For yesterday’s article on ‘direct action’ on the Canary, I very much enjoyed talking to Kevin Blowe from Netpol.
In the course of our brief morning chat, he referenced Policy Exchange’s 2025 John Creaney QC Memorial Lecture, which was given by Jonathan Hall KC, the UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation and state threat legislation. It makes for quite extraordinary reading, not least because he notes how his separate roles as reviewer of terrorism and state threat are increasingly overlapping. In so doing, he offers backhanded insight into the ‘intellectual’ basis for the government’s confused and draconian approach to the repression of dissent and the ways it is attempting to justify its neo-McCarthyism.
The lecture fell outside the scope of the article, if only because I was already pushing the word count, so I wanted to unpack it here.
Subversion & Counter-Subversion
The lecture begins with Hall discussing explicit acts of ‘terrorism’ — the July 2024 Southport attack being the recent example used. Next, he considers why it is increasingly difficult to distinguish terrorism from threats to national security.
The most interesting part of this section — important for what follows — is Hall’s brief discussion of how ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ was once a novel concept but is actually very difficult to clearly determine. “I do not consider State Terrorism is a useful concept”, he says; “it does not accurately describe the threat posed by States.” This is because it is far from clear how much influence foreign states have on any ‘enemies within’ and how much they simply choose to exploit already-existing social tensions for their own ends.
It is in the final section where things get interesting, as well as logically murky. When addressing the role of judicial intervention in clarifying the contemporary nature of ‘terrorism’ and ‘national security threats’, Hall notes how judicial clarity is essential because
if judicial oversight does not comprise the correcting of errors by powerful ministers, then it may be harder for governments to pilot extraordinary measures through Parliament in response to national security threats.
I am not thinking about an emergency situation such as war…
I am thinking about the measures that may one day be needed to save democracy from itself. What do I mean? I am referring to counter-subversion.
‘Subversion’ is obviously not a new concept in this context, but the more dynamic forms it takes in the present necessitate new and dynamic responses to it, or so Hall claims.
Here, Hall says that ‘subversion’ refers “to slow-burn damage to national security rather than the more catastrophic potential of terrorism”. ‘Counter-subversion’, by contrast, refers to “defending the realm from internal dangers arising from actions of person and organisations which may be judged to be subversive of the State”.
Hall continues by acknowledging that “the very concept of counter-subversion” has fallen “out of favour”, because it is “associated with McCarthyism and some unjustified infiltrations of domestic protest groups by undercover police”. Nevertheless, he suggests that counter-subversive strategies are needed.
Difficulties arise when what he describes sounds like nothing other than neo-McCarthyism. It is further complicated by the fact that ‘some unjustified infiltrations of domestic protest groups’, for example, are both recent and relevant to contemporary state overreach.
Subversive facts
Broadly speaking, the issue Hall identifies is clearly relevant to those worried about foreign interference in national politics. As ever, this is only concerning the UK’s historical ‘enemies’, with no issue raised around the widespread interference of the Zionist lobby in UK politics.
It is hardly surprising that foreign intelligence services would be concerned about this, but the breadth of examples that Hall uses is striking:
If I was a foreign intelligence officer of course I would meddle in separatism, whether Scottish independence or independence of overseas territories or Brexit. I would encourage extreme forms of environmentalism, hoping that policies generated would damage my adversaries’ economy or at least sow discord or hopelessness.
I would sponsor Islamism and Islamist MPs and contentious foreign policy issues such as Gaza within politics. Social media would be a delightful playground for wedge issues. I would certainly amplify the lie that the Southport killer was a Muslim who arrived on a small boat, and relish where an attacker had previously claimed asylum.
I would ensure that the UK hated itself and its history. That the very definition of woman should be put into question, and that masculinity would be presented as toxic. That White people should be ashamed and non-White people aggrieved. I would promote anti-Semitism.
My intention would be to cause both immediate and long-term damage to the national security of the UK by exploiting the freedom and openness of the UK by providing funds, exploiting social media, and entryism…
Hall is quick to note that he has no “evidence of foreign involvement in any of the topics … listed”; he is only “thinking like an adversary.” In fact, “proving that the Foreign Hand is at work can be very difficult”. Nevertheless, paying heed to the possibility of such interference, he suggests that more should be done to counter it in advance. One response, he suggests, would be to strengthen “social resilience against disinformation,” or even advancing “a Cold War mentality that sniffs out subversion” — the latter surely being another euphemism for McCarthyism.
