Terror that doesn't cause a panic: anxietism

We don’t respond to right-wing terrorism in the same way that we do to Islamic terrorism. That was the point of an article I read with the headline ‘The terrorism that doesn’t spark a panic’. We treat right-wingers who cross the nutty threshold into crime as mere criminals, but treat Muslims as inherently representative of anyone who also happens to use the same name for the religion. It’s a fair point, but there’s more to consider.

What do we define as terrorism? It’s violence intended to cause wider fear. Or, if I take the Crown Prosecution Service’s definition, ‘the use or threat of action, both in and outside of the UK, designed to influence any international government organisation or to intimidate the public’.

Now that’s a definition we can work with! Think of the possibilities. When Vladimir Putin says that Russia will defend the territory it stole from Ukraine, he is threatening action with the intent of influencing a government. He’s a terrorist.

Clearly the CPS has cast its net wide in defining terrorism. But it has done that for a reason. We can’t say terrorism is done outside of national governments, because North Korea is a terrorist state, and other states have threatened terrorist acts. If a North Korean or Russian agent tries to do something in the UK we want to be able to prosecute them despite their government affiliation.

Perhaps we can clarify the CPS’ definition by cutting out ‘influence any government’. After all, terrorism is designed to influence governments only by creating fear within, or for, the public that those governments claim to protect. So terrorism is really about intimidating the public, and in a democracy that directly influences government. That’s why authoritarian states are less worried about terrorism, and even employ it.

Why do we use the word ‘intimidate’? Well, we can’t use ‘terror’, despite it being implied. Most people aren’t actually terrified of terrorism, even if they are changing their behaviour because of it. It’s an ongoing concern, and that matters even though we feel safe enough not to feel such an extreme and immediate emotion as terror.

So it’s about actions or threats of actions that manipulate the emotions of the public. That’s what really matters about terrorism: without this, it’d be bog-standard crime. And it’s right that we care about this: attempts to distort others’ lives beyond the immediate victims, and attempts to distort our national life, are acts of aggression against us.

That’s exactly how to describe fake news and political lies. When Vote Leave displayed a picture of a queue of brown people (a queue! So they must have been natural Britons) with a caption about Turkey joining the EU, it was emotional manipulation of the public; it aimed to create fear of being overwhelmed using lies. Turkey is not anywhere near to joining the EU, and most of its citizens would stay where they are if it did. Every attempt at emotional manipulation is an assault on the public.

Politicians must campaign, and broadcasters must be free to discuss political issues. The difference is that facts can persuade someone through their rational, conscious decision-making. Lies distort that decision-making. It is the attempt to distort our national life that is the crime. That’s why Barack Obama, when he gave a speech during the EU referendum campaign about the USA’s thoughts on the matter, was not a terrorist: he was voicing genuine American policy. Yes, Cameron hoped it would influence voters, but not just through emotion.

The CPS, with its broad definition, has highlighted the similarities between terrorism as we usually imagine it and most modern campaigning. The only real difference is that terrorism is based on the credible threat of a crime, whereas political lies are not currently a crime. But since the whole point of labelling something as terrorism is to imply that there is something wrong beyond the basic crime, this difference isn’t important.

When commentators call social media a threat to modern society, is it hyperbole? Well, definitely no more so than when people call old-style terrorism a threat. But how often does it happen? We know that traditional terrorist attacks are very rare. Manipulation through lies and emotional gaming, on the other hand, is common. The threat is real. It is our actions to control it that are not.

But if we look even further afield, there’s more that ought to induce panic: the ongoing suffering of the public due to what we regard as natural causes. If it is the fear of terrorism that is the problem with terrorism - the negative emotion that worsens public life and lives - then we should care about all the other fears that drive people from day to day. This isn’t entirely a new point to make. For example, people who live in crime-ridden areas speak of the ongoing terror and anxiety, for both personal safety and property.

Outside of violent crime, in the modern economy most people are scared of losing their job; of falling behind in the rat race and falling under; falling further into debt, getting swamped with interest, bills and demands that all chase inflation in a way that needs constant promotion to accommodate. More and more people are surviving moment to moment, with poverty a constant threat. That doesn’t necessarily show up in statistics; people can still be in work and yet feel more threatened by being without it. They might work longer hours and more jobs, which would even make the economy look like it’s booming.

