JN: This [G8] summit was disrupted in the most
awful way, as we all know, by what happened in London. Have you always felt at the back of your
mind that this was inevitable?
TB: It was inevitable. I think I’ve always said that these terrorists would try. I mean, they’ve tried in many different
countries throughout the world, and they were always going to try in our
country. It’s just tragic that they succeeded.
JN: What does it mean for all of us in this
country?
TB: The British have a very great inner
resilience and the response of people in London has been extraordinary. And several of the leaders at the summit
commented to me on how remarkable the British people are, that they’re simply
not going to be terrorised by terror in this way, and I think that we will
continue with our way of life.
I genuinely believe that. Even as we mourn the lives of those people
killed so brutally and so unnecessarily, the sense I think and I hope within
the country is to pull together and to make sure that people can’t divide us.
JN: You’ve argued here at Gleneagles that this
is an example of politics triumphing over adversity, that you carry on, that
you issue your communiqués, that that dialogue will go on, but there’s a
philosophical point here, a point about how you practice politics, because on
the one hand you say, we’re resilient, we carry on, that’s how you defeat
terrorism, on the other hand ID cards, more control orders, questions about
whether people should be arrested for preaching unhelpful sermons in mosques,
more concrete blocks in the streets of London, the rhetoric goes one way, maybe
the practice goes another, we become an illiberal society, and if that’s true,
doesn’t that mean that the terrorists have won?
TB: If we became an illiberal society, it would,
but I don’t think we are. All modern
countries, all the countries around the table have had to take extra measures
to protect themselves, and it’s just a shame, it’s a shame that that has to
happen, but on the other hand it’s like the wretched iron fence around the
Gleneagles summit. I’m not suggesting
that these people there are anything like the terrorists, don’t understand me,
but the fact is that people are prepared to behave in a, in an irresponsible
way then democracy’s got to protect itself.
But, I think we stand today as a country that is in many ways a model of
an open, liberal, multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-cultural society. I think we’re rather proud of it.
JN: Do you accept that there is a danger when
governments are under pressure and there is security advice, and there is a
scare and you’re given information about what may be about to happen, that you
slip into a kind of authoritarianism .. authoritarianism by stealth, and that
that is a real danger for any government that still says it doesn’t want an
illiberal society?
TB: You’ve got to be very cautious about it,
which is why – I won’t go through all the details of the legislation we
proposed – but I mean they’re hedged about with an enormous amount of
restrictions on government power, and proper systems and due processes, and so
on. And of course, there is the human
rights legislation that we introduced which allows people to challenge
government, challenge its legislation.
The reason we had to change our legislation before the last election was
precisely because the House of Lords said this is incompatible with human
rights. Now, even if I may have
disagreed with that, none the less we accepted the verdict, and that’s what a
democratic society’s about.
JN: You have to accept, for example, on the
question of ID cards, part of the argument for which was terrorism, ID cards
were very, very unlikely to have made any difference to what has happened in
London?
TB: The argument about ID cards – and again it’s
probably not sensible to go into all the details now, or even appropriate to do
that – the argument is a far longer term one about how you make your borders
secure, and how you are able, fully consistent with people’s proper civil
liberties, to keep a check on who is coming in and out of your country, and
circulating within it.
But, probably with this type of
terrorism, the solution cannot only be security measures, and I’ve never really
doubted that myself. And, you’ve got as
a government to do everything you can to protect your people, but if people are
prepared to go on to a tube or a bus and blow up wholly innocent people at
random, to do the maximum death and destruction, without any thought for their
human rights or human life, there’s no .. you could have all the surveillance
in the world and you couldn’t stop that happening, and that’s why ultimately,
although we have to take the measures necessary, and we do, because that’s an
important part of protecting ourselves, the underlying issues have to be dealt
with too in terms of trying to get rid of this dreadful perversion of the true
faith of Islam, in terms of people
within the Muslim community, as they are doing, and I really welcome it,
standing up and saying that this is .. we abhor these acts of terrorism and
violence, there wholly inconsistent with the proper teaching of Islam, and also
creating a more just and a more fair world.
