A story of neo-Stalinist smears
Henry Porter
Friday 15 May 2009
A reaction was certainly to be expected after the Convention on Modern Liberty in February and commentators have rushed to deny that there is any such thing as a crisis of liberty and rights in Britain. What’s striking about the blowback is not so much the similarity of style and approach but the expression of unworldly faith in the state.
Each critic argued that the case against the government has been wildly exaggerated; that where liberty and privacy had been curtailed government ministers have act proportionately; and, finally, that those who protest do so out of a kind of narcissism and a desire for political heroism.
In an issue of the New Statesman edited by Alastair Campbell, Conor Gearty of the LSE argued that there was a “naked selectivity” in the end of freedom hypothesis and that the golden age of freedom never existed. He added that a dangerous libertarianism stalks the land that “works to protect privilege by cloaking the advantages of the rich in the garb of personal autonomy, individual freedom and the ‘human right’ to privacy.”
In the Observer, Rafael Behr pretty much agreed with Gearty except on the matter of Golden Age, which he suggested was in fact today. We have never been so free or more liberated from the taboos and ignorance of the past, he wrote. Liberals who worried about our freedom “secretly craved repression in order to give themselves a sense of political purpose.”
And finally the editor of Prospect, David Goodhart, took space in his own magazine to say that a repressive state had been invented by liberal baby boomers with a romantic view of political struggle. “If there is too much suspicion of the state,” he wrote, “ and too many data protection rules the state cannot give us what we want … It be might useful if we started to see our data as similar to tax, something we willingly surrender to the authorities in return for various benefits.”
He ended with this. “By turning this complex, technical debate into a story of noble defenders of liberty versus cynical power grabbing tyrants the liberty lobby reinforce the lazy anti-politics of the age – a sort of UKIP for the chattering classes.”
There may be no conscious orchestration but the sudden appearance of these three Musketeers swearing oaths of statist fealty is interesting at a time of such profound disillusion, particularly since they accuse those who are concerned about liberty of being vain and hysterical, probably Conservatives in disguise and guilty of selfish individualism and anti-state sentiment.
This is the familiar hard left charge sheet, which I suppose must be also applied to Lord Bingham, the former chief law lord, Sir Ken MacDonald, the former DPP, Baroness Helena Kennedy, Phillip Pullman, Tim Garton Ash, Billy Bragg, Jon Snow, Vincent Cable and Dame Stella Rimington, the former Head of MI5. Most are, or have been, Labour supporters and all have expressed serious disquiet about the course taken by the government on the erosion of such rights as Habeus Corpus, free speech, freedom of assembly and protest and also in the crucial area of privacy. Bingham, MacDonald and Rimington come from the heart of the establishment: they have given years of service to the state, manifestly support its institutions but that does not mean they believe in inevitable wisdom of the British state.
What is wrong and maybe even dishonest about the Goodhart line is that he tries to smear the Convention on Modern Liberty as being anti-politics when the opposite is in fact the case. They are passionately committed to a renewal of politics, to the improvement of parliament, to controlling executive power and creating better means of engaging and representing the public. This has been the heart of the argument that we have been making all along.
A visit to Parliament will tell you why. Here is the Labour MP Frank Field writing on Comment is Free in the wake of the Damian MacBride affair. “Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of. Even the debates that are put on to fill in time are those that deny MPs a vote. The whole exercise is vacuous.” MPs freely express their bewilderment at the stagnation of Parliament, the increase of barely scrutinized secondary legislation and the use of the guillotine to cut short debate when the long, Parliamentary holidays must show that there is no pressure on the timetable whatsoever.
Gearty’s accusation that the Convention was composed of sentimentalists addicted to the idea of some golden past is completely wrong. No doubt many agree with Rafael Behr that a lot has improved in our society. But, unlike Behr, they can tell the difference between liberty and liberation from taboo, prejudice and illiteracy and they know that ours may be the first generation in hundreds of years of British history to hand on a society that is less free and offers less privacy than the one we inherited.
The critics have not felt the need to engage with the arguments of people like Sir Ken MacDonald who made a powerful speech that condemned the living hell of a totally watched society, or the former head of MI5 who suggested that the fear of terrorism was being exploited by the Government in order to erode civil liberties and so risked creating a police state. They ignore anything that goes counter to their view - for instance the report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which in March made a timely analysis of the abuse of demonstrators’ rights by police, or the document from the House of Lords of select Committee on the Constitution which gave a dire warning about levels of surveillance in Britain.They don’t consider that the European Union’s legal action against the UK government for its illegal tracking of Internet accounts or its defiance of the European Court of Human Rights judgment on the retention of innocent people’s DNA.
These are the tests Gearty, Goodhart and Behr flunk because on the whole it’s easier to accuse people of being covert Tories, especially if you suggest, as Gearty does, that privacy and personal autonomy are somehow privileges sought only by the undeserving rich, surely an astonishing claim.
Each promotes the unthinking paternalism that the German writer Wolfgang Sofksy describes as the product of state pessimism. “It is based on the erroneous belief that people are incapable of taking care of themselves and recognising what is good for them,” he writes in his recent book Privacy – A Manifesto. “The modern state, on the pretext that it is only doing what is best for people, intervenes in everything, even against the express desires of the ruled.”
Sofsky suggests that the process must inevitably lead “ toward an increasing disenfranchisement and expropriation of citizens”, a description that rings eerily true about modern Britain. The government’s pessimism about our society together with its bewildering lack of respect for the public is taking us to a dangerous place where power is concentrated at the centre of national life and a very few people are able to require each individual to engage in an endless rigmarole of proving his worth and innocence.
When Goodhart says that we should willingly surrender our data as a form of tax to the authorities in order that we may benefit from services, we must wonder exactly who he’s got in mind.
Is it the people responsible for the numberless cases of data loss and security breaches in official databases? Is he thinking of government ministers who have been flipping the status of their homes, or Jack Straw who over-claimed on
council tax reimbursement then attempted to sabotage the investigation of MPs expenses by the Committee on Standards in Public Life? Who is it that Goodhart wants us to trust? The people who lied to take us to war in Iraq? The financial regulators who catastrophically failed the public during the boom years? The peers paid to make changes in the law?
The point I make is not that the authorities are hopelessly corrupt and inefficient because they aren’t. It is that the authorities – IE those people who exercise the authority of the state - are made up of fallible individuals who are capable of making big mistakes and at a moment of calamitous institutional weakness have lost their way about the balance between their power and the liberty of the individual.
What the authorities need is not the craven support offered by people like these three writers but constant scrutiny by a Parliament that does not resemble the Marie Celeste. That is the only route to good government and a benign state. It is this urgent reform that the supporters of Convention on Modern Liberty will continue to argue for
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