New security measures predicted for UK

Published on Sunday 14 March 2004 00:00

LAST Thursday, with the death toll from Madrid leaping upwards, the officials tasked with masterminding Britain’s defences against similar incursions were summoned urgently to convene at MI5’s London HQ.

The emergency session of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre was called to consider the implications for Britain: what the level of threat was and what the security services could do to handle it. Across the Thames at the Home Office, David Blunkett had called together his own advisers to work out how much tighter he could squeeze the anti-terror apparatus he has assembled since 2001.

"One of the things to come out of Madrid is that it will make it much easier for the government to impose these restrictions in the future," said David Capitanchik, a terrorism expert at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. "After this bombing we shall see more protection and more controls."

A year on from co-piloting the assault on Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair is now pondering increased measures to counter a growing threat at home.

That action, terrorism experts predict, will include a tighter grip on Britons suspected of involvement with al-Qaeda and other groups - even to the point of allowing the Home Secretary to ‘intern’ British nationals. It is the political reality facing all Western powers who have been singled out for warnings on al-Qaeda’s more recent pronouncements.

Yet a further extension of anti-terror laws, of high-profile security on British streets, should not come as such a shock to the system. In protecting itself from attack, in preparing its citizens for the threat of bombs, Britain has form that goes back far beyond 2001.

As the Prime Minister himself observed yesterday: "There has always been terrorism: Spain and Britain know its price." Witness the forbidding gates barring the entrance to Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament and a London Underground system that has no bins, or platform seats capable of concealing a suspicious package: all of these predated the war on terror. The campaign against the Provisional IRA, which once managed to land a mortar in the garden of Number 10, was useful training, but it was not a comprehensive preparation against a new enemy which is prepared to die for its cause.

"We were already prepared on September 11, much better than the Americans were," Capitanchik added. "It would have been infinitely more difficult to hijack an aircraft in Britain. We are probably better prepared now, but I think the government has a dilemma: if it makes a big song and dance it is creating a panic, but if it doesn’t talk about what it is doing, it is being secretive."

In the last two years, there have been new preparations: the massive increase in stocks of smallpox vaccine, the authorisation for RAF jets to shoot suspicious airliners out of the sky, the portable monitoring devices checking for germ-warfare attacks at public gatherings.

The Home Secretary has ploughed through anti-terror legislation which has enabled police to detain more than a dozen foreign suspects without trial for two years, despite the protests of civil liberties campaigners.

When the head of the Met, Sir John Stevens, volunteers the fact that the nation has been on its second-highest state of alert for a year, and sporadic reports warn of terror ‘cells’ operating within the UK, it is not difficult for him to justify the hard-line approach. The pattern was expected to continue even before the Madrid blasts, with the roll-out of regional reaction forces to deal with attacks and further legal changes likely to make it easier for the government to lock up suspects on the slightest of evidence.

Yet MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller is among several government counsels warning of the "inevitability" of a high-profile attack on Britain.

Scotland Yard is most keenly aware of the threat to the Underground and railway stations, targeted at least 20 times by the IRA in the past. They already use a portable scanning device on platforms to detect suicide bombers, and rely heavily on security cameras.

Mike Smith, an intelligence expert at King’s College, London, maintains that the supply of accurate information may prove the critical factor in avoiding an attack.

"Fortunately, the UK has considerable experience of this kind of anti-terrorist intelligence policing and thus is probably better-placed than many other countries to forestall such attacks.

"However, and this is the key point, one could have said exactly the same about Spain."