Cabinet level security minister needed to deal with disasters
Former Tory security spokesman, Patrick Mercer, criticises UK Home Office split as a "big mistake". Civil Contingencies Secretariat needs a cabinet-ranking minister of security if it is to deal effectively with disasters
One of the main speakers at the start of the recent Business Continuity exhibition held in London's Excel centre was Patrick Mercer MP, previously a British Army officer. After the opening plenary session I spoke to the Conservative Party's former Homeland Security spokesman - a post which the Tory leader, David Cameron, had asked him to relinquish under controversial circumstances, three weeks before.
I asked Patrick Mercer what he thought was the principal security issue confronting the United Kingdom. Expecting a straight-forward, military naming of terrorism or climate change, I got instead a more nuanced, considered reply: "The problem we face is making people understand that we live in a dangerous world, and it's a world that is going to become increasingly dangerous as terrorists and pressure groups realise how violence can be used to bring pressure to bear on governments.
"The biggest challenge is that we have got to come to terms with is the fact that there are a number of subversive groups which wish to overthrow our democracy and replace it with tyranny. Although this is never going to be as big a threat as, say, nazism or communism, we have got to come to an accommodation with this threat and learn to live with it. Terrorist groups believe they are successful if they can terrorise and kill us. Well, we've got to make it difficult for them to kill and terrorise us. Unless we can do that we will be very, very easy meat for the al Qaedas and animal liberation groups of this world. And we will also become more vulnerable to natural disasters which I fear are increasing."
So did Patrick Mercer agree with the call of his own Party's policy group for a UK National Security Council and the appointment of a Cabinet-level security minister dedicated to protecting Britain from terrorism? "Absolutely. This is first time thinking like this, which has been around for some time, has been exposed. It (the policy group's report) doesn't pretend to give the details of how this might be implemented. But, in my view security goes from a traffic warden, through doctors and ambulances, includes every aspect that makes our lives safe, to aircraft carriers and Trident missiles at the other end of the spectrum. Until such times as we engage with this overarching security, we are going to makes us more vulnerable than we need to be."
Should the security minister be part of the Home Office?
"The reason for my appointment, which went under the name of Homeland Security, was to pressurise the government to create a single security post. The government had turned its face away from this but, over the last two years or so, we've seen signs that the government is coming round to this way of thinking. Unfortunately it would seem that as it stands at the moment, the Home Office minister, Dr John Reid, intends to split his ministry into a department of justice and one of security, or something along those lines (this was confirmed the next day by the government - ed). This would be a big mistake. If they did this, the security minister, if appointed, would not be in day-to-day contact with the justice minister. So they would will lose economies of scale and the cohesion of a single department, and be more expensive
"We need to appoint, in my view, a single, cabinet-ranking minister of security with a straight reporting line to the Home Secretary and a dotted line to the Prime Minister. He or she has got to be capable of influencing other Secretaries of State. One of the weaknesses of the current Civil Contingencies Secretariat, located in the Cabinet Office, is that it has no minister representing it."
I asked about his point that we have to live with terrorism. Didn't we become used IRA bombs and managed quite well? "Yes, but there has been no large outrage, apart from July 7th , in this country now for a decade. Unfortunately much of the apparatus, which had been developed to allow life to continue as normal in Ulster, has either been forgotten or broken down.
Why hadn't the Conservative Party hadn't named a successor to Patrick Mercer, I wondered, hoping for signs of some dissension in the ranks. The man in question batted this away with ease, pointing to the expected (since confirmed - ed) Home Office reorganisation, which would require a matching Tory line up. Naming a successor now "would make us look foolish if we had to change it a few weeks later. Security still rests in capable hands of David Davis (the Conservative shadow Home Office minister - ed)."
Patrick Mercer's final point was that despite his focus on terrorism in his previous post, "we are much more likely to die from natural causes than terrorism". He stressed again that the Civil Contingencies Secretariat needed a cabinet-ranking minister of security if it is to deal effectively with disasters such as Avian influenza and floods due to global warming.
