7 - 7: The London Bombings: What Went Wrong? [Paperback]

In short, the book fails to make any original commentary, and fails to form an adequate synopsis of currently available public knowledge, rendering it a rather pointless affair. The overall impression is of an undergraduate dissertation written in a few rushed days from only the most basic of textbooks. Avoid.

Crispin Black asserts that there were different levels on which the intelligence capability in the UK failed to prevent 7-7. Firstly, he criticises the amount of political pressure exerted on the intelligence community, which he says jeopardises its ability to operate with neutrality and interpret data in a balanced way. Secondly, he claims that the traditional distinction between national (MI5) and international (MI6) jurisdiction in intelligence gathering is simply outdated, given that Islamic fundamentalism is relevant to both – not to have national-international continuum in this regard is costly to UK security. Black goes on to say that instead of focusing on UK-US intelligence collaboration, more effort should go into European based terrorist activities.

Black says the French do things better, despite being in a “weaker” situation: The French are also in a weaker position than Britain. They have a much bigger Muslim population…” Since when has that been an inherent “weakness”? His praise of the French way of doing things rests on the stern police approach: “In France you upset the police at your peril.”(p.72)

And writing of the French RG (Renseignements Generaux) – what Black calls “roughly the equivalent to Special Branch in the UK” – he says that they operate “clandestine opinion polling” and are therefore able to “put together usually accurate estimates of the political intentions and allegiances of arrondissements or small areas of Paris and elsewhere in France.” (p.74)

Black alludes to supporting racial profiling: “If you can only stop and search a limited number of people who should you target – Presbyterian South Sea Islanders or young Muslim men?” (p.62). Oddly, Black then goes on to declare his disagreement with surveillance: “If any of the current people under surveillance are not British, it would be simpler, safer and more sensible to deport them…”(p.63).
A remark alluding to freedom-of-speech also raises concerns about Black’s stance, but is never properly tackled: “It is too easy to preach religious extremism in this country”. (p.70). The term “religious extremism” is not defined and Black goes on to say that we need to put more effort into supporting “moderates”. This amounts to some call for social engineering by authorities controlling the volume of public religious sermons. And Black seems to see the primary role of government as that of a public body-guard: “We pay their salaries – first and foremost to make sure that we are safe – not rich or even happy – but safe.” (p.21). Given the Labour government’s treatment of the terrorism issue, the fact that they’ve done nothing but hype up public fears over terrorism, they are the perfect example of how having a government precludes being safe, never mind happy.

Given that Black is discussing domestic security issues primarily, rather than ideological preferences, his argument becomes incredibly inconsistent when he approaches the topic of the Iraq war. For instance, he readily acknowledges that “MI5 accepts that the Iraq war has been a radicalising factor pushing a small number of Muslims towards violence” (p.29) and that “involvement in Iraq has led the UK into danger” (p.80). He says that “[Muslim fanatics] would simply view Iraq as another string to their bow. It proves their point as they see it – yet again: the West wants to conquer the Middle East and reduce the influence of Islam.” Yet despite this, he says that at the time of the invasion he was “an enthusiastic supporter of the war – and remained so even after it became apparent that the intelligence books had been cooked.” He goes on: “There were and remain good arguments for the intervention in Iraq” and “you can get away with it if it works”(p.78). Black writes that “even if the means used to justify it to the people were inappropriate the motivation was respectable enough”. He asserts that “wars may be necessary, but they upset people seriously” (p.77) – not mentioning that apart from upsetting people, they result in high numbers of casualties (although he touches on that later). He says that “it was a perfectly reasonable option to go to war in Iraq” (p.78).
In places Black seems fairly partial to parroting government orthodoxies. For instance he gladly accepts the dogma that “the rules of the game have changed”, a quote taken directly from a Tony Blair speech, but which Black does not credit as such.

The book has some interesting things to teach about how the way intelligence in the UK is structured, and what its overall weaknesses are. Beyond this, it seems to be a badly structured diatribe of personal complaints about policy (especially the UK’s inferiority to the French!). It is evident that rather than waiting for the issue to settle down and be analysed over some time with careful consideration, this book is a knee-jerk reaction to the events of 7-7, which I suppose the publishers thought would attract high sales nonetheless so soon after the tragedy. I don’t think one could consider this a serious or even comprehensive commentary on 7-7 or surrounding issues. It is a semi-educational, but mostly preachy over-glorified pamphlet. Surely better literature will appear on this topic in due course.