And then there’s social pressure: the stream of adverts reminding you that you ought to be unhappy unless you have their product, selling you a dream of a perfect life that is impossible, and the stream of social media feeds that do exactly the same, only it’s your friends portraying the dream of a perfect life, and the advertisers only come along for the ride.

There’s the way that society has told us for 30 years that we can all be special; that we should be passionate about our work; that we can make a difference if only we try: messages that stop dead against the reality that we are tiny pieces in a bubbling pot of millions, and random chance does more work for and against us than we or our rivals ever could. The dreams we have bought into are a lie; our hopes are impossible.

And finally, of all these existential questions, there’s ill health. We have a skeleton health system; the structure is there but not even our health minister dares call it healthy. People fall through the cracks all the time: we have poor mental health services in general, insufficient beds, people kicked out of stroke wards just because newer strokes have happened, doctors working 24-hr shifts with no sleep, GPs rushing complex problems through 5-minute appointments (remember the last business meeting in which everything was resolved in the first 5 minutes?), 100,000 vacancies… No wonder everyone’s scared of ill health. And, of course, death. Death is the end, and we currently reconcile ourselves to it by claiming that we can finally be at peace: that our sufferings and anxieties are over. Doesn’t that strike anyone else as perverse? We have created a system that makes us suffer, and then claim that death is good because it’s our escape from that system!

Ongoing fears and worries are all about us. Terrorism, as you might have imagined it, is just a tiny part of them. We, as a nation and a species, have the ability to alleviate most of them, and the potential to eliminate all of them. We don’t; we don’t because too many people benefit from others’ suffering, directly and indirectly; because we are lazy; because we are jealous of others’ happiness; because the only joy we get in life is looking down on those beneath us and we fear to lose that last pleasure.We might sometimes wonder if our politicians do it deliberately, as advertisers do.

This is the real terrorism. Millions of times bigger than the effects of a blown-up bus, and bigger even than the lies on a Brexit bus, we are haunted by fears that could be addressed, if only we recognised them as more than ‘natural’. Or perhaps less: they are not part of how the universe works but part of society only. We made them, and we can unmake them.

The death of a country

How did we get into this mess? Momentous events in history can always be traced to things beforehand that built up to them. Here are a few.

