichotomies.
It will be interesting to find if Cameron has ever said anything in public that isn’t Unspeak. I lay that down as a challenge.
This particular statement is a caution to those seriously contemplating voting Conservative on libertarian grounds.
John Reid and the PM never look so happy as when they can outflank the Tories from the authoritarian right, but this is a contest the Conservative Party can always win.
If you begin a piece by describing David Cameron as the “cuddly, youthful, video-podcastin’ Conservative leader”, you are deliberately shutting down the possibilities of fair and objective discussion. By relying on media manufactured representations of a public figure, you are inviting us to share in your haughtiness, your clever discoveries and in what amounts to little more than lazy ad hominem descriptions. This is a kind of unspeak. It “smuggles in” a pre-fabricated image for which no case has been presented – let alone made. The idea of course is to bolster your deconstruction of public statements by David Cameron. So let’s take a look at this:
I don’t think Cameron is making a case for simply abandoning “human rights”. As I read it, he’s basically saying that we needn’t sign up to securing the human rights of crazed fanatical ragheads – i.e. all those increasingly recalcitrant brown people. But so long as the rights of nice blue-eyed white people like us are protected – and okay we’ll throw in the rights of other “honary” whites too and perhaps even a few “house slaves” – then we’re doing just fine.
Of course, Cameron and Brown aren’t saying anything significantly different. It’s just that the former has the privilege of being more brazen about it.
“If you begin a piece by describing David Cameron as the “cuddly, youthful, video-podcastin’ Conservative leader”, you are deliberately shutting down the possibilities of fair and objective discussion.”
No you’re not. That’s how he wants to be known, how he portrays himself. Just like how you can refer to Bush as a “War president” or whatever, because they’ve said that!
Petrit at #3: good spot. “Almost” covers a multitude of sins…
Alex:
This particular statement is a caution to those seriously contemplating voting Conservative on libertarian grounds.
Quite. It’s interesting to note how, from cloaking their intention to clamp down on the welfare state in the warm’n’fuzzy language of “social justice”, to coming right out and saying let’s withdraw from ECHR, they seem to be reverting to the Conservative party we knew and loved.
Aenea
Re:#7
It depends who your “commonsensical” observations are directed at. If you’re preaching to the choir, then yes. However, I’m not sure Cameron sympathisers will share the implicit sniggering in that particular configuration of adjectives.
I confess, I haven’t been paying as much attention to British politics as I should, since I moved to the US, but is this another case of British political rhetoric aping the American? Of importing stupidity when there doesn’t seem quite enough domestic production to go around?
It seems almost as if, in an effort to cut costs and effort, Cameron has decided to outsource his talking points.