1 - The Counter-Terrorist State

Summary

In December 2018, the National Counter-Terrorism Security Office, in conjunction with the Department for Transport, announced a new scheme to ‘reduce the risk of rental vehicles being used as weapons in acts of terror’. The Rental Vehicle Security Scheme aims ‘to promote a proactive security culture within the vehicle rental industry and individual companies’ by requiring participating companies to sign up to a tenpoint code of practice. Among other commitments, participants should ‘appoint a Recognised Security Contact’ and ‘train staff to identify and report suspicious behaviours’.

Introduced in response to the use of a rental vehicle in the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack in March 2017, this scheme reveals the banality and reach of contemporary counter-terrorism. It illustrates its expansion into policy areas traditionally unrelated to national security, and the responsibilisation of industry and private individuals as counter-terrorism actors. This is one example of how counter-terrorism has become a permanent and pervasive part of the state's operations, and of the everyday lives of people in the UK over the past five decades. Reflecting this, we term the UK a ‘counter-terrorist state’: a state in which counterterrorism law, policy, discourse and operations are mainstreamed across the domains of law and government in forms that are conceptualised and designed as ‘permanent’ in at least some cases; in which non-state actors are responsibilised for counter-terrorism; and in which all persons are the subjects of counter-terrorism, although not to equal degrees.

In this chapter we characterise the UK as a counter-terrorist state, tracing its historical development and the processes through which counter-terrorism has become permanent in this jurisdiction. Alongside this permanence, we show how counter-terrorism pervades a wide range of fields, beyond policing and security, extending both the range of actors responsible for counter-terrorism and those subject to the state's counter-terrorist gaze. In spite of some marginal disagreement around counter-terrorism law and policy, we argue that UK politics is marked by a hegemonic consensus on the counter-terrorist state's core propositions. Finally, we attest to the fact that the counter-terrorist state is also reflected in the emergence and the stabilisation, through law, of at least some forms of counter-terrorism review.