1. For decades the EU has been subject to a smear campaign from media outlets that know it can’t fight back and that fear the good it can do in the world. Most importantly, the EU has recently started to campaign against tax havens and tax avoidance, which is in the interest of its members in general, but not of the wealthy owners of media outlets.
1. The EU has also been a convenient scapegoat for politicians of all types, although predominantly Conservative ones. Decisions that have been made at a national level, or agreed by the UK government, have been blamed on the EU to avoid angering those voters who objected to progress. Blame-passing happens at every level in all organisations, and a little bit seems harmless and so easy. Eventually this causes problems somewhere.
2. David Cameron promised a referendum on leaving the EU because although he knew that it was a bad idea to leave, he assumed that the referendum would be won, thereby silencing frustrating divisions in the Conservative party. This was a sacrifice of principles to help his party (and him) keep power, through greater party unity. It seemed small because politicians often have to balance pure principles against electability and practical concerns, and the risk of anything bad was small.
3. The Conservatives made a series of ridiculous manifesto pledges. This was an opportunity to rescind the promise of a referendum. To do so would definitely have angered the Eurosceptic Conservatives, but politicians change their minds often enough that it’s not an unthinkable option. The polls all suggested that there would be a hung parliament, with the Lib Dems holding the balance of power. The Conservatives were therefore offering extreme policies as a way to draw in voters with their display of appealing ideas, safe in the belief that the Lib Dems could be blamed for blocking these unworkable and impractical promises. These promises would also have the advantage that any coalition negotiations that ended up at the mid-point between Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos would be skewed Conservative by the misrepresentation of what the Conservatives really wanted.
1. The tabloids and tabloid-like press, which is mostly right-wing, has championed a method of political discourse in which screaming loudest wins. This has been enabled by appeasers who think of themselves as well-meaning, centrist peacemakers and try to give a little bit to everybody. At every compromise, no matter how ridiculous the demands, the extremists would then re-start the argument, claiming the compromise position as their opponents’ starting point. A further increment is then gained for a new compromise, and so on ad infinitum. Each little sacrifice seemed a small price for peace, but peace somehow never happened.
4. The Conservatives committed electoral fraud. MPs overspent their budget restrictions, meaning that they paid for more campaigning than their rivals and therefore would have been better able to promote their messages and turn out their supporters. These were small fiddles, such as misallocating costs to the central party even though the activity was clearly for a constituency. The overall amounts were small compared to national spending but huge by local standards. In some campaigns the Conservatives might have spent double the prescribed limit. Other parties might have indulged in such fiddles, but this does not excuse Conservative wrongdoing and has not had the impact that Conservative victories have had. Any such electoral fraud is likely of a smaller scale.
5. The Conservatives won the election outright with a small majority (12 seat working majority; 330 seats in total). They hugely outspent their opponents because rich donors know that the Conservatives will look out for them. Money seems to buy elections in this democracy. A difference of 4% in the number of seats won would have resulted in a hung parliament (contrast this % with the ‘small’ frauds in the previous point). If additional electoral expenditure directly influences additional seats by the same proportion then the fraudulent expenditure in marginal constituencies could easily have swung the election. The Conservatives also spent £15.6m in total, more than Labour on £12.2m, or all others on £9.7m. People with spare money are the rich, and they mostly support the Conservatives. The concept of ‘one person, one vote’ has given way to ‘more money, more votes’.
6. Our first-past-the-post system is notorious for producing unrepresentative governments. There was a 66.4% turnout, and 36.9% of these voters voted for the Conservatives. This archaic hangover of a bygone age gave the Conservatives over 50% of the seats, and therefore 100% control of government for 5 years, from the votes of 24.5% of the registered electorate. The Conservative manifesto itself claimed that such a low level of support does not confer legitimacy. This was, however, when talking about strike action that might affect vital services such as transport or health. The Conservatives have chosen to implement transport and health policy despite having no legitimacy by their own standards.
7. David Cameron therefore found himself with complete power and a selection of foolish pledges he had expected not to enact. Politicians are known for renouncing manifesto pledges and reneging on promises (and the Conservatives have since tried to do so), but we must presume that internal party pressure forced him into keeping his commitment to an EU referendum, even though in this case the disaster leaving the EU will cause could have given him a reasonable excuse for not doing so. Cameron pressed ahead with a referendum when yet again he had a chance not to. The image of not keeping a promise was more important than the substance of protecting Britain.
