Why violence is political

In the latest issue of a magazine we revisited the subject of RICU (“Research, Information, and Communications Unit”), the Home Office team tasked with fabricating narratives in the wake of any high-profile crime which might cause people to question the wisdom of mass immigration. It was an eye-opening reminder of the extraordinary lengths to which the State will go to try and smother potentially unhelpful narratives.

But two other things which strike the reader are a) the immense nervousness implied by the existence of RICU and similar outfits and b) the increasing clumsiness of their efforts. We commissioned the piece after reading the absurd statement from the family of Steven Ogilvie, the man almost beheaded by an immigrant in Belfast, which stressed migrants’ contribution to “our hospitality sector”.

Now perhaps this is simply an instance of the well-known phenomenon that once you have first noticed something you can’t help but keep noticing it, but do we detect a hint of the same blundering panic in the police messaging around Ann Widdecombe’s death?

Nobody expects the police to have all the answers within a day or two of a murder (although it’s obviously nice if they do). Had they simply said that they had an open mind as to motive, nobody would have thought any less of them for it. Instead Matt Longman, an assistant chief constable at Devon and Cornwall Police, went out of his way to say that there was “nothing to suggest it was politically motivated” — only for the case to be handed over to counter-terrorism officers less than 24 hours later.

In the first instance, that made life awkward for the Dan Hodges of the world, who had piously ridden out on the back of Longman’s statement to shame people suggesting that Widdecombe’s death had any relation to her political profile. Confronted with the possibility that the irresponsible speculators might have had a point, they were forced to retreat behind a RICU-esque statement from Widdecombe’s family warning against, of course, people politically exploiting her death.

(Naturally, the people using it to call for yet another clampdown on social media — apparently our political class’s one and only reaction to a confirmed or possible assassination — don’t seem to think that this statement applies to them. But using an event to call for policy action is politicising that event; the Snowdrop campaign to ban handguns politicised Dunblane. That isn’t a problem unless you think that “politicising” something is inherently bad and thus only something your opponents do.)

But it also seems likely to only make life harder for the police, already struggling with a long slide in public esteem and loss of trust arising from widespread perceptions of two-tier policing. This looks like Devon and Cornwall Police trying to shut down any suggestion that the crime had a political angle based on nothing more than engrained narrative-management instinct. This made things like the decision not to release CCTV footage of the suspect seem inherently suspicious.

The media must share some of the responsibility here. Whilst Longman’s statement was injudicious, the simple fact that there wasn’t evidence to suggest political motivation at that point in the investigation appears, to the best of our knowledge, to have been true. What he did not actually say is that political motivation had been ruled out — and yet that was the narrative that took off.

Doubtless, this was driven in part by people’s eagerness to shut down Reform UK, which has made a big story of MPs’ security since the news of Widdecombe’s murder broke. 

Finding a person or organisation unsympathetic is no grounds for not taking their safety concerns seriously

One can understand why its opponents would be cynical about this. It is difficult to fathom a parliamentary security regime so expansive it extends to individuals who have been out of the Commons for years and against whom there was, presumably, no known threat, and obviously a convenient subject for Nigel Farage, who has sought to justify the donations at the heart of the current investigation into his finances on the basis of paying for private security.

But finding a person or organisation unsympathetic is no grounds for not taking their safety concerns seriously. We have in the past ten years had two MPs assassinated at constituency surgeries. This might not be quite the tempo at which they were being murdered in the 1980s, but the circumstances are very different. Back then, the danger was a coordinated campaign by Irish republicanism; formidably well-organised at times, but easier both for the police and intelligence services to combat and for individuals to simply avoid (most of the time, Brighton bombings excepted) by not talking about Northern Ireland.

A Britain in which there is a higher general risk of “lone wolves” murdering politicians is a very different problem — one that poses fundamental questions about how we operate our democracy. At present you can attend a constituency surgery and talk to your local MP, about more or less anything, without being searched, without police or security officers present. Whilst the constituency focus of our current model has its downsides, this is an under-appreciated element of it.

But it will only survive so many murders. It’s a horrible thing to think about, which is perhaps why so many politicians and commentators prefer to talk about controlling hurty words on the Internet.