Les Attentats de Londres de Juillet 2005: un Nihilisme ‘Made in the UK’
Nous devrions reconnaître les dimensions nationales du terrorisme au Royaume-Uni au lieu d’imaginer que ses causes premières émanent toujours de l’étranger ou reflètent une idéologie étrangère. Il semble refléter également un sens plus large d’aliénation et de confusion qui aurait saisi le monde occidental.

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Front page
Dr Bill Durodié is the Senior Fellow co-ordinating the Homeland Defence research programme in the Centre of Excellence for National Security of the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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He is also an Associate Fellow of the International Security Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House in London, and recently completed three years as Senior Lecturer in Risk and Corporate Security in the Resilience Centre of Cranfield University, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. He was previously Director of the International Centre for Security Analysis, and Senior Research Fellow in the International Policy Institute, within the 5* Research Assessment Exercise rated War Studies Group of King’s College London.

His main research interest is into the causes and consequences of our contemporary consciousness of risk. He is also interested in examining the erosion of expertise, the demoralisation of élites, the limitations of risk management and the growing demand to engage the public in dialogue and decision-making in relation to science.

Bill was educated at Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, and New College Oxford. In 2007 he was also awarded a PhD by Public Works from Middlesex University.

He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, and an Associate of the Royal College of Science (ARCS). He has previously been a Member of the Society for Risk Analysis, an Advisory Forum Member of the Scientific Alliance, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

His work has appeared and been commented on in a wide range of publications, and he is regularly requested to provide expert commentary for television and radio broadcasts. Bill featured in the BAFTA award-winning BBC documentary series produced by Adam Curtis: The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.

Transcript of Bill’s September 2006 interview with the Australian broadcaster Robyn Williams for ‘In Conversation’ on ABC Radio National.

Video podcast of his lecture ‘Resilience in the Face of Terrorism’ given on 9 March 2007 at the University of Warwick Business School

Bill was one of the founding members of the Manifesto Club, a network of individuals celebrating human achievement and challenging social, cultural and political pessimism.

Securing Electricity: Blackout
Preventing electricity outages from cascading into major international blackouts requires an appreciation of the social dimension of such networks. A focus on extreme possibilities rather than gradual failure, and an emphasis on environmental protection over assuring supply can be the real problem.

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China’s helpful role in the new world order
African economies are growing at higher rates than the world economy. China can help deliver some much-needed infrastructure there if it is allowed to. Its influence in the Sudan is more a sign of its weakness than its strength.

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China and Africa: A Rewarding Relationship
China has been portrayed as the new imperialist power in Africa, but its investments there are nothing compared to those of the old imperialists. What’s more, its activities are mostly of benefit to all, as opposed to the patronizing preaching of Western NGOs.

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Why ‘deradicalisation’ is not the answer
It's time Jacqui Smith realised that Islamist extremism is not a ‘foreign’ invader of Britain, but rather springs from our own bankrupt culture.

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On Tuesday, the British home secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced the development of a nationwide ‘deradicalisation’ programme to tackle people who have supposedly been drawn into violent Islamist extremism in Britain. Muslim community groups and councils will be allocated £12.5million, in addition to the £40million the government has already committed to the ‘prevent’ element of the national counterterrorism strategy made public in July 2006. The funding will be used for projects that will ‘challenge and resist’ the ideas and outlooks deemed to have informed recent acts of terror in the UK.

This strategy will fail for the simple reason that the government has yet to fully appreciate what the influences are that they seek to alter. In addition, officials have no idea as to what it is they would wish to alter them to.

The simplistic model that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 was that the West was confronted by a resurgent form of political Islam emanating from the Middle East and further afield. Subsequent events, including the London bombings on 7 July 2005, led to an almost begrudging recognition that many of the perpetrators of terrorism had been educated in the West, if not born there.

This still allowed for the possibility that their ideas were largely foreign in origin, or that their outlooks were alien to the presumed norms prevailing in the West. Hence the continuing focus on the form that these ideas take – couched in their jihadist rhetoric – or appeals to defending an ill-defined sense of ‘our values’ or ‘our way of life’. The UK government has failed to confront the true content of what these ideas expressed: a rejection of all things Western, rather than a positive affirmation of anything else.

Nor has the government offered an alternative vision of what we stand for as a society, beyond rhetorical references to freedom and democracy. However, the espousal of such values jars with current proposals to extend the period that alleged terrorists may be held without charge (from 28 to 42 days) - from a prime minister, Gordon Brown, who was never elected by the people.

The truth is that the sources of self-styled Islamist terrorism are more likely to be found within our own shores and within our own communities as anywhere else. It may be more likely, for now, that British Asians will act upon these ideas – with the benefit of an enhanced sense of victimhood that they may have picked up within the British education system. But as the steadily increasing number of white faces appearing on the counterterrorism radar suggests, this need not necessarily be true for much longer.

If this sounds rather harsh, let me illustrate what I mean by way of an example. A good friend of mine recently spent a day in the law faculty of a prestigious British university. The distinguished professor she spent time with advised her that nowadays students are not the same as they once were. They were no longer expected to read numerous books, write long essays or memorise case law. Rather, they are presented with handouts of Powerpoint presentations to read and they keep a weblog of their activities.

That evening, my friend attended the Islamic society meeting in the same university. There, she encountered many of the same students she had met earlier in the day (when they had been disinterestedly sending texts on their mobile phones during the law seminars). Now, however, the students appeared eager to learn. The cleric who ran the meeting expected them to recall specific lines from the Koran and to be familiar with all aspects of Islamic jurisprudence.

Maybe somebody should ask Jacqui Smith who here is the ‘radicalising’ influence? Is it the foreign mullah who ran the evening class, demanding attention and commanding respect, or was it the jaded Western intellectual who deep down believes that there is no truth that can be taught, that not too much should be expected of young people nowadays, and who in any case would not wish to damage their ‘self-esteem’ through challenging them in class?

I use this vignette to suggest that the roots of so-called ‘radicalisation’ are much wider and deeper than can be addressed by a prejudicially targeted programme focusing on ill-founded notions as to where such ideas might emanate from. Indeed, rather than targeting Muslim communities and monitoring Islamic society meetings, the authorities would be better off observing and monitoring their own contemporary culture.

Far from there being a layer of vulnerable young Muslims who are preyed upon by various hotheads, what we find, time and again, are passionate, intelligent and energetic individuals who somehow fail to find any meaning or purpose to their lives from within the confines of contemporary Western culture. Most of these are neither disconnected nor alienated from society, and rather than being ‘radicalised’ from the outside, they actively look for something to join. Nick Reilly, the supposed simpleton whose rudimentary device exploded in his face recently in Exeter, is proof that it is almost impossible to ‘recruit’ anyone of note into terrorism.

In short: a few, fairly intelligent people, deprived of a sense of purpose, will go looking for answers in radical Islam. These are Western people looking for some alternatives to the bankrupt intellectual and political culture around them. Those who are apparently ‘recruited’, on the other hand, are mostly idiots.

In focusing on so-called ‘extremists’ and ‘radicals’, the authorities and security agencies manage to miss that which lies right under their nose. What’s worse, the very language they use belies their own difficulty. By accusing someone of being ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’, they effectively give up on any attempt to address the content of what people supposedly believe, targeting instead the extent to which they are held to believe it. This is like saying, ‘I don’t care what it is you believe in, so long as it is not too much’, which in its turn is an admission that they themselves believe in nothing.

At a talk given to the Smith Institute in London on the evening of her announcement regarding the proposed ‘deredicalisation’ programme, Jacqui Smith suggested that ‘lacking a positive vision, al-Qaeda can only define itself by what it opposes’. Talk of projecting yourself on to others! She and her cronies would be better off outlining what kind of Britain it is that they do want to live in, rather than obsessing over a handful of dangerous idiots whose ideas and outlooks would seem entirely unimpressive were it not for the vacuum that they confront. 

History: it’s just one bloody thing after another
Having jettisoned political and historical frameworks, Michael Burleigh's story of terrorism combines a lack of insight with excessive prejudice about curry-eating loyalists and headbutting Glaswegians.

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In a recent interview for the Guardian’s education supplement, historian and writer Michael Burleigh suggested that his decision to leave academia five years ago, after stints, amongst others, at New College Oxford and the London School of Economics, was driven by a determination not to ‘become a guru-like figure’, ‘who surrounded himself with cronies’ and ended up creating ‘clones’ (1).

Judging by his latest book, Blood and Rage – A Cultural History of Terrorism, a more likely explanation is that such is the impoverished nature of his arguments that the only people who were prepared to listen were either cronies or clones. So, while describing women in burqas as ‘black sacks’, or suggesting that ‘headbutting one another’ is ‘a national (sic) pastime in Glasgow’, may appeal to a certain juvenile sense of humour, it is unlikely to endear him to those, as yet un-cloned, constituencies he might wish or need to influence.

One can only presume that he does not care. Over the course of 486 pages on the emergence and development of terrorism, which begins with nineteenth-century Fenians, Nihilists and Anarchists, ends with al-Qaeda, and takes in Italy’s Red Brigades and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang on the way, there is very little in the way of analysis. Indeed, he openly declares a desire to focus on ‘actions rather than theories’. But in the absence of analysis, his bombastic and belligerent asides become not just tedious - they encourage suspicion as to his reading of events.

It makes for a grating experience. Reading Blood and Rage reminded me of the great Cambridge historian Sir Herbert Butterfield’s famous aphorism – memorably adapted by Alan Bennett in his 2004 play The History Boys – that history is ‘just one bloody thing after another’. Sounding like a breathless and overexcited child who has just come back from a school trip, Burleigh delivers to the reader an un-insightful and somewhat random list of things that happened. Nowhere, other than in a short passage by Nelson Mandela, is there any attempt to explain how ideas and events may be shaped by context or will.