8. Cameron and other senior Conservatives still did not believe that the referendum would be lost and treated it as an internal party battle. They therefore allowed the vote to be set up so that when won it would provide the best arguments possible to silence the eurosceptics in the party. EU nationals in the UK were excluded from voting, but UK nationals in the EU were also excluded. This is inconsistent, as the referendum therefore used an electorate based neither on citizenship nor geographic residency. But if it had been won, this would have allowed Cameron to say “even though it was in your favour, you still lost”. Commonwealth citizens resident in the UK were allowed to vote, despite not being UK citizens. Local elections often allow commonwealth and EU citizens to vote, but not only one of these two groups. The 2011 census found that about 8.25% of the population is not British. ONS estimates for 2014 were that this was 8.4%. Of these 2,938,000 were EU nationals and 2,406,000 non-EU. Estimating the number of British nationals abroad is difficult, and I didn’t see Commonwealth citizens collated in the ONS data. The BBC estimated in 2006 that 5.5m British people live abroad (1.2m in the EU). This is roughly equivalent to the number of non-UK nationals living in the UK. There might be 1 million Commonwealth citizens in the UK. These numbers are big enough to have easily swung the referendum result.
9. As stated in 7, little attention was given to the details of the referendum because it was regarded as internal party politics, not a vote of national significance. No need for a ‘supermajority’ was specified, as is usually required in voting on constitutional changes. For example, the articles of association for a limited company typically require 75% approval for changes to be made to them. Conservatives typically approve of private sector arrangements, so can hardly criticize this. Other countries apply supermajority thresholds between 60 and 75%. The explanatory paper for MPs to pass the bill that enabled a referendum to be held pointed this out and explicitly noted that the referendum would therefore be only advisory, with Parliament retaining its sovereign power. Similarly, the question was amended so that there could be no claims of bias against ‘leave’ in the wording of the ballot. This was probably the right thing to do, but demonstrates that effects that might balance the other biases in favour of leave were removed, probably for internal party posturing.
10. As with 8 and 9, the referendum was treated by senior political figures as an opportunity for party politics, rather than as an independent vote of national significance. Although we cannot read people’s minds, two likely such people are Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson had very recently, as mayor of London, extolled the virtues of Europe. However, the side in favour of the EU was crowded with senior politicians, and if he led the leave side to a narrow loss he would have been in a strong position to be the next leader of the Conservatives in place of George Osborne, Cameron’s apparent heir.
11. Labour’s position, although a continuance of point 10, deserves a separate paragraph. Corbyn had not recently extolled the EU’s virtues, (in fact, he had in the past been quite a critic) but Labour as a party was in favour of the EU. Corbyn had a duty to put Labour’s position forward. Instead of leading, however, he gave in to his previous biases and was led by the Daily Mail (and other rags) to a lukewarm position that contributed little to the campaign except to help Labour’s ongoing implosion. He was scared of opinion rather than trying to change it and probably hoped that when Leave lost Brexit voters would support Labour because of its weak position.
12. There have been large spending irregularities in the leave referendum campaigns. These include giving money to organizations that must be entirely independent of the giver (to avoid having to report the money or have it count towards expenditure totals) but which seemed to act in a remarkably co-ordinated manner. This wasn’t a small one-off; there are problems with the DUP, BeLeave and Cambridge Analytica co-ordination.
13. The Brexit campaigns were supported by donations of uncertain provenance. There is good evidence that a foreign donor gave to the campaigns despite this not being allowed, and that Aaron Banks, who made the single largest political donation of all time, had dodgy links with the Russians. Although this link is unclear, his business empire is not vastly successful, and his donation was more than many might otherwise have assumed his wealth to be! The lack of transparency is reason enough to be suspicious. Was the money from an insolvent company? Was it from foreign interests? Was it merely from an offshore company in his group, that is therefore forbidden from donating? Each of these seems likely. Banks has been consistently childish about any possibility of an investigation and the victory in general, undermining the nation’s long-established dedication to the rule of law.
14. Perhaps the most widely-publicised of all these points, the leave campaigns told outright lies. The UK did not send £350m per week to the EU and could not possibly use all that money to fund the NHS. Turkey is not a member of the EU, was not likely to be any time soon, and not every Turkish citizen would immediately travel to the UK if given the freedom to do so. The head of the main leave campaign has admitted that his team’s polling information showed that this lie was decisive in swinging the vote.
15. The leave campaigns made promises to satisfy everyone (this isn’t quite the same as lying, even if the promises, all together, were unkeepable). For example, the idea that we could control immigration further while remaining part of the single market was denied by the EU but still promoted. Farmers were told that their subsidies would continue even though the CAP is a huge part of the EU budget and therefore a huge part of any savings that campaigners were talking about at the same time.
