John Reid was the Defence Secretary who thought British troops could win a war in Afghanistan without a shot being fired. If the Government did not have the media in the sort of slavering thrall that Pavlov engendered in canines, that statement would be aired daily and be well on its way to a place beside Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” as an utterance of such unforgivable idiocy that the man who made it was never taken seriously again.
For the record, the number of British bullets fired is fast approaching half a million, and some of the fighting has been so intense that bayonets have been fixed. Still, the country being what it is, Mr Reid scaled the ladder to the post of Home Secretary, his eighth in Tony Blair’s Government. He got his new job, mainly, because he looks hard and talks tough and in times of threat the British people want to see politicians like that. Mr Reid is Scottish, too, so we fondly imagine he might one day put the heid on some radical imam, the way he called Jeremy Paxman a West London wanker after a televised debate.
Mr Reid brought the house down at last week’s Labour Party conference with what amounted to a savaging of that outdated concept: innocent until proven guilty. Yet as his rose-tinted view of war suggests, this is another well-polished act. Engagement, bayonets fixed and bullets flying, is not really his speciality. The Prison Service has no strategy to tackle extremist recruitment within Britain’s detention centres and jails. What is our resident bruiser doing about this? Not a lot.
There are approximately 4,000 Muslim prisoners incarcerated in Britain, including the greatest number of terrorist suspects of any European country. It is a myth that they are kept separate from the rest of the prison community. The majority reside in high-security institutions, including Belmarsh, southeast London, but remain on normal wings because of lack of resources. The Prison Officers Association believes recruitment to extreme causes is going on, but is rendered helpless to stop it by circumstances ranging from language barriers to bureaucracy. A working group has been set up to monitor the problem. Until it reports, nobody moves.
“There is little hard evidence that it is happening to date,” says Peter Atherton, the Deputy Director-General of the Prison Service. Maybe he needs to get out more. Recruitment of disaffected young males in prison has been a fact of life for centuries, and a serious issue for the West since Richard Reid, the thwarted shoe-bomber, turned out to have been a product of Feltham young offenders institution, where a visiting imam with links to Abu Hamza is believed to have radicalised teenagers.
As early as 2000 Jack Straw, the former Home Secretary, was told that radical imams were operating in prisons. Meanwhile, four men await trial in America accused of a plot to attack Jewish and Israeli targets in the Los Angeles area. They are thought to be members of the Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Assembly of Authentic Islam) group that has been active in California state prisons since 1997.
Even in France where only 99 out of 60,000 prisoners have links to terrorism, 175 acts of proselytism were recorded last year. Some could have been benign; prison is tough and faith can get people through. However, in September 2005 Safe Bourada, an Algerian terrorist, was apprehended near Paris having allegedly set up a cell comprised of former prisoners that he had converted during a ten-year sentence for attacks on the Paris metro system. Prisons are full of angry and resentful men: fertile territory for radicals through the ages.
Steve Gough, the Prison Officers Association vice-chairman, who raised the recruitment alarm, finds the idea of al-Qaeda-controlled wings fanciful. He believes the problem is in its early stages and could be headed off with better surveillance and special environments for terrorist prisoners. His concern is that there is scant evidence of a will to address this. Past experience also shows that moving dangerous figures around is an easy and effective way of disrupting the recruitment process as grooming takes time. It is also quite possible that al-Qaeda no longer exists as a finite entity and is more a brand name for a type of terror that it has franchised around the globe. Yet this is what should make recruitment in prisons such an urgent matter for the Home Sec- retary: the threat is domestic specific.
Think about it. In the present climate, prison records set off airport security alarms quicker than a bottle of water. No self-respecting al-Qaeda recruiting sergeant would deliver a band of wannabe martyrs that are likely to get their collars felt somewhere between the short-stay car park and Costa Coffee. The men targeted in British prisons would be groomed for British missions — trains, buses, forms of transport on which nobody would know if the passenger with the rucksack had spent his last five years in Belmarsh or Burnham-on-Crouch.
The terrorist detainees also tend to be ringleaders. Madmen by nature, true, but they will have the people skills and personality needed to persuade and convince. The French believed that for 30 prisoners attempting to convert inmates to radical Islam, there would be 20 new recruits. That is quite a success rate: particularly when multiplied using the numbers present in British prisons (as many as 700 terrorists or terrorist suspects, although figures are murky). Conversion is a subtle courting process, often beginning with matters in common, such as the mundane difficulties of day-to-day prison life. Mr Gough says that prison officers are alert to the needs of intelligence, but can too easily be excluded by a conversation in a foreign tongue. By the time the new recruit leaves, he will have been given access to a network of contacts ready to help him to prove his sincerity to the faith. After which, who knows?
Not the Home Secretary, that is for sure. By the time his prison system produces its first martyrs, Mr Blair’s tough guy will be long gone; just as he was when the first dead soldier came home from his war without bullets in Helmand.
Martin Samuel