What really betrays Burleigh’s approach is the subtitle to his book: ‘A Cultural History of Terrorism’. That is, it’s history with the society and politics taken out. With no attempt to engage with the ideas and aspirations that motivated his assorted protagonists, be it the Basque ETA or Algeria’s FLN, or any attempt to appreciate the circumstances in which groupings found themselves, it is little wonder that Burleigh’s narration appears as a sequence of inexplicable events. Burleigh is left instead with just their actions to describe – mysterious, dangerous and impenetrable.

Annoyingly, this also means that even a reactionary like Burleigh effectively lets those who resort to acts of terror off the hook. To him they have become addicted to violence or, as he dubiously proposes, ‘are morally insane’, in which case they can hardly be held culpable.

With less sophistication and reason than the succession of mediocrities occupying the role of British home secretary, his rant continues, page after page after page. In the Daily Telegraph he continued his moan: ‘there are people in this country …who despise our way of life and seek to change it for all time.’ (2) But which people and what way of life?

Like many others, his prejudices encourage him to see such forces as largely emanating from far-flung places and foreign outlooks, in other words, ‘over there’. Yet closer scrutiny of his own invective would reveal to him the vast list of domestic enemies that exist among the ‘liberal elites’. These are variously castigated as ‘fervent human rights lawyers’, ‘loathsome academic[s]’, ‘fanciful journalists’, ‘celebrity useful idiots’ and other ‘well-to-do apologists’. He may have a point, but unable to engage with the breadth and depth of this cultural conflict on the homefront, he simply dismisses it and comes across as a grumpy old man.

At every turn, whether it is in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, Germany or the UK, he resorts to the tired and trite notion that the roots of terror lie in the rapid expansion of higher education without a concomitant development of employment opportunities. This growth may well have presented him with students less sympathetic to his cheap caricatures of Northern Ireland’s loyalists as people whose ‘idea of an exotic meal was to add curry sauce to a bag of chips, while venturing as far as Tenerife for their first overseas holiday’. But this supposed explanation is unlikely to be ‘the actual source of anger on the part of young Muslims’, as he suggests on his website (3).

Almost inevitably, amidst so much manure, the odd flower of insight blooms. But his apercus could have resulted in a 20-page essay rather than a 500-page book. One of the most useful bits, stemming from his rampant, yet oddly anachronistic anti-left wing prejudices, is a useful section - unusual to books covering Islamist terrorism - detailing the role and barbarity of the Mujahideen in Bosnia, as well as how their actions were supported or ignored by Western radicals.

Elsewhere, he astutely describes terrorists as ‘juvenile fantasists’ and ‘self-styled victims’ whose ‘misdirected or frustrated altruism’ makes them ‘too eager to repudiate themselves’ through their actions, hoping thereby to ‘overcome the boredom and purposelessness of their own lives’.

He also usefully debunks many illusions as to the supposed uniqueness of the threats we face today – simultaneous attacks, suicide bombings, bomb-making manuals, training camps and the targeting of information networks – as well as the overreaction of the authorities to these threats. His detailing of the sheer number and intensity of terrorist attacks in the not too distant past also acts as a reality check.

Yet, despite seeing through Islamism as a pose, he is still driven, through his refusal to see the origins and parallels for this within the West, to describe the contemporary crop of self-styled Islamist losers, plotting terrorist outrages from their bedrooms in east London, as somehow presenting ‘an existential threat to the whole of civilisation’. This seems like a tall order, but one somehow befitting a former academic left howling to the barking of Barking.

Senior figures in the world of national security today call for a new narrative of resilience to be developed in the face of these supposed threats. It is possible that Burleigh may seem to them to offer a little of what they need. But while history is always contested, his story is simply a fanciful myth, unable to engage or captivate a broader community, as real resilience and proper history would.

In the end, Burleigh abdicates all responsibility by suggesting that ‘the battle with jihadism will only be won by Muslims themselves’. In fact, he laments that ‘it is difficult to see how things can be rectified’, comparing contemporary counterterrorism initiatives to an endless game of ‘whack a mole’. Unable to engage in, let alone win, the battle of ideas, as has happened before, Burleigh will simply be left alone with his cronies and his clones.

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, by Michael Burleigh is published by Harper Press.

(1) Michael Burleigh: The reluctant guru, Guardian, 11 March 2008

(2) See Michael Burleigh’s website here.

(3) Actions speak loudest to terrorists, Mr Brown , Telegraph, 15 November 2007

Death of the warrior ethos
Weaving a path from Achilles to Rambo via Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Christopher Coker’s insightful new book captures the increasing demonisation of war – even ‘good wars’ – and the denigration of honour, duty and glory.

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In his 1998 BBC Reith lectures, ‘War and Our World’, the military historian and journalist John Keegan described war as ‘collective killing for a purpose’ (1). It is hardly surprising, then, that societies in which a spirit of solidarity has been diminished, the necessity to fight dismissed, and attempts to impart a sense of direction or meaning discredited, are unable to celebrate their wars and their warriors.

Primarily, of course, it is the ‘killing’ part of Keegan’s definition that contemporary societies feel uncomfortable with, or reject outright, rather than the ‘collective’ or ‘purpose’ elements, which many would dearly like to rediscover while remaining sceptical about some of their earlier incarnations. But it is precisely the absence of these latter factors that have served to create confusion about the former.

Anyone wishing to pay tribute to warriors today, or to compose a paean to war as ‘a test of, and testament to, a nation’s resilience’, would be ill-advised to do so. Christopher Coker, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, has done the next best thing. His book The Warrior Ethos, while imbued with a sense of loss, also appropriately captures the ambivalence and ambiguity of our times.

Despite copious notes and references, this is far from being an academic text. In parts The Warrior Ethos feels more poetic than polemic, as Coker endeavours to weave a path from Achilles to Rambo via Shakespeare and Tolstoy. His sense that the spirit of an age can be captured through its literature and culture, rather than historical and political analysis alone, proves most rewarding, especially in revealing what has changed.

It is not simply a lost world that is unravelled, but lost words, too. ‘Honour’, ‘Duty’ and ‘Glory’ lose their meaning, and their use, if we forget the past, dismiss the present and refuse to face up to the future. ‘Heroism’, stripped of its subjective factor, appears merely to be bred-in, or institutionalised. Alternatively it is pathologised, as a self-serving and dangerous obsession, or worse, as the sad struggle of trauma victims.

Henry V’s decisive defeat of the French at Agincourt in 1415, as well as Shakespeare’s account of it with the infamous ‘band of brothers’, can now be portrayed as being about people suffering from ‘a centuries-old “deception” about the glory of war’. Inverting this new orthodoxy, Coker reveals brilliantly how ‘we tend to deprive them of the fullness of their lives in order to support and sustain the smallness of our own’.

It is our contemporary construction of events that can transform these historic episodes from being ‘full of meaning’ to being seen as a ‘futile waste’. In that sense, the postmodern disposition towards not taking anything too seriously is quite disabling, even in the absence of any enemy we may face. But we should be clear, that this ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (2), stems from an interpretation of the world rather than being inherent.

‘All of us in the Western world come from a culture which doubts its own first principles’, rails Coker. So freedom must be fought for afresh in each generation. Stuggle, too, despite its rejection by those of sensitive dispositions, is also a necessity in nature. ‘Only in the last thirty years have we begun to imagine living at peace with nature’, he notes, yet increasing numbers seem to be forgetting this at their peril.

War, like all struggles, is transformative, both for the individuals concerned and for society. Little wonder then, that societies which – despite their rhetoric – fear change, rejecting the uncertainties it creates and endlessly seeking to control risks, should have such qualms about it. Fighting forces them to take a view of the future, regardless of whether they prefer the present or believe in any particular cause.

This transcendental element of existence is most acutely felt by warriors, who are asked to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the ‘greater good’ – another unfashionable concept, and one invoked by The Military Covenant that has only relatively recently been codified and released (3). But again, a ‘greater good’ presumes a ‘collective’ with a sense of ‘purpose’, despite these being noticeable by their absence today.

Coker does not romanticise killing, although, like a recent report accusing the British Army of glamorising warfare (4), he notes a growing reluctance in military circles to use the ‘K’ word. The preference for euphemisms, such as ‘engage’ or ‘suppress’, can rightly be interpreted as defensive. As in animal testing laboratories, when researchers avoid the ‘K’ word, or claim to prioritise ‘welfare’, their evasion allows opponents to run riot.

It was enlightened modernity itself that put paid to Homeric heroes such as Achilles who, living in an unfettered Hobbesian ‘state of nature’, could go about butchering their opponents with little sense of remorse. The modern warrior is accountable to society, choosing to fight for a shared interest. We are not driven mindlessly into feuds through genetic blood ties, but determine our course by our own reason.

But society, suggests Coker, by sanctioning its warriors’ actions, simultaneously removes the determination of their destiny from them. This suppression of the one to the many works so long as there are many who wish to be one, and so long as all parties trust one another and themselves. If these bonds are broken, a vast array of legal codes is imposed upon would-be warriors to patrol their actions and even their thoughts.

In addition, the American cultural historian Paul Fussell suggests that the attenuation of religious belief in the modern world contributed to making modern war and especially death much harder to bear than in the past (5). ‘How does a society cope with death when it no longer dreams of eternity?’ asks Coker, noting how it has been turned into a risk to be avoided, thereby robbing it, and life, of their significance.

The error is to measure life in terms of risk at all. Life, argued Freud, loses its interest when death may not be risked (6). Another way to put it is that there is more to life than mere existence through risk management. As Coker argues, ‘Reason serves the passions; it doesn’t suppress them.’ Yet, in recent years, the military has tied itself in knots assessing risks, thereby encouraging its detractors to do likewise (7).

Take one example, the tragic deaths from gunshot wounds of four young soldiers at the Princess Royal Barracks in Deepcut, England, between 1995 and 2002. This has now led to, by one count, 17 separate inquiries, including those by members of parliament, the Ministry of Defence, the Official Review, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and a two-year independent review of the various re-investigations (8). No wonder the military feels paralysed.

Meanwhile, the West’s enemies in the ‘war on terror’ claim to embrace death. But suicide bombers are not warriors, proposes Coker, because they are not accountable to society. The problem here is to take them at face value, or to view them as that different to us in the first place. It is not just the Ummah that is not consulted nowadays, but the self-disenfranchised millions in Western democracies, too.