16. The leave campaigns blamed economic distress on immigration, when it is more correctly blamed on austerity, economic progress and a lack of redistribution of the gains of that progress. Again, it might not be a lie; it could be plain ignorance and opportunism. That ignorance was paired with a promotion of, and respect for ignorance. Michael Gove memorably claimed that the nation had had enough of experts, and although he claims that this comment makes a bit more sense in the context he intended, it nonetheless perfectly captures the attitude of many of his fellow campaigners and believers: that their own opinions deserved as much respect as those of people who had studied the issue much more carefully. See point 20 for another example.
17. The leave campaigns were supported by the online activity of Russian cyber agents, running thousands of bots, possibly buying Facebook ads, and definitely getting a great many views for their messages. Russia is very keen to weaken the EU, which is a bastion of freedom, goodness and sense and therefore is Putin’s enemy.
18. The pro-EU campaign was poor, with some honourable exceptions. It focused on economic forecasts that will never capture the human imagination and which even the forecasters themselves, with sad honesty, admitted were subject to uncertainty. No additional arguments were put forward to try to catch people with different concerns and interests. There was no discussion of the principles of peace, tolerance, friendship and liberalism; there were no examples of the good that the EU has done.
19. The referendum result was 17,410,742 (51.9%) for leaving the EU and 16,141,241 (48.1%) for remaining in the EU, of a total electorate of 46,500,001; a 72.2% turnout. The latest estimate for the UK population is 65,110,000; the 2011 census identified 63,182,000. The result was therefore decided by 17.4m out of 65m people: 26.7% of the population.
20. This vote has been interpreted as unanimous support for ‘hard Brexit’, which was claimed not to be a possibility or sensible by leave campaigners. Of the 26.7% of the population only a few, given the leave campaigners’ statements, are likely to have wanted the hard Brexit now being pursued.
21. Our prime minister was not elected, either by the voters or by her party. All the fuss Gordon Brown experienced when he took over from Tony Blair has been forgotten. She has achieved the position through being a compromise candidate for the divergent wings of the Conservative party. She therefore finds it necessary to pander to the newly-powerful right wing of the right-wing party. This necessity is accentuated by the relative power of UKIP and the far-right, which might steal voters from the Conservatives, compared to the power of Labour, which is in disarray and unlikely to persuade centre voters. She has abandoned her principles (as stated during the referendum campaign) for a combination of power and holding her party together. Whichever of the two it is, the interests of the country ought to come first.
22. Leave campaigners have admitted that things are not possible that they claimed were during the campaign. For example, David Davis said that leaving the single market would be fine but now that he is being forced to look into the details because he is running a department whose job it is, he has admitted that they haven’t been able to forecast what would happen. This admission is a stark contrast to his campaign statement that leaving the EU would work out fine and the Remain campaign was making things up. It turns out that this was made up.
23. The civil service has been cut for ideological reasons too complicated and ignorant to discuss in detail, and yet it has been given an enormous new task of negotiating a massive separation of entwined entities. The likelihood of concluding negotiations in 2 years, or well, is therefore even lower. The cuts are major; Transport, for example, has seen cuts of over 60%. This cannot ever be efficiency; this has to be a reduction in service. The idea that government has no concept of money and millions of pounds can be clawed back from government waste is itself a sign that someone has no understanding of government or money. The biggest government waste, by many orders of magnitude, is in policies, not administration. Politicians who choose stupid things, like Brexit, waste far more money than civil servants could ever hope even to see, let alone waste.
24. It’s not helped by the Conservative approach to negotiation, which seems to be more akin to blackmail (over security or trade). Good negotiation requires co-operation and goodwill. Whilst Theresa May wants to use people’s lives as bargaining chips by not guaranteeing that EU citizens in the UK will be protected, EU leaders have said that they hold goodwill towards the British people and hope to do the best for us. Guy Verhofstadt has ensured that British citizens in the EU will be offered EU citizenship and the ability to keep their current lives. These are the people we are rejecting in favour of our Conservative reich.
25. Government departments are already being told that there will not be room for normal legislative work and that less important issues must be postponed. Departments, which already need to budget up to 18 months ahead, are now being required to prepare detailed budgets for an additional 2 years to save parliamentary time. A company that needed to budget over 3 years in advance would never survive. Other important parts of running the country will be neglected because of Brexit, and departments will be unable to adapt or respond because budgets will be set so far in advance.
