Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  As ever, Theresa May is in the vanguard, insisting that the government’s spectacularly missed immigration target should be readopted after the election. This is clever. As home secretary, it was her responsibility to hit the target. But, by rejecting the suggestions of several senior colleagues to abandon it, she appears hardline and unwavering despite her own failure.

  Arguing in favour of immigration control is easier than arguing in favour of immigration, because you get to tell persuasive anecdotes about depressed wages, Britons put out of work and pressure on public services. Whereas if you’re trying to emphasise the benefits of immigration (eg on the economy), you’re rather stuck with offering statistics – unless your audience likes hearing stories of improved living standards told in a Polish accent, which, the received wisdom seems to be, middle England doesn’t. Free movement of people can be an incentive to commerce and self-betterment, and a vital component of free trade, but these macroeconomic factors provide scant comfort to a constituent who’s irritated by the number of Bulgarians in her GP’s waiting room.

  Theresa May is also behind various assaults on universities. So underfunded that they’re desperate to attract higher-fee-paying students from abroad, our seats of learning have become magnets for foreigners. This, May believes, must be clamped down on like a scrotum in Guantanamo Bay. As well as closing “bogus colleges” and “satellite campuses”, she also insists overseas students should count towards the immigration figures. This means her unrealistic immigration target will continue to exert a huge downward pressure on an important national export: university education.

  Freedom of speech is also taking a kicking. I used to think that issue was one of the Tories’ saving graces: their commitment to the welfare state and redistributive taxation might have been suspect, but they seemed to believe in liberty. If you can, you let people do and say what they want – that seemed to be their sincere view. Well, that’s gone out the window.

  Charities that receive public funding, Eric Pickles has announced, will lose it if they use it to campaign against the government. That’s potentially hugely restrictive as, in many cases, a charity only exists because of a failure of government. You could argue that the very existence of, say, a food bank is an implied criticism of the state.

  Worst of all, the Home Office is planning to force universities to ban “hate preachers” from campuses – even “hate preachers” who don’t advocate violence and who have committed no crime. The government absolutely hates hate preachers. It hates what they say but certainly won’t defend to the death their right to say it. On the contrary, they are to be silenced. Preferably before they say anything hateful. Although I suppose they’d have to have said at least one hateful thing to justify the presumption that they were hate preachers. But maybe a hateful glance would be enough – a hard stare, a raised eyebrow, an undemocratic beard.

  Quite how you define a “hate preacher”, if they haven’t broken one of the laws about incitement to violence or hatred that exist already, is unclear. But if we say it’s someone who uses inflammatory rhetoric to turn different members of the community against one another, then the Oxford Union may run into trouble extending future invitations to David Cameron.

  The Tory parts of the government are absolutely fizzing with spite. And this is all in the run-up to an election, let’s not forget. These aren’t the electorally unpalatable tough measures that ministers feel they have to push through for practical reasons, or a secret malevolent agenda sprung on us after a landslide victory. This is stuff they’re proposing in order to win us round. It’s as if the latest Lord Ashcroft poll has found that the British are 90% evil. If so, it’s no wonder the Tories believe that hate preaching will convince.

  * * *

  Despite being an enthusiastic consumer of spy films and novels, I’ve never much fancied being an actual spy. Physical cowardice is part of the reason – I don’t like the sound of all the piranha tanks, gunfights, torture by sleep deprivation or polonium-laced sushi (depending on genre) – but that’s not the main deterrent. After all, popular culture makes it clear there are plenty of espionage jobs that don’t involve anything more challenging than ducking under some police tape in a cashmere overcoat. That’s the sort of spy I’d dream of being, if I dreamed of being a spy, which I’m surprised to find I don’t. The suit-and-tie, office-with-a-rooftop-view, “How can we stop them realising we’ve realised that they’ve realised we realise?” kind.

  Which isn’t to say I don’t want to be George Smiley: I absolutely do want to be George Smiley. I just don’t want to be any of the people he’s based on. I’d be thrilled to pretend to be a spy, with lots of people watching and applause at the end. What I’m not tempted by is the long career, wrestling with terrible secrets, mind-bending complications and soul-crushing compromises, while not being able to get credit when it went well, sympathy when it went horribly or a huge pile of money if I happened to be good at it.

  Call me a showbiz wanker but, to me, that job sounds crap – though recruitment must have been enormously helped by the efforts the film, publishing and TV industries have made to glamorise it. The occasional poolside page-turner or pacey mini-series on the subject of social workers would probably do wonders for the prospects of thousands of drug-addicts’ toddlers.

  Not that anyone’s taking on more welfare providers at the moment. Under our new prime minister, Theresa May, public spending is all about restraint – that is, the state’s ability to restrain people. So it’s security personnel they’re recruiting, according to recent reports, with MI6 looking to hire nearly 1,000 new spies over the next four years, increasing its payroll by almost 40%. This is part of a widely circulated government plan to increase the staff of all three covert security agencies (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) by a total of about 1,900.