Maybe, in the absence of a cohering society, we are all afflicted by a form of nihilism to some degree. Coker cites Nate Fick in his memoir of the Second Gulf War exclaiming: ‘Death before dishonour. Marines tattoo it on their forearms, but these fuckers [the Iraqis] live it.’ (9) Other, more dispassionate observers, however, characterise self-styled jihadists as making a lot of noise but saying very little, and as having a passion for self-publicity.

Image influences reality, but is limited too, notes Coker. He sees how today’s ‘Jarheads’ are more likely to style themselves upon one-dimensional Hollywood heroes, hip hop and the lyrics of Marilyn Manson, than to have read or appreciated the psychological depth of Greek epic poetry, and bemoans the ‘bad ass’ influence within the US military of those for whom Tupac Shakur is a more familiar figure than Abraham Lincoln (10).

This is a lazy caricature, for while not describing Iraqis as ‘motherfuckers’ or themselves as ‘cool because we’re so good at blowing shit up’, it is the elites who are confused in the current period. They fail to lead for lack of purpose or belief in themselves. And contrary to Coker’s assertions, films do capture mythical dimensions and transcendence, as epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Pan’s Labyrinth prove.

He is also in danger of overstating the role of technology. Coker seems mesmerised by the world of cybernetic warriors and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs). Quite how much he knows of the ‘hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis’ is anybody’s guess. True, such developments impact on the conduct of war, but it is the loss of confidence in humanity that drives these developments, rather than the other way around.

Technology need not erode tradition and myth, as he suggests. If, for myth, we read a self-affirming narrative that inspires, instructs, enables and connects, as he proposes, then this necessitates the engagement of human passions. For tradition, we could prioritise the truth, as we see it, one that has to be fought for and engaged with, not just imparted. This is the business of politics, not technology or management.

‘Theory’, wrote Marx, ‘becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses’ (11). It is the inability of the elites today to appreciate the material power of ideas, let alone fight for them, that leave them unarmed, looking to technology or management to fill the gap. Ensuring ideas ‘grip the masses’, and become the truth, combining objective evidence with subjective will, is a labour of love entirely alien to them.

There is a real irony, then, in the US military having now introduced a ‘Warrior Ethos’ programme across its force, from basic training to the Army War College, to remind its personnel as to what is expected of them. Like ‘citizenship classes’ in the UK, this seems doomed to fail where it is most needed – at the level of lived ethos as opposed to paper exercises where, unlike on the battlefield, targets are readily met.

The British military is not immune to such instrumental trends. Reports highlight how a career in the Armed Forces ‘equips people with skills and qualifications that can be transferred to civilian life’ (12), or provide ‘an opportunity that may have been denied in civilian life’ (13). In general, the approach is one that emphasises what people can get out of the military, rather than what they will need to give.

Unsurprisingly, then, with such confusion at large across society, as well as embedded in the ranks of the military, Coker identifies how a ‘Therapy Culture’ further confuses matters. It acts as an ‘invitation to infirmity’, he proposes, noting ‘we heal psychic wounds when we are able to give meaning to our experiences. Clearly, if an experience is deemed ‘meaningless’, then ‘so is the pain and suffering that results’.

We are now a long way away from George C Scott’s portrayal of the great American General, George Patton. Talking about war at the start of the 1970 movie, he is depicted as confessing, ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life’. Nowadays, it is journalists who self-depict themselves as the real heroes of war, risking it all in search of ‘the truth’ and without killing anyone to boot (14).

There is no glory in killing but, as Plato reminds us, ‘What makes us human … is not nature or nurture but our capacity to rise above both’. If we do not want, as Nietzsche warned, to find the abyss looking into us when we look into it (15), then it is high time we were reminded of these few basic truths. The fight for truth and for freedom is essential, and Coker’s book goes some way towards highlighting this.

The Warrior Ethos: Military Culture and the War on Terror by Christopher Coker is published by Routledge.

(1) War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998, John Keegan, Hutchinson, 1998, p.2

(2) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard, Manchester University Press, 1984, p.xxiv

(3) Soldiering – The Military Covenant, Army Doctrine Publication Volume 5, 2000

(4) Informed Choice? Armed Forces Recruitment Practice in the United Kingdom, David Gee, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, 2007

(5) The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern Warfare, Paul Fussell, Scribner, 1991, p.24

(6) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricoeur, New Haven, 1970, p.329

(7) Informed Choice?, op. cit.

(8) Breaking the Covenant: Governance of the British Army in the Twenty-First Century, Anthony Forster, International Affairs, 2006, Vol.82, No.6, p.1048

(9) One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, Nathaniel Fick, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p.82

(10) Generation Kill: Living Dangerously on the Road to Baghdad with the Ultra-Violent Marines of Bravo Company, Evan Wright, Bantam 2004

(11) A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx, 1844

(12) Ministry of Defence Responds to Independent Report ‘Informed Choice?’ on Armed Forces Recruitment Practice in the UK, Government News Network, 7 January 2008

(13) House of Commons Defence Committee, Duty of Care (Vol.1), The Stationery Office 2005, p.5-6

(14) This Man’s Army: A Soldier’s Story from the Front Line of the War on Terrorism, Andrew Exum, Gotham, 2005, p.233

(15) Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

Between Iraq and a hard place
In an otherwise usefully myth-debunking work on risk management in an age of war, there is no admission that debate on the invasion must go beyond cost-benefit analysis.

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Upon reaching the final page of University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein’s latest book on risk, two reasonable assumptions can be drawn as to his political (he would probably say ethical) persuasions - first, that he opposed military intervention in Iraq in 2003, and, second, that he favours far-reaching international action on climate change.

These are both perfectly respectable, if debatable, positions. It seems, however, as if this distinguished-service professor of jurisprudence, like many others across the political spectrum nowadays, is rather loath to debate things. Rather, he is in search of a technical tool to decide matters for us. Sunstein has found this in risk management.

He starts off well enough, wanting to steer us on a course between the opposing perils of inaction and overreaction in the face of potentially catastrophic risks.

The US, unlike Europe, he proposes, has developed an exaggerated fear of terror attacks while simultaneously underestimating the consequences of global warming. Why is this?

His book, aimed at a wide audience, usefully debunks a number of myths along the way. American Republicans are not as intransigent as is often made out. He reminds readers that it was the US that originally led the charge on combating climate change, while Europeans developed the precautionary principle, invoked in going to war in Iraq.

As others have done before him, Sunstein shows how little logic there is in precaution. Variously used to justify both action and inaction, its consequences can be as uncertain as the uncertainties it is called upon to ward against. Hence, for Sunstein, war in Iraq to reduce the risk of terror would always create new risks that we would then have to live with.

But this is where the analysis of a Chicago Law School lawyer is exposed as being as limited as those of both the pro-war and anti-war lobbies. Iraq should have been about more than calculating risk-risk tradeoffs. Political principles, such as state sovereignty, were at stake too. And no risk-management process can defend these.

Unlike others who may read this book, I have no problem with the use of cost-benefit analysis or future discounting, although, as Sunstein accepts, neither is an exact science. However, when to the best of our abilities all the facts and pseudo-facts are in, decision-making in a democracy still remains a politically contested arena.

It is never just information that determines policy, but rather how that information is interpreted through particular outlooks. Hence, absence of evidence for weapons of mass destruction might mean that they are not there, or that they are extremely well hidden. Either way, facts become secondary to the framework we apply to the world.

Citing the work of Paul Slovic and others, Sunstein reveals his own preference for the influence of emotional and psychological factors over cultural and sociological ones. In this regard he is in tune with the times. A society that is little more than an aggregate of individuals has trouble conceptualising the import and impact of broader forces.

Thus it is almost as an afterthought that he notes in his conclusions: “Of course, well-organized groups, the media and political leaders have power to influence the underlying dynamics.” But there is precious little about these in the remaining pages. Perhaps they could serve as the subject for a future book?

In fact, Sunstein unconsciously reveals the answer to the problems he addresses very early on in the book. Whenever he worried as a child, his mother would ask: “What’s the worst that could happen?” Sunstein confides that “her confidence was contagious”. It is precisely societies without confidence that obsess about worst-case scenarios.

Worst-Case Scenarios, by Cass R. Sunstein is published by Harvard University Press.

Gordon Brown’s state of terror
The UK prime minister's vision for counterterrorism would involve reorganising the whole of society around precaution and fear.

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The British prime minister’s announcement of new security measures, and his promotion of wide-ranging new partnerships to root out extremism in the United Kingdom, confirms that counterterrorism is fast becoming one of the main organising principles of society in the twenty-first century.

Gordon Brown used the annual security statement to parliament to announce a wide range of new proposals for combating terrorism. In a packed House of Commons, he presented both hard measures – increased surveillance, checks, barriers and monitoring – as well as softer ones designed to win the hearts and minds of those who might be tempted by terror.

On the same day, a related article by him in the tabloid Sun newspaper, entitled ‘I need YOUR help to beat terrorists’, sought to drive the message home. This was, he proposed, ‘a generation-long challenge’, that would require a partnership ‘with everyone’. He concluded, for those who had still not absorbed the breadth or gravity of the situation, with a piece of over-inflated, pseudo-Churchillian prose exhorting us to ‘fight street by street, community by community and year by year’.

But his actual proposals look anything but brave or combative. Rather, they are a concession and a gift to the handful of nihilistic, self-styled, radical Islamists, fantasists and wannabe terrorists whose actual impact on British life, were it not for such grandiose and vacuous security responses, remains largely marginal.

In fact, Brown’s mantra on the need for ‘physical barriers’ is the perfect metaphor for the authorities’ inability to tackle this limited threat either intellectually or emotionally. Unwilling to believe that the nation is not about to crumble in a heap of cowering vulnerability, and unable to provide any grand vision of why British society is worth defending, Brown hides behind steel doors and blast-proof windows.

