Politics | 7 July 2007

Don’t mention the war on terror — even if we’re winning it

The war on terror is over — or at least has been purged from the vocabulary of Gordon Brown’s government. The phrase, he has decided, will never be mentioned by any of his ministers. The men who attempted to attack a London nightclub and Glasgow Airport are ‘criminals’ and not warriors. It is only a matter of terminology, of course, but Mr Brown knows the power of semantics. With no formal announcement, British policy towards global terror has changed fundamentally.

Jack Straw has longed for such a day. He may have been Tony Blair’s foreign secretary during the Iraq war, but he prides himself on never having uttered the words ‘war on terror’ and regards the phrase as a vulgar American import. Other Cabinet members agree, and claim to have never let these particular words pass their lips. It is all part of the disengagement from the American notion of the war — a war whose existence the government does not even technically acknowledge now.