  This all has a very different vibe from the cold war, when Britain’s secret services were still secret. Or officially secret anyway, which is not quite the same thing. But that’s no longer politically viable. In this era of austerity, the public would be more offended by the notion that thousands of government employees were doing nothing than that they were, say, invading the privacy of millions, testing the limits of international law and abetting our allies in systematically committing war crimes. “I don’t mind if they’re organising rendition flights, as long as they’re not just sitting on their arses!”

  Since 1986, when the existence of a secret intelligence service was first grudgingly acknowledged, all three institutions have been flirting with the limelight. As the Soviet Union collapsed, they all shyly took a bow and, at some point between the publications of Spycatcher and Stella Rimington’s autobiography, possibly when the location manager for a Bond film first rang up to inquire about filming outside MI6, they abandoned the shadows for ever.

  In some ways, this process was quite fun – almost like a revelation that wizards or dragons really existed. “So there are spies, after all! And they do hang out in huge central London buildings, trying to steal secrets from each other. How magical!”

  But there’s something rum about this openness. To start with, it’s not meaningful openness. We know who the heads of these organisations are: we know, for example, that MI6’s current “C” is really called Alex Younger, thus reducing the code name to the same trivial ceremonial level as Black Rod and the Stig. But we don’t know what they’re actually doing.

  The openness about their existence and leadership, but not about the activities of their thousands of staff, is rather rubbing the public’s nose in the fact that there are things we are forbidden to know, and forbidden to know about people whose salaries we pay. In contrast, the previous policy of keeping the organisations as well as their activities secret shows a certain delicacy, even a fitting shame that such a recourse should be necessary in an ostensibly free country.

  This shame is understandable in the context of the cold war, when the Soviet bloc countries, over which the west, with considerable justification, asserted its moral s
uperiority, kept so much secret from their own peoples. In the free world, secrecy smacked of tyranny. It alarmed people, so, ironically, the scale of it was best kept under wraps.

  Nowadays, however, our security services want us to be alarmed. They want it because it will make us feel we need them, and this is the bigger problem with the current openness. The Soviet Union gave spies an indisputable raison d’être. Since its fall, they’ve felt the need to justify their existence. Obviously, before you can justify your existence, you have to admit it – but that was just the first step. The government proudly letting it be known, at a time of considerable national austerity, that thousands more security officers are to be employed shows how successful that self-justification has been.

  The language of it is familiar. We hear of “security threats”, “foiled attacks”, of the prime minister “chairing an emergency Cobra meeting”. At airports we see policemen with guns, while seemingly random prohibitions from our hand luggage are clues from which we attempt to work out the nature of the latest maniacal assault on our way of life. Maybe this time it was something with liquids and shoes? A belt shampoo bomb? A mace made out of plastic cutlery embedded in a Frederick Forsyth novel?

  I’m not saying this fear of terrorism is unjustified, and I’m not saying it’s justified. I’m saying we don’t know, and that it’s unwise to leave unquestioned the estimation of the problem provided by the people we’re paying to solve it.

  The widely reported terrorist threat, the stories of “near misses” and “heightened terror alerts” and the announcement of more investment to “keep us safe” create, from the security services’ point of view, a virtuous circle of increasing funding. Modern espionage is about what they’re seen to do, when it used to be the opposite. It’s become my sort of job after all.

  * * *

  In an otherwise unremarkable article about how a British Airways passenger, barred from the plane’s lavatory, had wet herself, I noticed something that chilled me to the bone – even more than sitting in my own urine throughout a transatlantic flight would have done. The airline, it mentioned in passing, while reporting how some schoolchildren said they’d been refused water (BA seems to be operating a none-in/none-out policy when it comes to fluids), doesn’t accept cash for in-flight purchases.

  This is a deeply sinister development, made more so by the fact that it hardly seems to have been noticed. “Why’s it sinister?” you may be asking. “I’m sure there are sound practical reasons – no one wants airliners struggling through the sky weighed down by thousands of 50ps. And who doesn’t have a credit or debit card these days?”

  Not many, I admit – just a few parched schoolkids. But cash is money in its most basic form. The airline is effectively saying it doesn’t accept or recognise money any more. Coins and notes with the Queen’s head on them, endorsed by a sovereign state, are no longer sufficient. It needs to know who we are; it needs to take its payment by tapping into each individual’s credit source. The electronic endorsement of a bank, an organisation accountable to no one but its owners, is required.

  This isn’t primarily BA’s fault. I’m sure all big banks and retailers want to try it. No dirty cash pushing up insurance and security costs, everything nicely kept track of – where the money came from and where it went. All that data building up so that, as and when the law allows, it can be ruthlessly exploited for marketing purposes.

  It’s great from the state’s point of view too. If anyone it considers dodgy is spending money, it has only to contact the bank and the access to credit can be turned off like a life-support patient’s drip. The slow insinuation of the futuristic-sounding concept of a “cashless society”, conjuring up the wholesome Californian feel of the “paperless office”, is primarily in the interests of large and powerful organisations. One might almost suspect it was no accident the new fiver had animal fat in it. Expect the next £20 to be gummed together with GM crops and foie gras, with a picture of Jimmy Savile on the back.