Last summer, after failed attempts by alleged al-Qaeda sympathisers to detonate gas canisters at a London nightclub and Glasgow Airport, the new prime minister, less than 24 hours in the post, asked the former head of defence intelligence and the Navy, Sir Alan West, to conduct a review of security in public places. Sir Alan’s report back, now in his new capacity as Labour minister for security, formed a key part of these proposals, arguing, amongst other things, for the designing, or redesigning, of public spaces and buildings – specifically airports, major railway stations, shopping centres and sports facilities – to deter future terrorists, or to mitigate their possible impact.

As I have argued on spiked before, this focus on managing risks, rather than projecting a sense of positive purpose, reflects a defeatist attitude that can only encourage those who would want to have a go. This outlook deflects society from clarifying and pursuing any grand broader aims and objectives (see Britain’s bunker mentality, by Bill Durodié). Turning ourselves into some kind of Fortress Britain offers an easy win to the small number of cack-handed idiots we truly confront. Bombing civilisation out of existence is an impossible task, but turning society in on itself has been achieved far too easily.

Now, according to the new proposals, planners and architects will be required to consider their designs from a counterterrorist perspective, relocating windows to reduce the risk should they shatter, placing obstacles on pavements to prevent vehicle-borne devices and not building underground car parks – a restriction guaranteed to warm the heart of many environmentalists. In fact, such buildings have successfully been designed previously. They were called castles. But whilst functional, they were never the emblems of a free and open society such as ours.

Such measures have not been forced upon us through the activities of hardened terrorists – the prime minister noted in his speech that ‘no major failures in our protective security have been identified’. It is the new ethos of precaution that has been adopted throughout government that is driving these proposals. In effect, this argues that in all instances of uncertainty or doubt, society should be reorganised along the lines of the worst that might happen, applying an ‘act first, find the evidence later’ principle of organisation.

Far from suffering from ‘a failure of imagination’, the criticism levelled at the US security services by the 9/11 Commission report, it would seem now that officials and politicians seem keen to imagine rather too much. ‘Terrorism can hit us anywhere from any place’, argued Brown in the Sun. As such limitless possibilities might mean attacks beyond the major public buildings and places his security minister’s report addressed, the prime minister, in his speech to the Commons, also offered ‘updates’, ‘more detailed advice’ and ‘greater vigilance’ for other, less prominent places, such as shops, schools, hospitals and places of religious worship.

This support will be backed up by guidance and training from 160 counter-terrorism advisers who will clearly have very busy jobs. To help them in their thankless task of spreading the Gospel of Doom across the entire nation, local authorities will also now be mandated, as part of their performance framework, to assess the measures they have taken to counter terrorism. Judging by the way such targets tend to be usurped by those who are called upon to enact them, it is likely that any minor act, such as watering the hanging flower baskets that adorn many city centres, will now be counted as a possible opportunity for deterring terror.

More insidiously, Brown hopes to engage young people in opposing so-called ‘extremist influences’ not just in schools and colleges - which, over recent years, have already been turned into social engineering outlets - but also ‘through the media, culture, sport and arts’. The British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sport England, Tate Britain and Arts Council England have already signed up to such initiatives.

Once upon a time, it was just the former education secretary, Charles Clarke, who thought that ‘education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’. Now, it appears, Gordon Brown and others are proposing we all go much further than that. Culture for its own sake, sport for its own sake and the arts for their own sake, without a good dose of anti-radicalisation thrown in for good measure, are all a bit dodgy, too, it would seem.

In short, British society is to be reorganised around precaution and the fear of terrorism. Everything we do, from the buildings we use to the ideas that are taught, will be informed by the risk of a handful of nihilistic nutters blowing us all to smithereens. Society will be built - often literally - in fear of the uncommon enemy rather than to further the common good.

A youth panel to advise the government was also announced. By this logic, it is the government that is in need of support. That may not be too far from the truth. Lord West has already had to make an embarrassing U-turn regarding his endorsement, or not, for longer periods of detention without trial. West explained away his unfortunate public disagreement with the prime minister as the act of a ‘simple sailor’.

While the UK government is keen on advising President Musharraf of Pakistan as to the need to end his state of emergency, the British authorities will nevertheless seek to use their own set of emergency powers to achieve the goal of holding suspects without charge for longer than is currently allowed. Without some kind of permanent emergency in Britain today, there would be little to talk about.

Homegrown nihilism - the clash within civilisations
Terrorism reflects a wide spectrum of causes and beliefs. Individuals who trained in camps in Afghanistan have different motivations from those who act out of a sense of vengeance in the Gaza strip. Some groups may hold global pretensions, but most have amore limited, regional focus. What it is that propels young men from Britain – individuals with no tangible connection to anywhere else much beyond these shores – to choose to be, or to support, terrorists?

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A cultural revolution at Tate Liverpool
Free of Western pessimism, the young Chinese artists on exhibition in Britain are witty and experimental.

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In the Gospel according to John, Pontius Pilate is held to have asked Jesus ‘What is truth?’ That question lies at the heart of a major UK exhibition of contemporary Chinese art – The Real Thing.

How do we know anything? The Chinese say that the height of Mount Everest is 8,848m, so when in 1999 an American GPS reading pegged it at 8,850m the radical artist Xu Zhen organised an expedition to the mountain to bring back the top part of the summit and put it on display in Shanghai, thereby restoring the mountain to its ‘real’ height. This provoked outrage among foreign correspondents in China, especially when experts confirmed that Everest was indeed shorter than had been assumed.

The pinnacle of Everest in a refrigerated cabinet, along with expedition maps, equipment and a video of the team sawing off the peak and sliding it down the mountain - together with before and after shots - are now on display for all to see in the exhibition at Tate Liverpool as ‘8848 Minus 1.86’.

Or are they? Was it all an elaborate hoax by citizens of a country that once banned irony? Who is having the sense of humour failure now? How tall is Everest really? How do we know? Does it change? Does it matter?

Chinese art, like China itself, is too vast to be contained or pigeonholed. This allows critics to project whatever they want on to it. If they see China to be out of control and rapacious then they are more likely to fall for the Everest scam. If they see it as suffering from the tremendous upheavals of rapid industrialisation then they will read misery and drudgery in the faces of factory workers who would otherwise have toiled in the fields.

What is the real thing when it comes to China? The co-curators of the exhibition should be commended for daring to ask the question, even if the answer is full of contradictions and ambiguities, ‘the real thing’ oscillating as it does between an aspiration towards authenticity on the one hand and the Coca-Cola slogan on the other - which is perceived by many as a metaphor for the dangers of unfettered consumerism.

Outside the exhibition, in Albert Dock itself, floats a 7m high model of Russian constructionist Vladimir Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the Third International’ of 1919. Except that Ai Weiwei has remodelled the replica as ‘Working Progress (Fountain of Light) 2007’, transforming it into an illuminated chandelier that glistens on the water to celebrate ‘the enlightened thinking behind Lenin’s theories’ - distinguishing these from the system that sent Weiwei’s own family into exile during the Cultural Revolution.

Inside the exhibition hall Qiu Zhijie also references the past in his ‘Railway from Lhasa to Kathmandu’. In 1863, a 33-year-old Indian, Nain Singh, was tasked by the Royal British Engineers to map out Tibet in precise 33inch strides whilst concealing his purpose from onlookers by using prayer beads to keep count. Qiu has completed the journey in reverse, wearing ankle chains separated by 33inches and collecting local artefacts along the way that he smelted into railway tracks now suspended in the air, to symbolise the completion of the highest railway in the world, which opened in 2006.

It is as if both these artists are pointing to the fact that neither the Soviet Union nor the British Empire quite completed their plans. Only now might it be possible to fulfil Tatlin’s vision. Ai Weiwei should know as he is working with the engineers Ove Arup to build a similar structure for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Qiu Zhijie states directly that the opening of the railway would have more impact on these remote parts than the British Empire or the Chinese imposition of sovereignty on Tibet in 1959.

Nearby Wang Wei has made a video of a walled space built by migrant labourers in Beijing as part of his exhibition in the 798 Space of the Dashanzi Art District. What is he saying?

Is this a new construction within an old building that finally gets pushed down by those that made it, representing the possible fragility and futility of the new China? Or is it an old construction (using recycled bricks that arrive on donkey-drawn carts) within a newer space (built of steel and concrete) even though the space itself is reclaimed from a former machine tool factory? Wang wanted to highlight the workers’ plight in a period of constant churning and the creation of new divisions, symbolised by the wall. But his views on this and what it means may be very different to ours.

The opening exhibit itself is a play on our sense of reality. Arriving from the brightly lit gallery you walk onto a grey and dreary factory floor, populated by vast grinding machines and heavy metal ring sections over 30cm thick and a metre in length. Zhuang Hui’s ‘Factory Floor’ is eerily silent. Where are the workers? And why have they abandoned their lunch on the floor? Based on his real experience of working in ‘The East is Red Tractor Factory’ the exhibit recalls an incident when workers rushed off to the aid of an injured comrade.

Except that the meticulously recreated walls, complete with graffiti and grime, as well as the machines, chains, steel sheets and drums are all made of polystyrene, carefully and painstakingly painted to appear like the real thing. Like Everest, it fools the casual observer, but unlike much contemporary art elsewhere in the world it makes no pretence to being something it is not on any supposedly deeper level.

Elsewhere in this collection of mostly young artists, all of whose work has been completed since 2000, a sense of mirth abounds. Wang Peng locked his friends and guests into a gallery space with a padlock for which he did not have the key. How would they cope? Now the film of their reactions is the exhibit, although they did not know this at the time. More amusingly maybe, Wang is also found being filmed walking through New York and Beijing trailing a ball of string that unravels from a hole in the back of his jacket. ‘Passing Through New York 1997’ and ‘Passing Through Beijing 2006’ explores the respective reactions of passers-by, traffic and officials as they literally get caught up in his journey. Is there a difference? You decide.

