Terrorist Threat Construction and the Transition to Permanent British Counterterrorism Law

Abstract

After over two decades of renewing temporary counterterrorism laws in Britain from the early 1970s, making such measures permanent with the Terrorism Act 2000 was not necessarily a predictable or predetermined outcome. The Northern Ireland peace process was underway, the Labour party who had voted against temporary counterterrorism laws for over a decade was newly back in power, and historical context pointed to an inconclusiveness around how effective such laws actually were in reducing insecurity. In this article I argue a key element helping explain this transition from temporary to permanent counterterrorism law lies in how particular threat and referent identities were constructed in official British discourse. Drawing on empirical research from a relational-securitization analysis of official British discourses from the late 1960s to the present, this paper argues that processes of identity construction were essential to introducing and justifying the Terrorism Act 2000. The deployment of particular threat and referent labels established in discourse before events such as 9/11 or 7/7, such as "international" terrorism, helped enable the shift from counterterrorism law from temporary emergency response to permanent policy practice. There have been few mistakes bigger or more durable than the PTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act]. Its powers of exclusion, arrest and seven-day detention, the miscarriages of justice to which it gave rise and its powers of stop and search at the ports have alienated generations of Irish people and assisted the IRA with its recruitment from the nationalist community in Northern Ireland. (Conor Gearty and John Kimbell, 8 March 1995[2]) As the House will be aware, the Government propose the introduction of permanent counter-terrorist legislation, which we hope will do away with the need for the annual renewal of temporary provisions…Terrorism, and the threat of terrorism from a range of fronts, is likely to continue to exist for the foreseeable future.