26. The Conservatives after Mrs May’s snap election (and yet more spending irregularities) bribed the DUP with £1bn of taxpayers’ money. The distinction from corruption is a fine one. A more honest alternative would have been a hung parliament or another election, even though these would have made massive legislative changes to support Brexit very difficult in the time. That’s what a hung parliament is: a sign that the people do not support massive change in any direction.
27. Mrs May invoked Article 50, starting the 2-year period to leave, without any plan. She had no idea how long leaving might take, no idea of what she wanted, no idea what her party might support her in and no idea what the country wanted. Partly this is because the referendum was so poorly set up, with only one option to represent the myriad ways that one might approach Brexit. She invoked Article 50 solely to get a brief burst of support from the extremist right wing, who were scared that nothing would happen and the idiocy of the result would be forgotten as a misguided piece of guidance for Parliament. She forgot that her party campaigns by constantly attacking whatever compromise is achieved and that her members support not compromise, but only someone who champions every whim of theirs. Boris Johnson realises this. So yet again someone put immediate, personal or party political benefit over the good of the country. Theresa May felt her position was unstable, and so sacrificed country for her leadership.
28. The government proceeded to continue with no plan, constantly attacking the EU for failing to propose a great deal that we could sign our names to, forgetting that we might have some responsibility to understand what we want and communicate this to them.
29. Ex-leave campaigners, spotting that a compromise such as the one they campaigned for might be reached, as in the Chequers Plan, spotted a chance for political glory. As Boris had seen no figurehead for the leave campaign and chose to be the biggest fish in the smaller of two ponds, the pattern repeated at a smaller level. David Davis saw that being just another leave campaigner who had signed up to compromise didn’t distinguish him, so he outflanked the others by resigning from Cabinet. He could then be the lone voice for the even-more-extreme-right. The others immediately followed to avoid being accused of betrayal and to avoid giving Davis half their supporters.
30. The Conservatives have sniped from the sidelines because no-one is brave enough to replace Mrs May. This is a sign that everyone knows that leaving the EU will be a mess, but no-one wants to take responsibility for it, or try to stop it. Everyone, including Jeremy Corbyn, wants to be the saviour who swoops in to take over and repair the damage. That might be good for their careers, but it would be better for the people if the damage were to be prevented. Dominic Raab even resigned in outrage at the agreement he himself had been in charge of negotiating.
31. Fake news in general, outside of deliberate Russian misinformation, is a natural consequence of the echo chambers created by online algorithms. These seem to take advantage of the worst aspects of human nature: our tendencies towards irrational and emotional decision-making. When people have a lot of choice they find it all too easy to go with the easy lie and not the hard truth, whether they’re voters choosing what to read or pundits choosing what to say. Of course, even if people reject lies, it takes a strong mind to reject them absolutely. Many people will read something and if they don’t care much one way or the other will retain only a vague memory of the message, and, importantly, no memory at all of how true it might have been. And once it pops up again from memory, people will tend to trust their memories. All it takes is massive exposure. Our national discourse has been deteriorating for some time, but this has accelerated as extremists realised that they could use the effects that were starting to be identified. The big online corporations never thought about the cultural effects; they chased clicks for overrated advertising without caring about wider society. That’s someone else’s job… and when others did start to make noises, they were shouted down. It’s someone else’s job not only to care, but to be powerful enough to out-lobby the mega-rich.

We can attribute the negative consequences to every decision or event that could have stopped them occurring, even if each alone could never had made things happen. Many people can each have full blame for one terrible outcome. Many of these items could have been enough, on their own, to change the terrible path we're on. But combined, even if we stay in the EU, our politics will be the poorer for decades to come. Brexit betrayal will become a rallying cry for any demagogue who needs something to blame.

Although we can view history as defined by the big events, such as Brexit, and therefore view everything as a series of decisive events, a bit more detail always reveals that decisive events were caused by a multitude of smaller ones. Every large organization, dynasty, state, empire or civilization dies a death of a thousand cuts, and 31 of Britain’s most important ones are listed here. Small-minded people acting in narrow self-interest and expecting that larger issues will sort themselves out have found that everyone else was doing the same. Quelle surprise.

Those of us do think of lunatic things such as consequences and detail tend to be dismissed as boring. Perhaps people should admit that it’s their responsibility to deal with such subjects (or not vote), not ours to deal with all the detail and complexity and still somehow be more entertaining than those who spend all their time on being appealing.