Some exhibits, such as Yang Shaobin’s series of paintings, ‘800 Metres’, examining workers in a coalmine, are undoubtedly bleaker (and weaker) than others. China suffered fatal accidents in 30 mines in 2005. No one should imagine that development has not come at a cost. But is it one worth paying? Certainly the presumption by the curators that Wang Gongxin’s exhibit ‘Our Sky is Falling!’ should be read as an indictment of change appears unduly negative: a family stare in wonder as their roof caves in - but their faces neither suggest fear nor anger.

Cao Fei’s video of workers at the Osram lighting factory in Foshan was previously exhibited as part of the China Power Station: Part 1 exhibition put on by the Serpentine Gallery at Battersea Power Station in 2006 and previously reviewed on spiked (see Reawakening the ‘yellow peril’ by Tristan Edmondson).

This beautiful work can be read in many different ways. The tedium of factory work may not appeal to the artistic sensitivities of some Western cultural commentators. An appreciation of a world without light seems beyond them. But the final part of Fei’s video, ‘Whose Utopia? What are you doing here?’ entitled ‘My Future is not a Dream’, suggests hope and aspiration for a bright future among those who, for now, toil to light up the new China.

In many ways ambition and ambiguity are the key themes running through this exhibition. The works themselves are not necessarily typical of the artists. As Simon Groom, head of exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, notes in his introduction to the catalogue: ‘[M]any commentators on Chinese art are often bewildered by the variety of work an artist is capable of producing; works that might appear to lack consistency or logical connection between them, so opening them to accusations of unevenness, or lack of authenticity.’

But why should these artists be consistent, and who demands authenticity? China is a dynamic, exciting and rapidly changing society. This art reflects that. In his introduction, Xu Zhen, the man who would move mountains, urges us ‘not to seek out a logic that’s not there’, as well as stating boldly that ‘We’ll make better exhibitions next year...’. In the last of his Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845, Karl Marx wrote; ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’. Replacing the word ‘philosophers’ with ‘Westerners’ in the above might provide an apt description for the ambitions behind The Real Thing.

In the run-up to its China Week in 2005, the BBC ran a series of interviews with young Chinese people. One of them, Jeff Qiang, remarked: ‘I know one day we will be the greatest power in the world. We all believe that.’ (2) The Real Thing suggests Chinese artists lack none of this self-belief and seem to be willing to explore almost anything, in any medium, including the meaning of meaning. Instead of trying to discover an authentic Chinese ‘voice’, Westerners would do well to be inspired by their ambition.

The Real Thing: contemporary art from China runs at Tate Liverpool until 10 June 2007 (further details and booking).
(1) China’s middle class revolution, BBC News, 11 October 2004

First published by spiked, 11 April 2007

Is London still stressed out about 7/7?
A survey claiming that 11 per cent of Londoners were ‘substantially stressed’ by the bombings raises more questions than answers.

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I have an interest to declare. My partner is one of those who lost a good friend in the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Miriam Hyman was on the bus at Tavistock Square when the youngest of the suicide bombers, Hasib Hussain, detonated his device about an hour after the three other attacks on the London Underground.

Is my partner affected? Undoubtedly. Bereavement is painful, and it is felt individually in a way that few others can appreciate. Loss hurts. And loss of a young life brought about by such an ultimately pointless act as 7/7 can hurt even more (1).

So does my partner (a) feel upset when reminded of what happened; (b) have repeated thoughts about what happened; (c) have difficulty concentrating; (d) have trouble falling asleep; or (e) feel irritable or angry? Definitely. Yet now, answering ‘yes’ to having experienced any of these feelings in the aftermath of 7/7 indicates the presence of ‘substantial stress’, according to a team of researchers at King’s College and University College, London, in a survey conducted shortly after the 2005 attacks and now published in full.

Never mind the fact that most of us could answer ‘yes’ to at least (c), (d) and (e) every now and then – the conclusions of the research team, as presented in the British Journal of Psychiatry and reported in the Sun newspaper yesterday, are held to indicate that 11 per cent of the British population have suffered from persistent and substantial stress as a result of 7/7 (2).

The researchers first telephoned 1,010 Londoners 11 to 13 days after the 7/7 bombings and asked them about their feelings and thoughts; they then carried out a follow-up survey of 574 Londoners between seven and eight months after the bombings. In the first survey, they found that around a third of respondents were suffering from ‘substantial stress’ as a result of the bombings; by the time of the second survey, that had fallen to around 11 per cent of Londoners.

There seems to be a definitional problem in some of the language used. How upset does one need to be in order to be suffering from ‘substantial stress’? Using non-specific terms to explain an ill-defined concept like ‘stress’ is a formula that allows one to conclude pretty much anything, according to prevailing prejudices. The researchers themselves are not unaware of this problem. In their paper they argue: ‘It is reasonable to question whether our measure of substantial stress might have produced an artificially inflated prevalence estimate.’ (3) Tucked away in the ‘Limitations’ section of the paper, this caveat did not make the headlines.

If respondents answered yes to any of the questions (a) to (e) listed above, then they were judged to be suffering from ‘substantial stress’. Most said yes to the first question: ‘Do you feel upset when something reminds you of what happened?’ If you remove the yes responses to this question from the overall survey, then the percentage number of those who suffered from persistent and substantial stress falls from 11 per cent of the population to five per cent of the population.

It is somewhat surprising that the researchers, among the myriad questions they asked, did not enquire about the influence of media images and reporting of 7/7 on people’s views of the terrorist event. We are informed about the respondents’ age, gender, social class, working status, residential location, housing tenure, ethnicity, religion, income and parental status, but no mention is made of what media they follow and what kind of media images and claims they consumed post-7/7.

Those who have a link to individuals directly affected by the bombing will know that the constant reappearance of references to the attacks in the news, and particularly images of the blown-up bus (the other Underground incidents did not provide a similarly iconic image), often reminds them of what happened and leaves them feeling upset.

Feelings and perceptions are usually a poor guide for social research. For example, numerous surveys of both ordinary people and public figures in the US have consistently shown a high degree of expectation that there will be a terrorist attack in the coming months; such an attack has not come to pass. This shows that expectations can be wrong – and policy built on misplaced expectations can be disastrous.

As I have argued elsewhere, as more money has been spent on the ‘war on terror’, and as more measures are put in place to protect people from an allegedly big terrorist threat, the more people’s awareness about terrorism is raised and the more ‘stressed’ they seem to feel about it (4). Many in the British media and the authorities seem loathe to ‘let go’ of the 7/7 bombings, instead revisiting them as symbols of evil and as a justification for various legal measures. This institutionalisation of 7/7 and its effects no doubt has an impact on how people feel about the event. Could it be that society itself is prolonging the impact of terrorism on the population, by elevating terrorism to the main issue of the day and working from the presumption that it will have a long-lasting and damaging emotional impact on those who experience it?

At the same time, as the sociologist Frank Furedi has pointed out, people’s individual identities are increasingly fragile today. There is a widespread assumption that people are vulnerable and open to suffering from stress and other mental problems (5). It is notable, for instance, that those who took part in the 7/7 stress surveys were older and wealthier than non-respondents, and were less likely to have previously reported being stressed.

No doubt, some affected by 7/7 will have needed the support of psychiatrists to come to terms with their loss. But the growing presumption among professionals is that significant numbers of us have been affected somehow – a presumption which, sadly, this research will have done little to question. Ironically, those truly needing support may find it more difficult to receive it, given that we now have a situation where everyone involved in an incident is encouraged to seek counselling.

Professor Simon Wessely, a leading and insightful psychiatrist at King’s College London, tells people that whatever they do after an emergency, they should not give their name to the media. Otherwise they will never be able to ‘let go’ as the various anniversaries of the incident will bring a fresh round of calls to remember and reflect. Maybe we could add that nor should you give your name to ‘boffins’; certainly when research is carried out along these kinds of uncritical lines, the benefits are far from obvious.

(1) See The truth about 7/7 – it was meaningless, by Brendan O’Neill

(2) ‘Over 10% suffering 7/7 stress’, The Sun, 2 April 2007

(3) ‘Enduring consequences of terrorism: 7-month follow-up survey of reactions to the bombings in London on 7 July 2005’ by Rubin, G.J., Brewin, C.R., Greenberg, N., Hughes, J.H., Simpson, J. and Wessely, S., British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol.190, pp.350-356, 2007

(4) Panic in the Streets, New Humanist, May 2004

(5) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age by Frank Furedi, Routledge, 2003

First published by spiked, 3 April 2007

Resilience in the face of terrorism
A video podcast of a lecture on the roots of modern terrorism and the issue of risk.

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First published by University of Warwick Business School, 9 March 2007

Global terrorism: what should we really fear?
The immediate problem posed by terrorists remains extremely small. But there remains the far larger problem of defining who we are, what values we uphold, and where we intend to go in the twenty-first century.

