My building has every convenience

You can define a thing in many ways, especially when it’s an abstract concept (“terrorism”, “democracy”, “British values”…). You can define to persuade, by emphasising features you believe people will find desirable (or, in some cases, undesirable). Alternatively, you can define to exclude, emphasising features some people will find it impossible to sign up to. You can even define to provoke, emphasising features some people will positively object to; this is particularly effective when other listeners aren’t in on the disagreement in question, and are thus faced with the unattractive sight of a minority making a fuss about nothing.

A more radical approach, and one which New Labour is particularly fond of, is the un-definition or anti-definition. I first saw the power of the anti-definition several years ago, when I was (briefly) a union rep. Negotiations over job descriptions repeatedly ground to a halt over management reluctance to take anything out. (I’m sure management would have another version, centring on trade union obduracy, but this is my story and I’ll tell it how I saw it.) But what about this clause?, we asked on more than one occasion. If it stays in our members could be forced to do this, this and this! (I can be less specific.) No, no no, we were assured, there’s no question of people being forced to do that (let alone that and that). OK, fine, we said, if you aren’t going to use that clause it can come out, right? But of course, it wasn’t OK – if that clause came out there’d be no flexibility, people could insist on sticking to the wording of their job descriptions… You mean you wouldn’t be able to force people to do this, this and this? No, no no, we were assured… and off we went again.

An anti-definition, in other words, is a definition framed broadly enough to allow the actual definition applied at any one time to be, well, whatever you need it to be. A classic example is ‘anti-social behaviour’, which is defined in law as

behaviour by a person which causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more other persons not of the same household as the person

(Emphasis added.)

Another concept which has been anti-defined under New Labour is ‘terrorism’. The definition given in the 2000 Terrorism Act is lengthy; the briefest summary I can come up with is “carrying out or threatening to carry out politically-motivated personal violence, property damage or social disruption, either using firearms or without firearms but with the intention of intimidating members of the public or influencing the government”. (Yes, the bit about how the intention doesn’t matter if you’re using guns is strange. I didn’t write it.) While the wording of the Act is restricted slightly by a scattering of ‘serious’s and ‘seriously’s, what this essentially means is that any violent act, any act of property damage and any act with the potential to endanger public safety – for example, a sit-down protest which stops the traffic, and hence could stop the emergency services getting through – any of these things, if done for political reasons, is an act of terrorism. Not only that, but threatening to do any of these things is a terrorist act in its own right. Or rather – and here’s the beauty of the anti-description – any of these things can be an act of terrorism. In practice ‘terrorism’ means something rather narrower and more specific – although precisely what it means isn’t defined and doesn’t have to be.

There has been an odd series of incidents recently involving hate mail sent to Labour activists and other people unlikely to be on the BNP’s Christmas card list (leftists, gay and lesbian groups, a synagogue). The tactics have escalated from simple nastygrams, through letters containing white powder (not anthrax) to an actual letter-bomb, although one which thankfully didn’t go off. What struck me in the Grauniad story was a reassuring comment made by the police officer investigating the letter-bomb incident:

He stressed that officers are not linking the incident to any terrorist activity.

Call me a naive literalist, but it strikes me that posting explosive devices to your political enemies is terrorist activity: it qualifies under a common-sense definition, and (more importantly) it falls well within the ample embrace of the Terrorism Act definition. But apparently these were ordinary decent criminals using an ordinary decent letter-bomb; it certainly wasn’t a terrorist letter-bomb.

Because, of course, when we say ‘terrorism’ in 2006 what we really mean is something a bit more specific. (There is, after all, a war on.) And it’s not too much of an imaginative leap to suppose that, in a couple of years’ time, the effective definition of terrorism will be different again, as police priorities turn to different kinds of contentious political activity. The wording of the Terrorism Act is an anti-definitional sweep net, allowing different effective definitions to be used and discarded without any changes to the law, and hence without any political involvement or public debate.

Like the job descriptions I argued against (unsuccessfully), anti-definitions can always be justified on grounds of flexibility and managerial efficiency. The question is who benefits from these gains in efficiency, and who pays. Anti-definition asks us to put our trust in managerial arbitrariness and exception-making: no, no no, there’s no question of that… But the law stands, by definition, against exceptions and arbitrary decisions: an anti-defined law is a dangerous and corrosive paradox. The ultimate outcome of this approach to law-making is a state with only one law: Everything Is Forbidden (Unless We Say Otherwise).