The folly of jailing fools

The folly of jailing fools

A bunch of blowhards have been turned into public martyrs; their sentences are an incitement to violence.
Edward Pearce

The judge got it wrong - which is a pity. The judiciary is one British institution which has stood out for sense in the Blair/Reid-led hysteria, bravely offending a succession of twitchy ministerialists keen to put dust covers over constitutional law. But the men sent down for six years apiece for vicious talk should not have been sent, should not be going to prison at all.

I know what they said - wanting to see British troops come back in body bags and the rest if it. They said odious, savage and disgusting things, but they said them; and we should never forget the Spanish wisdom: "Words are feathers." Nobody was killed on that demonstration, nobody even slightly hurt. But, says the letter of this ill-considered law, they incited violence and murder. Other and susceptible people might hear, might act, might injure, might kill.

Respectfully, the law should not be suppositious, should not reside in the subjunctive mood. It involves something judges are normally chary about: want of certainty. This is a law of conjecture, of long-shot possibility. If you live in the fraught world of Chief Constable Jones, Professor Glees and Great Aunt Ada Doom, possibility is accomplishment, risk is certainty and we must all be afraid all the time. It is trite to say so, but Clarksonian motorists, "get out of my way" 80-plus merchants, kill more people in a fortnight than the British chapter of al-Qaida have killed throughout their campaign.

The shining and blessed quality of that campaign has been its incompetence, the arithmetical miscalculations, the badly set fuses, the miserably low quality of the operatives. Certainly fools can set a bomb that kills 100 people, but that is no excuse for making our own terror by overselling the threat and slewing a response which should be, not outraged, but rational and calculated.

To make a different conjecture, it is probable that these sentences, vividly re-stated in thousands of Muslim homes from websites, are more dangerous, have a better prospect of setting the fuse that works, blows heads off and ruptures arteries than any amount of malignant rubbish spouted by the fools sentenced - fools just now converted into martyrs. I blush to say anything so obvious, but clearly it isn't obvious enough.

The Muslim population of Britain is a long spectrum, it is complex and very fragile. Between the end-points of active engagement (very few) and categorical rejection (very many), there are other categories. The fellow-travellers are self-limited, but ready to give a minor hand, refuge and encouragement. A fuzzier group, less clear in outlook, might be called "the sneaking regarders". This is the band of opinion most significant for policemen trying to contain the threat, and is quite big enough. It is a source of silence and non co-operation, but its younger members may be recruitable. Mostly, it embodies passive sympathy. "We are the fish," said General Vo who drove the Americans out of Vietnam, "they are the water."

We need nothing done which takes fragile emotions and breaks them, nothing which shifts any Muslim into the mood of anger which becomes a course of support and collaboration. The soft line, mindful of emotions, which makes no martyrs and no new enemies, is the only wisdom. On Wednesday, a bunch of blowhards were converted into public martyrs. Those sentences are best defined in their own terms. Honourably intended, they are an incitement to violence and murder.