Reading Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent Never Had It So Good – a history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles last night, I came across this interesting observation about why McCarthy-style witchunts never took off in the UK:
A Whitehall committee set up to examine the case for positive vetting reported in 1950 that the procedures in the United States … were certainly ‘extremely elaborate’, but also concluded that ‘any such procedure would be repugnant to British thinking’ … McCarthyism was therefore condemned on all sides as ‘a disreputable form of politics’, the result of what [the historian Richard] Thurlow calls ‘a conscious decision to maintain civility in public life’.
Fast forward to the current debate over the Counter Terrorism Bill, and how it’s all changed. As Sir David Omand showed at the Fabian conference last weekend, the instinct for restraint and sense of proportion that was so useful to Britain in the 50s can still be found among the best senior Whitehall mandarins. The real culture shift can be found among ministers responsible for counter-terrorism, with their desire to appear ‘tough’ on terrorism and retain political momentum – and with their credulous attitude towards what the security services tell them, Stockwell and Forest Gate notwithstanding.