Hall continues on from this point in a manner that is slippery and ideologically blinkered. ‘Social resilience against disinformation’ might as well be inverted to mean ‘social resilience in favour of truth‘, and yet, he is also eliding the truths that exist at the heart of the social tensions he previously listed:
- there is a climate crisis;
- to deem the genocide in Gaza ‘contentious’ is to wilfully ignore the truth of Israeli apartheid;
- the UK’s history is littered with grave crimes against humanity, from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the unending consequences of the British Mandate of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration;
- the truth of patriarchy and the existence of trans people…
Hall’s insinuated perspective on ‘truth’ is reduced to what is ‘normative’, in the sense that what is ‘true’ is that which is deemed to be preferential for the British state itself. But this becomes an ignorant form of displacement regarding the difficulties experienced by British people which have arisen from the actions of the British state, both contemporary and historical.
To insinuate that none of these things are true — simply because they shine a light on the British state’s responsibility for the disenfranchisement of its own citizens, which is beneficial to foreign adversaries — is an extraordinary example of ideological deferral. This is made all the more apparent when we consider the bastions of ‘truth’ and ‘trust’ that Hall is grateful for:
Truth and resilience require a degree of trust in institutions where the UK is still lucky. The Royal Family, the jury system, the BBC (I think of its VE day coverage, as well as the snooker), the police and security services – domains of institutional trust in which the UK has incalculable advantages compared to the US.
Everything falls even further apart here — not least because the yankification of the UK media landscape is a well-established rot. More broadly, ‘trust’ in the royal family is in shambles and has been declining for decades. The government itself is planning to restrict jury trials, because it doesn’t ‘trust’ them to deliver the results they want in protest trials.
What all of this ultimately leads to is a presumption of ignorance with regards to a nation’s citizens. It’s a governmental rendition of that Principle Skinner meme: “Am I, the British government, out of touch? No, it is the citizenry that is being subversive!”
Governments thus throw their citizens under the bus, assuming that they do not have the ‘intelligence’ — understood in more ways than one — to make reasonable judgements as to their own beliefs and the risk of their exploitation.
Critiquing the West
Hall’s lecture reminded me of a peculiar problem I had back in 2020, which I’ve no doubt mentioned on the blog before.
Shortly before the publication of my first book, Egress, I found myself fielding media enquiries from Russia Today. First, they reached out to my publisher. Then, they contacted me directly. Eventually, they called me at my place of work. The latter was genuinely unsettling and inappropriate. I declined the offer repeatedly.
It was clear that the subject of the book and its contents were a secondary concern to the channel’s producer. Russia Today was obviously not interested in engaging with the finer points of interpretative contention that I was navigating in the late thought of Mark Fisher. As my publisher put it at that time, you could guarantee that Russia Today was interested in the book and Mark Fisher more broadly because he was critical of the West, and they could use those critiques for their own ends.
In the large, Fisher’s critiques of the West are incisive, insightful and accurate. I believe them to be true. The UK is a “boring dystopia“. I know that because I live in it. Indeed, one can recognise that statement as true without wanting one’s perspective on life in the West to be exploited by the propaganda machine of an equally dystopian national broadcaster… Just because Russia might want to amplify critiques of the West for its own ends doesn’t mean that those critiques are false.
Jonathan Hall KC doesn’t bother to make any comment on that though…
It’s only autocracy when ‘they’ do it
As Hall tiptoes around his recommendations for countering ‘subversion’, he both warns against the UK developing its own brand of autocracy whilst euphemistically advocating for it in the same breath.
“It’s one thing to take these steps in an autocracy but quite another thing in a democracy like France or the UK”, Hall says. “Our laws are based on general principles that apply to individuals equally”. But when there’s a group of people we don’t like, there are various ways in which we might undermine them. A group like the Muslim Brotherhood, by way of Hall’s example, might be “banned [on] the basis … that it met a general criterion such as terrorism, or legal criteria that we have yet to invent – separatism, or hateful extremism, or subversiveness.”
