The nightmare agenda

I'm grateful to my new correspondent blueskygreysky for the opportunity to revisit the subject of how best to prevent acts of terrorism.

My initial blog post on this, three months ago, was The Power of Nightmares.

It certainly ruffled a few feathers at County Hall, once officials realised their words "identifying potentially violent religiously-motivated extremists" could also mean "spotting suicide bombers." Actually, it's hard to see how their words mean anything else, although my reports on BBC Radio Cornwall made it clear that Cornwall's Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) is also planning to tackle eco-terrorism and some of the more radical elements of the Cornish National Liberation Army.

The SACRE's £3,500 seminar designed to advise Cornwall's teachers about all this is planned for this summer and is part of a Home Office initiative called the "Prevent Agenda." Notwithstanding the case of Plymouth's Nicky Reilly, jailed for 18 years for trying to blow himself up in an Exeter restaurant, the civil rights group Liberty has condemned the Prevent Agenda as a waste of time and money which risks the reverse of what it is trying to achieve.

In fact, police Inspector Robin Hogg's "Prevent" presentation to the SACRE made specific mention of Nicky Reilly as precisely the sort of lone fanatic that teachers should be alert to.

But consider an alternative scenario: an 11-year-old girl is fond of her pet rabbit. She writes an essay which is broadly critical of vivisection. In theory it is possible that her teacher, who is after all only human, and who is also perhaps inexperienced and over-enthused with the "Prevent Agenda," uses the Special Branch hotline supplied by the SACRE. I'm not saying that before she's 12 she'll be kidnapped and sent for waterboarding in Pakistan but have we been assured that the police and MI5 systems are sensitive enough to screen out well-meaning false alarms and prevent a file being opened on her?

As a society we have to balance our individual freedom (not to be spied upon) with our collective freedom (not to be blown up.) The point about my original blog post was to question whether Cornwall's Advisory Council on Religious Education was really the best organisation to lead the fight against the bad guys. Do we not all have a responsibility to keep an eye out for the next Nicky Reilly? But that doesn't mean we can, or should, think of ourselves as characters from Spooks.

In response to blueskygreysky's question about whether there are laws to prevent MI5 spying on minors, the answer is "no." The first duty of MI5 is to keep us safe. Back to the question about balance. But Cornwall is a county where children have to have their fingerprints taken before they can borrow a school library book. How about a Liberty Agenda?