Negotiating with terrorists

Jul 20, 2023

This looks at terrorism through the story of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone. Who are the terrorists? (also, the behind the scenes story of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Arms Race)

Ken looks back here

Mrs T herself in her own words

There should be no easy answer to this question.

Here’s the debate: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/01/we-do-not-negotiate-terrorists-why

'“The UK government has not officially acknowledged negotiating with armed terrorist groups for the release of hostages. The Northern Ireland peace process was negotiated with – among others – Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA. Sinn Féin’s ranks included men formerly accused of terrorism by the UK, including its leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The US also endorsed those talks.”

Some people use this to score easy political points.

Did Thatcher negotiate with terrorists?

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-16366413

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-17539320

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/oct/20/londonmayor.london

The nuclear problem

“So Thatcher was horrified when she discovered what actually transpired in Iceland. Following hours of increasingly testy discussion about trade-offs between different categories of weapon, Reagan said in frustration that none of this would matter ‘if we eliminated all nuclear weapons’. Immediately, Gorbachev replied: ‘We can do that. We can eliminate them.’ Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, sitting in on the conversation, couldn’t hold his tongue. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. The implications of this sudden meeting of minds were, as one observer put it, ‘cosmic’. Within a matter of moments, the future prospects of the human race had changed. And so had Thatcher’s prospects of squashing Kinnock at the next election.

****

Thatcher secured an invitation to Camp David, where she intended to remind Reagan of some hard political truths. Her principal aide, Charles Powell, drafted a memo in which he laid bare the core of the argument she would need to get across to the president (the emphasis comes from Thatcher’s annotations of the text):

You will cause me very real political difficulties if you pursue your proposal for eliminating ballistic missiles too actively. In our people’s mind it will raise two questions: isn’t Labour right after all in wanting to get rid of nuclear weapons ... ? And why on earth should we pay out all that money for Trident, if it’s going to be abolished in 10 years? The next British general election could ‘turn’ on these points, so you must help me deal with these arguments.

In sum: worrying about the future of humanity is all very well, but what about the Labour Party?”

***

“By the mid-1980s hatred for Thatcher herself as well as what she stood for had become something comfortable and familiar to those on the other side of the political divide. As Ian McEwan wrote after her death in 2013: ‘It was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her.’”

“Brittan, when he falls, is pursued from office by nasty rumours about his sexual history. There is nothing in Moore’s account to give them much credence but plenty of evidence of the equally nasty undercurrents that may have fuelled them. At the time of Westland, when the backbenches were starting to chunter that Brittan was not sound, Alan Clark picked up on the word coming out of the 1922 Committee: ‘Too many jewboys in the cabinet.’ Brittan may also have been the victim of Cold War dirty tricks. Michael Bettaney, the MI5 officer caught trying to spy for the Soviet Union, was said to have revealed in the course of his interrogation that ‘Moscow had information about Mr Leon Brittan’s life that laid him open to blackmail.’ When the cabinet secretary checked with MI5 he discovered that Bettaney had said no such thing, but merely by inquiring he helped to keep the whispers alive. Most conspiracy theories have long roots, and they fold back into earlier conspiracy theories, so that the point where one ends and another begins is hard to discern. Anti-Semitism is almost always part of the mix.”

For Thatcher, the IRA, the NUM and the hard-left Labour councils were all of a piece: each sought to supplant parliamentary government with direct action and threats of violence. At the 1984 Conservative Party conference in Brighton she had been planning to deliver a stinging attack on Scargill and the NUM leadership, whom she regarded as ‘an organised revolutionary minority’ determined to subvert the rule of law. She intended her audience to understand that what she had to say applied to Ken Livingstone’s GLC as well. When an IRA bomb exploded in her hotel the night before she was due to give her speech, nearly killing her and succeeding in killing five others, she was determined to give it anyway. She didn’t feel any need to change it: she could simply extend what she wanted to say about the NUM and the GLC to include the IRA. She told the shellshocked delegates: ‘The nation faces what is probably the most testing crisis of our time, the battle between the extremists and the rest ... This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.’ They thought she was talking about her would-be assassins. In fact she was just reading the words that had been written before the bomb went off.”

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n23/david-runciman/fear-in-those-blue-eyes

The Sheep that thinks it's a Wolf

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