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First published by Britain Today, 1 March 2007

PRESENTATIONS
List of Bill's presentations

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2008

China’s role in Africa
Battle for China Conference
Norton Rose, London, 12 July 2008

The Sociological basis for Trust
Trust in Me
Royal Institution, London, 30 June 2008

Risk Management in a Post-Political Age
Police Service of Northern Ireland C3 Conference
La Mon Hotel and Country Club, Belfast, 1 April 2008

Home Grown Nihilism
What is a Time of Terror?
University of Antwerp, Belgium, 29 February 2008

Obsessions with the Unknown
Intelligence, Evidence and the Construction and Management of Risk
Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, 6 February 2008

When Health Scares become our Daily Meal
The Amigo Society Lunchtime Talk
Radisson SAS EU Hotel, Brussels, 15 January 2008

2007

Home Grown Nihilism
UCL Centre for Security and Crime Science Seminar
University College London, London, 4 December 2007

What are the Barriers to Science in the 21st Century?
Battle of Ideas Conference
Royal College of Art, London, 28 October 2007

Iraq – What Next?
Battle of Ideas Conference
Royal College of Art, London, 27 October 2007

The Domestic Security Environment
The Future of British Defence Policy
Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, 13 October 2007

This House Believes that Current US Foreign Policy Cannot Win the War on Terror
Durham Union
University of Durham, 12 October 2007

Terrorism: How worried should we be?
Brighton Salon
The Terraces, Brighton, 10 October 2007

Chemical and Biological Weapons as Public Concerns: The Role of the Media
Countering Chemical and Biological Weapons Proliferation
Wilton Park, West Sussex, 30 September 2007

Science and Risk
Aerosols 2007
Manchester Central, Manchester, 20 September 2007

Misunderstanding the Meaning of Contemporary Terrorism
Interrogating Terror Conference
University of Brighton, 12 September 2007

Addressing Risk Perceptions: the Role for Industry
From SMEs to Multinationals: Trends, Best Practices and Future Perspectives
A.I.S.E. General Assembly, Amsterdam, 14 June 2007

Security and Government
Britain and Security
Chatham House, London, 13 June 2007

The Broader Cultural Context
Terrorism: Is Our Way of Life Under Threat?
Dauntsey’s School, Wiltshire, 12 June 2007

The Science of Risk
Cheltenham Science Festival
Town Hall, Cheltenham, 8 June 2007

Domestic Terrorism
Parliamentary Inquiry into Tackling Terrorism
Committee Room 15, Houses of Parliament, London, 5 June 2007

Home-Grown Nihilism: The Clash Within Civilisations
Terrorism in the UK: A workshop on Radicalisation
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 2 May 2007

The Concept of Risk
Inaugural Design Against Crime Lecture
University of the Arts, London, 24 April 2007

Science and the Perception of Risk
The Office of Science and Innovation
Department of Trade and Industry, London, 16 March 2007

Resilience in the Face of Terrorism
Warwick Business School Lecture
The University of Warwick, Warwick, 9 March 2007

What Science and Technology can Contribute to the War on Terror
King’s College London, Maxwell Society Conference
Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, 3 March 2007

Towards Strategic Risk Management
Department of Work and Pensions
Holiday Inn, Doncaster, 27 February 2007

Misunderstanding the Meaning of Contemporary Terrorism
Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation Seminar
London School of Economics, London, 20 February 2007

Resilience in the Face of Terrorism
School of Psychology Visiting Seminar Series
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, 6 February 2007

National Resilience in Crises
Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior National Security Officers
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 19 January 2007

2006

Understanding the Meaning of Contemporary Terrorism
London in a Time of Terror: the Politics of Response
Birkbeck College, University of London, London, 8 December 2006

Looking to the Future
Terrorism and Extremism Conference
The British Library, London, 7 December 2006

Radicalisation
Plymouth International Studies Centre Seminar
The University of Plymouth, UK, 17 November 2006

Are We Paralysed by Risk Aversion?
Battle of Ideas Conference
The Royal College of Art, London, 29 October 2006

Presumptions on Radicalisation
Understanding Islam in the 21st Century
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK, 26 October 2006

Building and Maintaining Public Resilience
Social and Psychological Effects of Radiological Terrorism
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, Bratislava, Slovakia, 24 October 2006

Conspiracy Theories and the Politics of Fear
Port Talk
Goodenough College, London, 19 October 2006

Risk Management and the Politics of Fear
SKYDD International Security Conference
Stockholm International Conference Centre, Sweden, 20 September 2006

Towards Strategic Risk Management
The Institute of Risk Management Risk Forum
Keele University, 19 September 2006

Celebrating Development
British Dam Society Conference
Durham Castle, 7 September 2006

New Security Research
British Association Festival of Science
University of East Anglia, 4 September 2006

Risk Management
International Mine Action Training Centre
Nairobi, Kenya, 9 August 2006

Risk Society and Resilience
Soliswiss Board Conference
Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland, 15 June 2006

Limitations of Risk Management Approaches to Fighting Terrorism
ACPO/Home Office Joint Research Conference: Organised Crime
Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK, 8 June 2006

Public Panic and Morale: Lessons From the Blitz and Other Disasters
Fear – An Interdisciplinary Conference
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 19 May 2006

Expert Panel Meeting on Alcohol Consumption in Europe
The Weinberg Group
Brussels, Belgium, 9 May 2006

Paralyzing Development Through Public Engagement and Risk Communication: The Case of Hydro-Electric Dams
Environmental Hazards and Risk Communication Conference
The Royal Society, London, 20 April 2006

Terrorism Research Update
Exclusive Analysis Briefing
Lombard Street, London, 31 March 2006

Pathways to Radicalisation – The Wider Social and Cultural Context
Asylum and Security Conference
The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 27 March 2006

Understanding Scientific Risk in Context
Social and Ethical Issues Concerning Protocells: Key Questions and Answers
Palazzo Franchetti, Venice, Italy, 16 March 2006

Terrorism in Europe and the World
Young Fabians Seminar
Italian Embassy, London, 9 March 2006

Limitations of Public Involvement in Infrastructure Development
Dams and Sustainable Development Conference
Institution of Civil Engineers, London, 21 February 2006

Maintaining “Business as Usual” – A New Mind-set
Aviation Resilience in the 21st Century – Prevention, Response and Recovery
Royal Aeronautical Society, London, 9 February 2006

The Limitations of Contemporary Counter-Terrorism
The Risk and Security Management Forum
Union Jack Club, London, 2 February 2006

Was 9/11 a Conspiracy?
Oxford Union Forum
University of Oxford, 23 January 2006

Terrorism in Perspective
Emerging Markets, Trade and Political Risk 2006
Whitehall, London, 19 January 2006

Limitations of Risk Management in Dealing with Disaster
Department of Defence Management and Security Analysis – Research Seminar
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK, 12 January 2006

2005

Business Continuity – Beyond Risk Management
Survive 16th Annual Conference
Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London, 17 November 2005

Responses to Asymmetric Attacks
Transnational Terrorism Project
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 14 November 2005

The Challenge Within
Tackling Organised Crime in Partnership
Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London, 1 November 2005

What Next for … Anti-Terrorism?
Battle of Ideas Conference
The Royal College of Art, London, 29 October 2005

Headline Debate
The Royal Institution of Great Britain
Piccadilly, London, 27 October 2005

Defence and Development: A Special Role for the UK and France?
Corporate Responsibility in International Development
École Polytechnique, Paris, 22 October 2005

Perception of Threats and Real Resilience
Sveriges Säkerhetsting
Eskilstuna, Sweden, 11 October 2005

Risk in Perspective: Toxic Policies
CTPA Annual Business Forum
The Grove, Chandler’s Cross, UK, 10 October 2005

International Terrorism: Implications and Directions
Terrorism, Tourism and Crisis Management
Visit Scotland, Edinburgh, 7 October 2005

Ethics versus Experimentation: Scientific Advance in a Culture of Precaution
Social and Ethical Issues in Protocell Research: Assessing Risk and Responsibilities in an Uncertain World
Venice International University, Italy, 2 October 2005

Addressing the Wider Community
Understanding Islam in the 21st Century
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, UK, 29 September 2005

Terrorism and Community Relations
Institute of Ideas – Health Forum
St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, 14 September 2005

Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
Huntingdon Life Sciences
Cambridgeshire, UK, 1 September 2005

Contribution of the Science and Technology Community in Responding to Terrorist Threats
ESRC Technology, Governance and Security Workshop
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 19 July 2005

Social Resilience
Public Sector Security Conference
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 18 July 2005

Exaggerating Risks and Missing the Real Threat
Emergency Planning Society Annual Conference 2005
Harrogate, UK, 29 June 2005

Suicide Bombers vs Sexual Abusers: A Battle of Depravity or Western Fixations?
The Barbarisation of Warfare
University of Wolverhampton, UK, 28 June 2005

Fearing Terror
The Hive
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 18 May 2005

Understanding Hazard and Risk to Build Confidence and Trust
NCV/NVZ Annual General Meeting
Utrecht, Netherlands, 11 May 2005

The Concept of Risk
Health, Foreign Policy and Security
Nuffield Trust, London, 6 May 2005

Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
NETCU Stakeholders Conference
Cambridgeshire, UK, 26 April 2005

Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
IAT Congress
Glasgow, UK, 17 March 2005

How Policy Makers Approach the Public’s Resilience
Resilience
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, University of Kent, 26 February

Opening Remarks
Homeland Security
SMi, London, UK, 23 February 2005

Terrorism and the Politics of Fear
Perse School
Cambridge, UK, 11 February 2005

International Terrorism
Surrey Emergency Services Major Incidents Committee
Kempton Park Racecourse, Surrey, UK, 9 February 2005

The Limitations of Risk Management in Dealing with Disaster
Social Contexts and Responses to Risk Conference
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, 29 January 2005

The Domestic Management of Terrorist Attacks
Anti-Terrorism, Media and Publics
Regents College, London, UK, 14 January 2005

2004

Resilient or Vulnerable? The Consequences for UK Security of Assumptions about Human Behaviour in a Disaster
British International Studies Association Conference
University of Warwick, UK, 20 December 2004

Chemical Reactions
Royal Institution of Great Britain
Piccadilly, London, 23 November 2004

Is Real Resilience Attainable?
Wide Area Crises – Resilience and Recovery in the 21st Century
SMi, London, UK, 15 November 2004

Facing the Possibility of Bioterrorism
VIIth International CBRN Defence Symposium
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 12 November 2004

Animal-Rights Terrorism and the Demise of Political Debate
Annual General Meeting
Coalition for Medical Progress, Wellcome Trust, 6 October 2004

Nanotechnology and Risk Assessment
Labour Party Conference Fringe Meeting
King’s Hotel, Brighton, 28 September 2004

Risk Assessment and UK Policy
Science and Society in the Face of the New Security Threats
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, University of Cambridge, 27 September 2004

What can the Science and Technology Community Contribute?
Science and Technology Policies for the Anti-Terrorism Era
NATO Advanced Research Workshop, University of Manchester, 13 September 2004

The Domestic Context of the War Against Terror
International Intelligence Directors Course
Defence Intelligence and Security Centre, Chicksands, Bedfordshire, 5 July 2004

Fear and Self-Loathing in the West
Ideologies of Anti-Americanism: Cross-cultural Perspectives
Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford, 12 June 2004

Prioritising Chemicals for Attention: Risk versus Hazard
REACH: A Science Based Approach
Scientific Alliance, London, 3 June 2004

