The Press MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1974 Britain at war

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33706, 2 December 1974, Page 16

The Press MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1974 Britain at war

The whole of the United Kingdom last week came under the toughest ever powers given to the police there in peace time. The House of Commons has approved laws which ban the I.R.A. and similar organisations, laws which prohibit people from helping I.R.A. members, and which allow the police to arrest and hold suspects without warrants, or to deport them. The main criticism of the new measures from the Opposition has been that they do not go far enough. So far, the Home Secretary (Mr Jenkins) has resisted pressure to introduce identity cards for the population, a move which would have upset some political groups associated with the Left-wing of the Labour Party. The death penalty has rot been reintroduced. If murders continue on the present scale the Government might find that it is impossible to resist pressure from the community to have the death penalty put back on the statute books as the punishment for carefully defined crimes of political violence. A point must come at which a society’s concern for the rehabilitation of criminals is, quite fairly, overwhelmed by its desire for self preservation. The new powers given to the police remain abhorrent to most Britons, except in the most desperate circumstances, even though similar restrictions on personal behaviour are part of daily life for the great majority of the world’s peoples. Britain has been forced to go against its most deeply held tenets of freedom by a group of murderers who have exploited the logic of terror as a weapon. For such groups as the 1.R.A., terrorist attacks are a kind of bargaining. They indicate the price a political faction is prepared to extract from other people if its demands are not met. The demands of the I.R.A. murderers in Northern Ireland have not been met; the I.R.A. only succeeded in provoking equally horrible reprisals from other sections of the community. Two strategies were then open to the I.R.A. It might have increased the scale of violence in Northern Ireland in an attempt to create an anarchic and ungovernable situation in which its own organisation seemed to offer the only viable system of authority. Or it could try to extend the war in a new and more dramatic manner. If the I.R.A. has tried to make Northern Ireland ungovernable, it has failed because the majority of Roman Catholics, however much they might resent the present arrangements of government, have not shown that they regard the I.R.A. as an acceptable alternative. In the event of a complete breakdown of law and order the Roman Catholic minority, even if united, could only take control with the support of the Irish Republic. That support would not be given. The I.R.A. appears to have decided there was little point in increasing the scale of its atrocities in Northern Ireland. That society had learned to live with terrorism; the effect of any particular incident has decreased and too many terror groups have been in the field. The alternative strategy for the I.R.A. was to move to a more spectacular arena—dramatically and horribly, it moved to Britain itself. The I.R A. cannot hope to destroy British society or to make it ungovernable, but by committing atrocities on a sufficiently large scale and with disconcertingly random effects, the I.R.A. will try to persuade the British Government that it must make political concessions in Northern Ireland on the I.R.A.’s terms. The very freedoms which Britain, along with a handful of other countries, allows to its citizens, have made the I.R.A.’s task easier. Members of Parliament have been reinforced in their actions last week by the support of a society revolted by criminal outrages. A solution to the intransigent problems of Northern Ireland’s future remains to be found. Much more pressing is the need to disable those who work under a cloak of what they insist is “ political necessity ”. But the British Government must also acknowledge that it has its own “ political necessities ” and has acted accordingly.