The suggestion that legal criteria for separatism or subversiveness be invented is alarming. It is the autocratic policing of political thought, not least those pesky Marxists who might subvert the West through their historical materialism. Hall buys into an ethical relativism that seeks to cast the UK in ideological amber. Never mind all your evidence of state violence, climate breakdown, inequality and subjugation, we don’t believe in all that here. The British are a notoriously boot-licking nation, but to somehow concretise that in law is a baffling self-own.
Thankfully, Hall acknowledges that, no matter how much the security services might be gunning for broader repressions, it is probably a fool’s errand to try and legally define ‘subversion’ or any other byword for what is taken to be ‘extremism’. “There are very many difficulties in achieving an appropriately clear legal test,” Hall says, “and the road to a legal definition of extremism is littered with wreckage.”
Everything is terrorism
What this government has been doing instead, over the year or so since Hall’s lecture, is utilising the rickety frameworks it has already put in practice. Indeed, the UK government doesn’t need a legal definition of extremism. It only needs to expand the repressions already emboldened by its counter-terror legislation.
This was a further point made by Kevin Blowe in our conversation yesterday, which also did not make it into the Canary article. The article’s provocation was simply that the government doesn’t understand what ‘direct action’ is, what it is for, or how it differs from other forms of (equally legitimate) protest. But Blowe added that of course the government doesn’t need a working definition of ‘direct action’. In fact, to formulate one would probably cause the state more problems.
As Hall argues, “if a sufficient definition [of ‘subversiveness’ or ‘extremism’] could be found, then new laws would need sufficient safeguard in the form of judicial intervention”. That sounds like a headache for civil servants and law clerks, so best to just work with what we have…
What we have is the Terrorism Act, the legal definition of which can be (and has been) stretched to cover various forms of protest and ‘subversion’.
The Terrorism Act is, of course, fundamentally racist. It is utilised broadly, but the ideological underpinning of the War on Terror is also baked into it. It has been much easier to apply its various draconian restrictions to black and brown people, and Muslims in particular. To use the Terrorism Act to cover pro-Palestinian protest — as has been happening more and more frequently, and exclusively; they don’t use this stuff on far-right protestors or rioters — is not much of a stretch in this regard. It is sufficient enough to paste it onto people deemed ‘Muslim-adjacent’ in their solidarities.
Judicial safeguards
This is how human rights and freedoms are being eroded in this country. This is the ‘intellectual’ foundation of the crackdown on direct action and jury trials.
Hall’s lecture, if ideologically muddled in its own right, falls back on the view that the judiciary has an important role to play in maintaining certain freedoms:
As a criminal lawyer by origin, my first observation is that the definitive choice between guilty and not guilty made by juries is [the] best and most widely accepted guarantee that laws against terrorism are valid. And when we come to – if we come to – counter-subversion measures, they will be accepted, if they are accepted, by allowing judges to decide.
This lecture is only one year old, but already we have seen how judges have been skittish about their role in proceedings. Clearly interfered with by the government, they have lubricate the crackdown on direct action and civil disobedience, particularly as expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity. They are not protecting freedoms but allowing the government to wage its lawfare on citizens trying to hold them to account for their crimes in the only way they know how.
Hall might be trying to navigate the minefield of ‘subversion’ in the terms of UK intelligence officials and McCarthyites, but by privileging that perspective implicitly, we find an oh-so-British mask of ‘friendly’ bureaucracy pasted over policies that are, at their core, dictatorial and autocratic.
It is usually embarrassing to invoke Orwell in times like this, but it is hard not to think of him. The UK government does not have the monopoly on truth, nor does its puppet judiciary. If the UK wants to protect itself from foreign enemies, it should have thought about that when it stomped around the world making so many for itself. After an imperial age of the fuck-around, it’s starting to find out. Don’t call it ‘subversion’ when the UK continues to undermine itself for failing to take any accountability for its historic crimes, nor to initiate any remedies for the modern crimes it is complicit in.
Our neoliberal hellscape cannot jettison the ‘right to revolution‘ that even the father of liberalism, John Locke, advocated for. Some things need to be subverted. An increasingly dictatorial and autocratic British state is one of them.