  This may sound paranoid – credit cards are convenient and most people have nothing to hide. Why does it matter if all our payments are traceable? Just because someone is constantly following you around at a slight distance, it doesn’t mean they’re going to do you harm. But I imagine those who are constantly tailed really value a few hours’ break from it now and again. And, if asking for such a break, they’d probably be irritated if the response was: “Why? Looking for the chance to stare at some kiddie porn and plan an act of terrorism, are you?!”

  The anonymity of cash has been an integral part of our economy and society for millennia. Getting rid of that is quite a step. Are we definitely going to get properly consulted on it? The government is already introducing an initiative called Making Tax Digital, which will give it unprecedented access to millions of taxpayers’ financial information. Who, in the current climate, is going to champion the cause of ordinary people retaining the right to buy stuff anonymously?

  The internet makes all of these issues even more fraught. By the accounts of the print media and security services, the virtual world is an amoral anarchy in which super-villain can talk to super-villain and swivel-eyed loners are groomed by terrorist organisations and provided with easy-to-follow atrocity tips. On the other hand, it also has the potential to allow fully cyber-militarised governments to monitor almost all of their citizens’ activities and interactions. Sounds lovely either way.

  Last week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of this hell-in-the-ether’s most well-meaning architects, sharply criticised the British and US governments’ moves to undermine privacy and net neutrality, saying the “human right … to communicate with people on the web, to go to websites I want without being spied on is really, really crucial”.

  The home secretary, Amber Rudd, takes a different view: “We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.”

  Seems reasonable. Except, if there’s no secrecy for terrorists, there’s no secrecy, or privacy, for anyone. Is that a price worth paying to fight Isis? Or is that surrendering our way of life, famously meaning that “they’ve won”?

  But perhaps Isis and the security services can both win. In the first Metropolitan police statement after the Westminster attack, they portentously said they were treating it as a terrorist incident, thus darkly alluding to the Oxford second VIII’s nefarious namesake. And it wasn’t long before that organisation claimed responsibility, though it didn’t seem to know the attacker’s name or anything else about the event that it couldn’t have got off the TV news.

  It struck me then that, on some level, both the Home Office and Isis wanted it to be Isis. They’d found common ground. Neither side wanted it to be a random nutter who’d hired a car – you don’t strike fear into the infidel that way, and neither will it make the public acquiesce to greater surveillance powers. The same horrible, murderous event has occurred either way but, if it’s Isis, more people get something from it – including the media, which are justified in much more sensationalist rhetoric than if twice the number of people had been mown down by a non-radicalised driver drunkenly fiddling with his satnav.

  To the elements of western governments seeking to increase their control over citizens’ lives, Isis has provided a wonderful opportunity. It’s just so absurdly evil and unsympathetic. This isn’t like the communist bloc, which, for all its totalitarian excesses, had a humane underlying philosophy. These guys actually make videos of themselves chopping people’s heads off. So, if presented with a choice between Isis and the Tories, or even Trump, or even Ukip, we’re all going to plump for the latter.

  But it’s a false dichotomy. That’s not the choice. It would not be safe to give Isis the power of almost infinite surveillance over everything we say or do online, who we talk to, what we like and every penny we spend. But Isis isn’t demanding that. The only issue is whether it’s safe to give it to those who are.

 
* * *

  What is the advantage of letting sitting MPs work for lobbying firms? What are the pluses of that for the country? Because we do allow it, so I’m assuming there must be some upside.

  After all, there are clear advantages to many things we don’t allow: smoking on petrol station forecourts, for example. Allowing that would mean, if you’re addicted to smoking, or enjoy smoking, or think smoking makes you look cool, you could do it while filling your car with petrol, polishing its bonnet, going to buy snacks, checking the tyres and so on. You wouldn’t be inconvenienced by either the discomfort of nicotine withdrawal or a hiatus in the image of nonchalant suavity that having a fag in your mouth invariably projects.

  And the same goes for those essaying auras of Churchillian defiance and grit or Hannibal from The A-Team-style twinkly maverick leadership, for which a lit cigar clamped between the teeth can be vital, particularly if you’ve got a weak chin.

  Similarly, if you’re a pipe-smoking detective of the Sherlock Holmes mould and are, perhaps, investigating a crime on a petrol station forecourt, or merely passing across one while contemplating the intricacies of a non-forecourt-related mystery, you wouldn’t have to suffer a lapse in the heightened analytical brain function that you’ve found smoking a pipe crucial to attaining. Interrupting such processes to buy petrol may cause murderers to walk free.

  And then there’s the possibility that allowing smoking at petrol stations will marginally increase overall consumption, and therefore sales, of tobacco products – all the Holmeses and Churchills and Bonds will be able to get a few more smokes in before they die of cancer – which would slightly improve trade and GDP, and so create jobs.

  Nevertheless, I am not, on balance, in favour of allowing smoking on petrol station forecourts. The manifold advantages are, in my view, outweighed by the several disadvantages: passive smoking for non-smoking users of the forecourt, nicotine-staining of the underside of the canopy, and various others I can’t currently bring to mind.