Transport/Commuter Security – Two Months on from Madrid
Homeland Security and Resilience
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 19 May 2004

Terror in an Age of Insecurity
The Age of Insecurity
The Institute for Cultural Research, London, 15 May 2004

Government and Media Influences
Perception Gap: Public attitudes to security and the impact on corporate decision-making
Demos, London, 11 May 2004

The Costs of Precautionary Chemicals Regulation
Science and Politics – Special Symposium
Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Prague, 19 April 2004

How Accountable should Scientists be to the Public?
Oxford Literary Festival
Town Hall, Oxford, 27 March 2004

The Precautionary Principle: Is it Killing Innovation?
An Apology for Capitalism?
Economist Conference, Whitehall, London, 20 February 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Modern World?
The Way We Live Now
Fabian Society Conference, Imperial College, London, 7 February 2004

2003

General Trends
Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age
King’s College London, 22 November 2003

Plenary Session
Countering Terrorism: The Experience of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London, 22 October 2003

The Cultural Background to Risk Aversion and its Consequences for Resilience
Global Security and Resilience Symposium
Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, 9 October 2003

Chemical and Biological Weapons
Global Public Affairs Conference
Dorchester Hotel, London, 3 October 2003

9/11 – Two Years On
Liberal Democrat Party Conference Fringe Meeting
Hilton Metropole Hotel, Brighton, 21 September 2003

Emergent Concepts of Risk
Risk in its Social Context
University of Plymouth, 9 September 2003

Political Stability: Impacts on Global Business
Institute for Practitioners in Credit Insurance and Surety
University of East London, 18 August 2003

European Chemicals Policy
World Congress on Risk
Brussels, Belgium, 24 June 2003

The Challenge of Terrorism
World Congress on Risk
Brussels, Belgium, 23 June 2003

Peer Review and Public Experts
Ideas, Intellectuals and the Public
Goodenough College, London, 22 June 2003

Chemical and Biological Weapons
Festival of Science
Cheltenham, England, 8 June 2003

Closing Remarks
Communicating the War on Terror
Royal Institution of Great Britain, Piccadilly, London, 6 June 2003

Public Dialogue in Science
Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology
Portcullis House, Westminster, London, 13 May 2003

Risk and Chemicals
Stockholm Network Conference
Geneva, Switzerland, 7 May 2003

Cultural and Psychological Aspects of the War on Terror
Psychological Aspects of Terrorism and Martyrdom
University of Ulster, Derry, 30 April 2003

Bio-Terrorism
Genes and Society Conference
Battersea Arts Centre, London, 26 April 2003

Genetically Modified Crops: Time to Say Yes?
Genes and Society Conference
Battersea Arts Centre, London, 25 April 2003

The Challenge of Terrorism
SMi Homeland Security Conference
The Hatton, London, 20 February 2003

2002

Can We Trust the Experts?
International Book Festival
Edinburgh, 18 August 2002

The Loss of Trust
Science, Medicine and Expertise in Contemporary Society
Oxford Union, 15 June 2002

Getting Regulation Right: The Uses and Limits of the Precautionary Principle
21st Century Trust
Merton College, Oxford, 7 April 2002

The Demoralization of Science
Demoralization: Morality, Authority and Power
University of Cardiff, 5 April 2002

The New Morality of Risk Awareness – A Case Study
Medical Research Council – Institute for Environment and Health
Leicester, 21 March 2002

Public Health Communication and ‘New Terrorism’
NATO Parliamentary Assembly Sub-Committee on the Proliferation of Military Technology
King’s College London, 4 March 2002

2001

The True Cost of Precautionary Chemicals Regulation
Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
London, 19 July 2001

First published by -, 21 January 2007

A battle of ideas in which understanding lies among the casualties
As Paul Wilkinson's book, Terror v Democracy illustrates, what analysts do best today is to describe what, when and where events happen. What they are weakest at is explaining why.

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This book is full of contradictions. That should be no surprise. Almost 100 years ago, in a short essay on terrorism, Leon Trotsky noted how the “bought-and-paid-for moralists” of the establishment would “make solemn declarations about the ‘absolute value’ of human life” before sending millions to war to defend the “nation’s honour or the monarch’s prestige”. The contradictions here are just as glaring.

“The new US strategic doctrine of pre-emptive attack used by the Bush administration is in fact extremely dangerous”, says Paul Wilkinson. The word “extremely” is italicised in the original in the manner beloved by conspiracy theorists. Forty pages later, he suggests “the best form of prevention is to intercept and pre-empt”.

Likewise, Wilkinson proposes to champion Thomas Jefferson’s principle of free speech “that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself”. This freedom lasts a page before he indicates that “the more responsible mass media organisations” favour “voluntary self-restraint”.

The real weakness, though, is one shared by the authors of the Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 . That is, that what analysts do best today is to describe what, when and where events happen. What they are weakest at is explaining why.

Hence this book lists organisations and chronicles events and legislative responses. But without understanding why such incidents occur, there is little hope of precluding them from happening again. Wilkinson talks of a “battle of ideas” but fails to flesh it out.

The language is loose, unbefitting of a book with academic pretensions, with talk of “fanatics”, “carnage”, “godfathers of terrorism” and “Al Qaeda’s congenital tendency to engage in mass killing”. Weak or absent references suggest this to be more of a rant than an insightful analysis.

On several occasions Wilkinson suggests that terrorists seek to create “a climate of fear”. He seems unaware of the fact that this pre-dated 9/11 quite significantly. In that regard, Trotsky also had it right when he indicted any terrorist act as inadmissible “because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness” as well as breeding disillusionment and apathy. Today we might be able to say precisely the same things about governments that continually seek to bypass the people in the name of security.

Terrorism v Democracy: The Liberal State Response, by Paul Wilkinson is published by Routledge.

First published by Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 January 2007

The government is for turning
As U-turn follows U-turn, New Labour is looking more and more like a party devoid of direction.

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Another day, another U-turn. Less than a week into the New Year, a UK government minister has been told to ‘get back in your box and stay there’ by his own boss after criticising the airline industry. But this kind of thing is nothing new for a government that doesn’t know whether it is coming or going.

The minister, Ian Pearson, responsible for climate change, had very publicly rebuked a number of airlines for not taking seriously enough what he considers to be their responsibilities in relation to climate change. In an interview published in the Guardian, Pearson accused Michael O’Leary, chief executive of the budget airline Ryanair, of being ‘the irresponsible face of capitalism’, for describing a proposed EU carbon trading scheme as ‘just another tax’.

He also criticised American airlines for not wanting to have anything to do with the scheme and added that even British Airways were ‘only just playing ball’. But the following day Mr Pearson was severely reprimanded by his boss, David Miliband, for speaking out of turn. According to a senior adviser quoted in The Times (London) that day, ‘this is not how you make government policy’, and she indicated that in future Mr Miliband would lead the discussions on the carbon trading scheme.

It wasn’t the only U-turn that day. Elsewhere in The Times, it was reported that Tony Blair had questioned plans by his ministers to ban the use of ‘human-animal’ cloned embryos.

The proposed ban on fusing human DNA with animal eggs, which could provide experimental material for research into diseases like motor neurone disease and Alzheimer’s, had been criticised by leading scientists in The Times the previous day. The Department of Health had only just set out their proposals to introduce restrictions in a White Paper published in December, and officials had privately advised scientists that their applications to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to conduct such research were unlikely to be successful.

But, the scientists, including Professor Ian Wilmut - who led the team that created Dolly the cloned sheep - argued that Caroline Flint, the public health minister, and Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, had been ill-advised. Their decision appeared to be based on a small number of unrepresentative responses from interested parties answering a call for public consultation. This went on to generate adverse newspaper headlines referring to ‘frankenbunnies’ and ‘moo-tants’. Now it appears as if Tony Blair is prepared to overrule his ministers by indicating that the law should be amended.

What both these instances reveal is not hard-nosed commercial pressures winning out over vacuous rhetoric about environmental awareness and scientific ethics, even if David Miliband and Tony Blair did baulk at the economic implications of what some of their more zealous ministers were proposing. After all, slapping down the airline industry and British science is quite a lot for one day.

Rather, the fact that such senior-level decisions were reversed within 24 hours is more significant. It reveals a government whose left hand doesn’t know, or does not agree with, what its right hand is doing - a government increasingly organised around endless streams of fleeting and reversible policies rather than a small number of firm and enduring principles.

New Labour was forged in the politics of pragmatism when Tony Blair announced his government would be the people’s servant upon being elected in 1997. But his claim sought to conceal the real and growing disconnection between the party and its traditional base. Far from being popular, politicians now needed to be populist. And policy based on unchallenged prejudice and emotion does not provide a stable base to build from.

More bereft of a coherent ideology than any political party before it, New Labour also came to be dependent on a growing army of privately appointed experts and cronies. Policy led by consultants and focus groups, and an obsession with new initiatives and measurable targets, hampered its ability to define an agenda. What one group of experts or consumers might come up with on a Monday was readily undone by what another group (or even the same group) thought on a Tuesday.

Nor are these inherently contradictory tendencies restricted to government circles either. For example, last week, Derbyshire Constabulary refused to release photographs of two escaped, convicted murderers on the grounds of having to protect their human rights. Greater Manchester police issued them instead, after the Lord Chancellor had intervened, on the grounds of protecting public safety.

Over the coming months we can expect many more policy U-turns and confusions such as these, as the plethora of incoherent policy initiatives produced over the last decade, and still emanating from various quarters, are increasingly doomed to clash. What we are witnessing is a government that has no strategy or guiding vision (hence Gordon Brown’s growing obsession with the need to find one), and policymakers and institutions that have no sense of purpose or direction around which to frame their ideas and decisions.

First published by spiked, 8 January 2007

In Conversation with Robyn Williams
Are London bombers more likely to be hardened, trained members of terrorist squads or misguided young men on eccentric missions?