So I think that, you know, it’s
probably not the right moment now to go into these arguments about security and
laws on terrorism, and identity cards and all the rest. We can have those debates at a later
time. But, I think the one thing that
all of us want to hold to is to the belief that the British way of life has
something very special about its sense of fair play and democracy, and that our
revulsion at terrorism is not just revulsion at loss of life and innocent
bloodshed, it’s also a revulsion at trying to create change by these barbaric
methods of violence, and we will resist that, and we are resisting it as a
country, and the spirit that people showed indicates that.
JN: Have you ever worried in the last two days,
has it crossed your mind just as an individual that if you hadn’t gone to war
that we might have been spared this?
TB: That’s a debate again that people will
have. What was interesting, round the
table was, if you take President Putin, who was passionately opposed to the war
in Iraq, and yet suffered Beslan, if you think of Bali, and what happened
there, if you think that even after the change of government in Madrid, the
terrorists there were planning further terrorist acts before they were caught,
fortunately for the people of Spain, and if you remember that September 11,
that was the reason we went into Afghanistan,
September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of
these issues, and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all.
And so, people will have their
views about that, and they’ll have to make their judgement, but I think this
type of terrorism is, is .. has very deep roots, and as well as dealing with
the consequences of it, the terrible consequences of terrorism, trying to
protect ourselves as much as any civilised society can, it’s only when you
start to pull it up by the roots that you will deal with it.
JN: And what does pulling it up by its roots
mean?
TB: Creating the circumstances in which there is
a proper understanding between people of different faiths, in which some of the
critical issues in the Middle East are dealt with and sorted out, when people
can see out there in the Middle East that there is a perfectly good path to
democracy if people want to take it, and also, and I think that this is being
done now by sensible moderate people within the Muslim faith, those people who
are extremists and have perverted the faith of Islam – and the same way that
you have crazy people who have perverted the faith of Christianity in the past,
and some still do – that they confront
those extremists and defeat them.
JN: It’s been an extraordinary 72 hours for you
– the Olympic decision, the hopes you had for this summit, the horrors in
London, the end of this summit – the simple question, but I think people
probably want to know the answer to, what’s it been like?
TB: It’s been an extraordinary ..
JN: Have you ever known the gamut of emotions?
TB: No, I haven’t. I haven’t, because obviously, you cannot compare the winning of
the Olympics with the terrible deaths by terrorism, of course, you can’t. The truth is that on Wednesday, people felt
exhilarated and uplifted, and then on Thursday it felt an awful sense of
tragedy and despair at the mindless killing of innocent people. And then, the subjects for the summit are
important, and they’re important even with the acts of terrorism, even with the
Olympics or not, any of these issues.
What I’m left with is once again
the reflection of the extraordinary interdependence of today’s world. What is interesting is that those five
countries that came to discuss climate change in most of those, there have been
direct acts of terrorism in all of them, they’ve felt the impact of it in the
African nations, seven or eight of them that came today, most of them have felt
the impact of terrorism, and that’s just – it’s almost a cliché to say it – but
that’s the reality of today’s world.
And the reason why it’s so
important that we’re able to come together and co-operate and try and tackle
some of these major issues is because ultimately what we now know, if we didn’t
before, is that where there is extremism, fanaticism, or acute and appalling
forms of poverty in one continent, the consequences no longer stay fixed in
that continent, they spread to the rest of the world, which is why it’s so
important that the leaders of the world come together, with all the
imperfections of any process like a summit, do their level best to send a
signal out to people that politics can make a difference and that, for all the
tricky compromises along the way, it’s better to do business that way than
through violence and bloodshed.
JN: A lot of people here were reflecting in the
course of this week that you’d hoped that this might be one of your great
moments, one of the moments you might enjoy, where you got an achievement that
you believed was very important, and it turned into one of your worst. Is that true?
TB: When you find yourself looking at the death
and destruction, there’s just nothing more awful, and not just because you’re
the leader of a country and a prime minister, but also you think of all the
families that are grieving and you think of all the people’s lives that have
been either ended or upturned forever as a result of it, and you then match
that alongside the fact that we actually came to this summit to try to do
something good.
There are lots of things we might
disagree about, my government, some of the governments represented here, have
done in the past few days, most people actually think that what we were trying
to do on Africa and climate change was the right thing. So what do you do when
you see alongside the action on Africa and climate change the despairing
tragedy of terrorism. What you’ve got
to do, the only way you can make sense of it in the end as a human being, never
mind as a leader, is to contrast the two and to say there are two ways that
this world can go forward, one is the way of a fanatic and the other is the way
of a democrat.