Mark Neocleous

Prof Mark Neocleous teaches politics and government at Brunel University. In this conversation with Natalie Wulfing, he manages to laugh at the preposterous policy of the administrators at Brunel who are 'doing their bit' to defeat terrorism by trimming the foliage of the shrubbery:

MN: "... it doesn’t take much for a State to point to a whole range of insecurities and then to say that we, the State, must act. More interesting, more problematic, is that it doesn’t take much for the State to fabricate insecurities. Once that process takes place, it has a momentum of its own. There’s an interesting document produced by MI5 in 2004 and reissued in 2005 about how universities and large organisations can help in the ‘war on terror’. One piece of advice was to trim the bushes and small trees around entrances. Think about what that does. No terrorist attack has ever happened by a terrorist jumping out from behind a tree near an entrance to a building or planting a bomb there. My university actually did send an email around after this document arrived, and now the bushes at the doorways are all trimmed back! But think: how many times do people go in and out of their work or university building in a day? Now, every time they go through a door they are supposed to feel secure or insecure. So,
something as mundane as going for a sandwich becomes a question of security – or reminds people of their ‘insecurity’."

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