 In the wake of the unspeakable tax commissions in Manchester, there have been calls to get tough on terrorism, stop pandering to wishy-washy PC Liberals and get boots on the ground. The streets of London now are brittling with law enforcement and there's been talk of expanding the powers of the Snoopers Charter, allowing the government to monitor the behaviour of its citizens even more than before. If you're thinking that this all seems a little Orwellian, well then you'd be right. Acts of terrorism have frequently been used as a pretext for pushing through draconian legislation that steadily chips away its civil liberties. Just a few months ago, Amnesty International called the UK's anti-terrorism legislation dangerously disproportionate, with the director of Amnesty International UK stating that, the Big Brother surveillance state that George Orwell warned of back in 1949, is alive and dangerously well in Europe today. Governments, including the UK government, are not far off creating societies in which freedom is the exception and fear the rule. The argument usually goes that, yes, we do need to sacrifice some of our civil liberties in order to stay safe, but I don't think it's a cut-and-dried case of calculating how much intrusive surveillance and policing we need to accept, how much liberty we should forfeit in order to stay safe. Combating end-to-end encryption and expanding the Snoopers Charter provides, at most, a minor inconvenience to terrorists. It does a far better job at allowing the government to better survey the lives of ordinary citizens, of a vast majority of folk who are disgusted at the thought of such a monstrous attack. And moreover, this approach is not just ineffective, it's actually dangerous. Anti-terrorism legislation is used as the legal basis for the government deporting people to countries where they risk torture or death, in contraversion of international refugee law. It can be used to strip people of their nationality, detain them without charge or without sufficient legal process. To me, that doesn't seem like a good way of protecting people. To me, protecting people doesn't mean hauling them away in the middle of the night, strip searching them for no reason. It doesn't mean putting more guns in the hands of the police. Last time we suffered a terrorist attack and armed forces poured onto our streets, an innocent man named Jean-Charles de Menezes was gunned down in a tube station and no one was held accountable. Of course, most of the people on the sharp end of this legislation are people of colour and it's probably fair to say that the government doesn't really give a damn about them with the way that it's openly panned as to Islamophobia and all kinds of racism. We have to remember that these policies are actually a threat to everyone. The definition of terrorism is alarmingly vague. It's defined as acts motivated by political, religious, racial or ideological reasons designed to influence the government of any country or international organisation, or to intimidate any member of the public, anywhere in the world. That essentially means that you can be defined as a terrorist or a domestic extremist for really the slightest infractions. The previous green candidate for mayor of London, Jenny Jones, was supposedly a domestic extremist. Under the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004, wherever there is a threat of terrorism, the government can make emergency regulations that could temporarily override almost any other legislation, all due process, all concerns for people's rights, straight out the window. That doesn't make me feel particularly safe, particularly stable or secure. It might increase state powers, sure, but protecting the state is not the same as protecting the people who live within its boundaries. And when it comes to terrorism, it doesn't tackle that problem either. When prevent legislation means school children are treated like suspects, when minorities are searched and arrested for no reason, when the border police prowl through migrant communities, when Islamophobia fuels racist street attacks, all of that sends the message, you are not one of us. Yes, we want to protect people, but not you. Your lives are less valuable. Your lives are disposable. That alienation is a gift to jihadist recruiters, to the reactionary theocrats who trade on taking young people's anger, people's disaffection and turning it deadly. The way to combat terrorism is not to roll out a police state. It's to reject the politics of division, of warmongering and of xenophobia that helped get us here in the first place.