On Start the Week, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty spoke of an arms race in Home Office policy. She wasn’t talking about tasers or automatic weapons for policemen. Her phrase was metaphorical. Now I find that this metaphor is habitual to her. She used it when giving evidence in 2008 to the committee considering the Counter-Terrorism Bill. It quite annoyed Tony McNulty, who had not then resigned as a minister nor yet apologised to Parliament about his expenses claims.
In discussing detention without trial, he told her: ‘You made a very negative characterisation of the shift from 14 to 28 days. You described it as an arms race.’ She replied: ‘In an arms race there is plenty of substance that is achieved by the escalation… . An arms race is a useful categorisation in that the arms race potentially can go on for ever, and can potentially be counterproductive and damaging to those on both sides of that race.’
In 2009, Miss Chakrabarti told a lunch for the Association of European Journalists that an ‘authoritarian arms race’ began in home affairs well before 11 September 2001. Since then her arms race metaphor has, as it were, escalated. Last November, Mark Damazer, late of Radio 4, now master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, noted that in a talk there she had launched ‘an attack’ on Michael Howard and Tony Blair for their ‘illiberal arms race’ on home affairs. Now, only two months later, she’s at it again.
Like Miss Chakrabarti, I think of escalation as a bad thing, though I would not voluntarily use the metaphor. So I was surprised recently to find in some business-speak a reference to ‘escalation of logged technology issues’. The logs are not the kind that float down the Mississippi in rafts. The phrase meant the taking of problems (‘issues’) about some piece of technology to the next level of action — from logging them to doing something. That would be a good thing. I know that escalators go down as well as up, but in origin the word comes from escalade (16th century), ‘a siege-ladder’, designed to get over literal obstacles. Running to the top of an escalade, sword in hand, would be an arms race to concentrate anyone’s mind.
Comments