Simon Carr: The Jihadists threaten our lives not our values

The first official casualty of the airline plot has been MI5's security threat levels. "Critical (an attack is expected imminently)" was quickly seen to be inadequate and agents of the State came up with their own escalations. "Unprecedented" was overtaken by "unimaginable" and over the weekend "unimaginable" fell to "apocalyptic".

It's hard to know where to go from "apocalyptic", except perhaps to become more precise about it. "The security alert has been raised from 'Three-Head Beast Level' to 'Seven-Head Beast Level (Arrival of Anti-Christ Imminent)."

It was three or four years ago that Tony Blair started this moral inflation with his "our values" speech to conference. "Our values" weren't just the values of the Labour party, he said, they weren't just British values nor values of the West. They were "universal human values". This sounded so odd I had to check my hearing aid. The only "universal human value" is, for evolutionary reasons, revulsion at the smell of human shit. I pointed this out at the time but he kept doggedly repeating his proposition.

Only recently has it become clear how much he wants to believe it. We didn't invade Iraq to get rid of Saddam or his weapons of mass destruction but "to change their value system".

We what?

Politically, historically, militarily and theologically, the Prime Minister is up the creek on this one. It's a claim of moral omnipresence he's putting forward. It's not just totalitarian in impulse but of the religious madhouse. "My values are the values of the entire world" is a delusional, bedlamatic remark - as well as being extraordinarily rude to the rest of the world.

And as "our values" include vaporising entire cities when we're pushed, I wouldn't want to spread them around indiscriminately. The other side of the Global War on Terror (the G-wot) will make great use of our values if we ever succeed in imposing them.

No, foreigners have many odd ways, not all of them pleasant but they seem to be attached to them. In a plea for complacency, I suggest that, as a rule, we should let them get on with it.

Isn't that one of the more important values in our heritage? The idea of liberty we've taken so many centuries to work towards? The liberty under the law that allows us to do what we like, as long as we don't offend the liberties of those around us? It's not tolerance, au fond, it's a contract that generates tolerance as a by-product (the deal requires us to allow others the same rights as ourselves).

So these jihad-jumping nutcases don't threaten our values. They threaten our lives perhaps, but not our values. No, the people who threaten our values are our leaders who have been panicking and harrying us towards un-British ideas like locking people up for three months without charge, and invading other countries to change their value systems. Another of our most fundamental values is stoicism. If more atrocities are inevitable - and it's extraordinary we don't have them all the time - we should be stocking up on quiet courage. Can't we have a bit more of that? A bit more sang froid? Some of that laconic fatalism and dry humour we used to do so well? We've been bombed quite a bit over the years and we know how to do it.

Can we also remember that ID cards wouldn't have prevented this airline plot any more than they would have helped prevent 7/7?

Can we ask whether a 90-day detention will make an outrage more likely or less likely?

If we're going to be relying on informers and reliable tip-offs from Muslims close to the plots wouldn't it be important to keep on the best possible terms with that community?

And out of 800-or-so arrests under anti-terror laws, how many Muslims have actually been convicted for terrorist activity? The total was three, last time I looked.

So, can we get a bit better at assembling evidence in order to produce proof of guilt, like in the old days so we can get more of these jihad-Joes locked up - or more nastily, sent back to Algeria or Syria or Saudi Arabia or wherever they escaped from in the first place?

And finally, can we stop our Prime Minister saying his values are global values?

We're never going to win his G-wot by trying to change the value systems of Iraq, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan. They hate it and it's never worked before. In fact, the end was written years ago, by Kipling:

"At the end of the fight, a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, And an epitaph drear, 'A fool lies here, who tried to hustle the east'."

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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