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in conversation: interview on ABC Radio National, Australia

Robyn Williams: Tonight In Conversation is about young men as suicide bombers. Are they focused and trained militants, or mixed up kids trying to make a meaning out of nothingness? My guest is Professor Bill Durodie, who made something of a splash at the recent BA Festival, that’s British Association Festival of Science in Norwich in England. Now, he accepts that there are indeed hardened militants among the disaffected, but plenty of lost kids as well, not really connected to any set like Al Qaeda.

Bill Durodie: I think it’s fairly clear that there’s a spectrum of people in relation to terrorism. Some of them have indeed been to camps in Afghanistan and been trained, others are typically people in the Gaza Strip who have a personal grievance because of the tragic loss of a loved one and therefore they see it as some kind of revenge. But increasingly, particularly in the United Kingdom, we’ve seen essentially loners and small groups where it’s very hard to detect any organisational affiliation prior to their trying to, or actually, detonating some kind of device.

And in that regard, when we look into the background of these people what we find is on the whole, very well brought up, well educated, fee-paying public schools, universities like the London School of Economics and therefore no obvious signs of what some people presume to be the risk factors that shape a terrorist. They weren’t educated in a madrasa, there’s no evidence of great piety, of being well versed in the Koran, and many of them keep their grievances largely to themselves before they then commit suicide. Therefore it begs the question as to what it is that really shapes and drives these people? And the way I see it is that in some respects they are fantasists searching for some kind of identity amongst what’s going on out there in the world.

Robyn Williams: So something happens to them, they’ve got a kind of misalliance, some personal grievance, a sense of failure, a certain sense of something missing and then they become the sort of people who think nothing really of ending their lives and doing so on a spectacular basis. That seems to be an extraordinary transition though.

Bill Durodie: That’s true and obviously fortunately it’s not the majority of people that are like that. I think we need to be clear by the way that this sense of alienation and lacking in identity and searching for meaning affects most of us in contemporary society. Since the end of the Cold War there is no great political divide in the world between a socialist left and a free market right. And also, we’ve seen social networks fragmenting from families, communities, neighbourhoods. People don’t participate in general elections, we’re all a bit disconnected from the world that we live in, we no longer participate in the formal process of decision-making in society and our informal networks have all been severely eroded. And the consequence of that is in some ways we are a generation of people searching for meaning and identity.

Now within that generation of course not all of them will become radical nihilists and some will go into all sorts of bizarre hobbies to try and affirm who they are and what they do. Others will discover illness and stress within their lives and have fantasy illnesses that they shape their lives around. And a small minority, no doubt they have some connection of some kind, possibly to Islamic extremism or they see it as a ready model for them to identify with despite the fact that their parents weren’t particularly devout Muslims at all. They may end up in that kind of avenue but it is a tiny, tiny minority and how to identify those – really my suggestion is that you can’t – we just are going to have to learn to accept that we now live in a world – and we will continue to live in a world so long as we are unable to define what it’s for and where it’s heading – whereby a tiny minority of individuals will lash out in a form of extreme rage against a world that they feel totally disconnected from.

Robyn Williams: I’m reminded somewhat of a section in The Tipping Point, you know Gladwell’s book where he describes teenage violence being completely unknown on a particular Pacific Island. Then it happened twice and there was a huge outbreak – in other words it became almost a fashion and it seems from what you’re saying that because this sort of terrorism is so commonplace, people can opt for it because, well, it’s there, it’s really almost its own kind of recruiting drive. Is that fair?

Bill Durodie: I think that is fair. There’s a huge amount of copycat events occurring that we can see. You have to ask yourself where did the – for instance, bombers in London, in the summer of 2005 – get the idea of bombing the Underground from? Well actually if you look at the intervening years between 9/11 and then you’ll find a number of BBC drama documentaries about terrorist attacks on the London Underground. You could argue that the BBC has been radicalising individuals and fermenting terrorism, or at least glorifying it to some extent, if you were the Home Secretary and wanted to ban them.

Fortunately I think it is worth reminding people that this is a very, very rare occurrence. You know we are still more likely to suffer an unfortunate accident on the way to the airport in our cars than we are ever to encounter some kind of terrorist eventuality. And even those car accidents are few and far between. So the problem really is when we start reorganising our lives around these extreme, rare, and very unfortunate events. And I see another problem, by the way, that it’s not so much what is it that makes radical alienated youth, but the real crises is what’s got wrong with the adults in society and the elite? You know it’s their absence of any sense of purpose and vision for society, any direction that they’re providing society with that lends itself to people, you know young people, trying to look for that somewhere else.

Robyn Williams: Idealism really.

Bill Durodie: Well we all need some ideals and I think to some extent to live our lives by. In some ways we live a very empty life nowadays and I’m not saying that from a religious perspective necessarily, I think there’s a crises of secularism that needs to be explored and investigated. And it is possible for instance to shape a life around a positive sense of humanity and human achievements and where we’ve got to today, and wanting to go further. And the divide I see emerging in the world today is between people who are positive and ambitious in that sense, and others who are very nihilistic, very pessimistic, who suggest that humanity has destroyed the planet, is destroying itself, and to be honest is a plague that ought to be destroyed. And believe me there are senior academics that I could name who write that kind of stuff.

Robyn Williams: Go on, name them.

Bill Durodie: Well they would be easy for your listeners to find.

Robyn Williams: Indeed. Going back to what you’re saying about risk, I was fascinated the other day to hear something on the BBC concerning the fear of paedophiles; occasionally of course, it’s a real, real thing that there is a nasty man in a coat and there is a poor vulnerable child. However for every one of those – apparently now that everyone drives their kids to school, there are 300 fatal accidents – so for each one child that you’re saving from the paedophile, 300 are dying in car crashes.

Bill Durodie: I think that’s catastrophic and I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. In this country there is legislation about to go through Parliament in the autumn basically asking that any adult that works in any capacity with children will need to be vetted for their criminal records. And we’re not just talking teachers here, we’re not just talking music tutors, or athletics coaches, we’re talking cleaners in hospitals, canteen staff in schools, young adults who are helping teachers look after young children. To the point where you ask the question, well, how long is it going to be before a mother taking a few children to a football match on a Saturday has to be vetted because she’s taking children that aren’t her own?

I think it’s a very insidious culture and it’s not simply the cost to society that worries me in terms of economic cost. There are going to be continuous and pointless records being checked but it’s more the social cost – we are teaching our children that we do not trust one another as adults and I cannot think of a more perverse and corrosive message to be sending to society.

Robyn Williams: Going back to the terrorists and Heathrow, an airport I will avoid at all costs but sometimes I can’t, given the fact that there are now gigantic inspections of security and that the lipstick syndrome and the gel syndrome and all the rest of it. How do you assess the worth of that kind of elevation of security check?

Bill Durodie: It is the equivalent of putting a totem pole up in your village green hoping that it will ward away evil spirits. The reality is it’s largely pointless, people in the security world know that it’s largely pointless, they are doing it to be seen to be doing something because they have got a false impression of how the public would behave were something to go wrong. The presumption from officials is that if something goes wrong the public will never forgive them. However what we saw in London after the attacks last summer is that most members of the general public were determined to get to work the next day and the British government did not collapse.

So what we have now is a series of measures that hamper the airline industry, where we are effectively doing the terrorist job for them, which are entirely pointless. We know that determined individuals will be able to get through no matter how many checks are introduced. Indeed many of the checks have been introduced on the passenger side but there’s not half that level of security airside in terms of staff that service planes, or people that put catering onto planes. So there is always a weak link in the chain. We are going to have to get used to this and accept that as long as we live in a society that doesn’t know where it’s going, as I said earlier, there will be a few nihilists who will lash out against it. It’s sad, it’s annoying, we need to deal very hard with those people when we find them but at the same time we must not allow ourselves to reorganise society around them.

Robyn Williams: But it’s very much a legalistic society, someone always has to be to blame, you see this with doctors. I’m not talking about the grotesque medical maniac who is hurting people, I’m talking about genuine mistakes. There is always a legal redress – is that not yet another example where it’s always got to be someone’s fault and you need to avoid the case rather than look at the overall general good and say to people well, you’re going to have to put up with things in a modern society.

Bill Durodie: Well you used a phrase there that’s very important. You talked about the general good and the problem is that we now live in a society that no longer perceives itself as a society. Rather it’s just a mass of individuals looking after their own interests and obsessing about personal choice. They have been encouraged in this by various governments, not just you know left-leaning, but the right as well over a number of years. And what we have is a society that is essentially fragmented so it takes, of course it maintains the appearance of being a society, but at its root it’s just individuals looking after their own. And as soon as you’re looking after your own you get particularly obsessed with things to do with your private health, you get particularly obsessed with things to do with security because it’s No.1 that you’re looking after.

Actually in the past as a society we had a sense that some things were worth certain sacrifices and it’s that absence of meaning that means that people are reluctant to put up and tolerate any kind of suffering today. Victor Frankel the holocaust survivor who wrote a book Man’s Search for Meaning famously said it’s not suffering that kills people, it’s suffering without meaning. If you give people a reason for why they have to put up with things, why things might be difficult, then they will be more willing to accept the cost if they align themselves with a particular project. For instance like flying to the moon a generation or so ago. But today, if you’re unable to define a direction for society, if as a politician you’re hiding behind the security measures that you say are imposed upon you because of 9/11 rather than trying to define your agenda and what your vision for humanity is then you are helping to create that society. And in some regards you’re as much a terrorist as those who perpetrate the nihilist acts.

Robyn Williams: Now I’m sure you are consulted by various corporations and indeed government – how do they react when you say things like this?

Bill Durodie: Quite favourably although my suspicion is they then go to work the next day and nothing much changes. I’ve noticed over a range of issues recently that government officials are very keen to deny any responsibility for the measures they’ve been introducing steadily over the last decade. We recently had the case here of the director of the Health and Safety Commission saying that we had all become risk obsessed and that we should stop being so without any recognition of the role of the health and safety executive in shaping that. A few years ago Tessa Jowell the culture secretary said that it was time that we celebrated art for art’s sake, rather than making it instrumentalist and utilitarian in terms of realising corporate profits or soc