So, how do the parties match up on protecting our freedom?
The New Labour manifesto asks you to ignore all the suspicion the government has created during its term in office
Henry Porter
Sunday, 18 April 2010
The Observer
The picture on the front of Labour's manifesto of a young family
confronted by the rising sun and the words: "A future fair for all" has
been preoccupying me all week. The sickly blend of Stalinist
iconography and The Wizard of Oz is weird, but as important is the
contrast between the image and what I know Britain to be, which is less
free, less equal, less private and less just.
Here is a clutch of stories from last week that remind us of the
reality. A Freedom of Information request revealed that in the last six
years 15,000 people have been wrongly identified as criminals by the
Criminal Records Bureau. Stop and search was up by 182% in 2009, while
the use of the Section 44 terror law by officers to stop people without
suspicion rose by 66%. In Essex, bouncers, now dignified by the term
door supervisors, are being given powers to hand out fixed penalty
notices for drunkenness. In Stroud, a man was sentenced to four months
in jail for breaching an Asbo that prevents him swearing at his
television set. And in Manchester police used a 50,000-volt Taser on a
man suffering an epileptic fit.
The sunny uplands of a Labour future do not beckon, at least for me:
reading the manifesto closely, I realised there's an ingenious
mechanism of self-fulfilment at work which, for example, allows Labour
to stoke fear of crime and create thousands of new criminal offences,
then employ 17,000 new police officers and 16,000 new community support
officers and swell the prison population by 24,000. During the first
Labour term, the party relaxed drinking laws and planning requirements
for licensed premises. Now, it deplores drunken antisocial behaviour.
It sold hundreds of playing fields for development; now, it demands
that we find more for teenagers to do.
In this barely plausible document, which makes the astonishing boast:
"We are proud of our record on civil liberties", there is nothing to
remind us of the intrusions of state databases, the mass surveillance
planned for our email, phone calls and internet usage, the new measures
to allow secret interception of mail by the taxman, the attack on jury
trial, the half-million people who came under some sort official
surveillance last year, Britain's alleged involvement in torture and
rendition…
On and on the list goes, but I won't try your patience; I will just
tell you that I finally flung "A future fair for all" across the room
when I came to the section called "Democratic Reform" and the sentence:
"A new politics also means strengthening the power of Parliament to
hold the executive to account." This piety was too much to endure from
a government that cut short debate in Parliament by unprecedented use
of the guillotine, drafted legislation so that toxic measures at the
end of bills weren't examined and used record levels of unscrutinised
secondary legislation. The only reason Labour agreed to reforms that
will give backbenchers more say and the chairs of select committees
more independence was because Harriet Harman was ambushed by the
Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, as well as her own backbenchers. A
few weeks later, her party makes a virtue of something they were forced
to accept and which they had resisted for 13 years.
When people use extreme language about politicians I mistrust them, so
I will simply confine myself here to saying that Labour is not fit to
be in charge of a free society.
The impact of the last 13 years can be seen in the policies of both
main opposition parties but particularly the Conservatives who have
been bamboozled by sentiments such as this in Labour's manifesto: "The
Tories talk tough but vote soft on issues from gun crime to DNA."
With the help of Rupert Murdoch, Labour has permanently changed the
co-ordinates of the middle ground. On crime, the Conservatives cannot
risk the big girl's blouse taunt and while the menace of an intrusive,
bossy government may fit the party's criticism of the big state, the
manifesto confines itself to just one-and-a-half pages about restoring
civil liberties. Yes, it is encouraging that the Tories accept "Labour
has subjected Britain's historic freedoms to unprecedented attack", and
are committed to scrapping the ID card, yet there's no mention of a
great repeal bill to redress Labour's attack on liberty, which was
being pushed by Dominic Grieve, and no undertaking to hold a judicial
inquiry on accusations of British involvement in torture..
Writing in the Observer, David Cameron commits the party to openness in
government and to some disclosure of personal data, which is welcome,
but he does not go the whole way to make all personal information held
by the state available to the individual, who should also know who is
using his or her information and what for. That would represent a real
transfer of power from state to individuals and society.
As you would expect, the Liberal Democrats are much better on civil
liberties. Their manifesto guarantees a freedom bill, trial by jury,
the reform of the regulation of investigatory powers laws and
protections for free speech and protest. They promise to scrap ID
cards, the children's database and fingerprinting in schools, put a
stop to the creation of new offences and remove innocent people from
the DNA database.
It's good that both opposition parties recognise the problem, if only
fleetingly in the case of the Tories. I am beginning to wonder if any
politician appreciates quite how much Labour's laws and its corrosively
pessimistic view of society have permeated national life or, for that
matter, the way that a culture of fear, encouraged by government and
the popular press, leads to ludicrous overreaction on the ground. There
is something freakish about a man being stopped from taking photographs
of his own toddler in a shopping mall or police using terror laws to
search an artist doing a watercolour in London.
Since reading the following sentence a few years ago in John
Skorupski's study of John Stuart Mill I have been haunted by it. I
quote it again because it seems so absolutely right for the moment. "It
could be," he writes, "that modern democracy chronically risks falling
into a cycle of periods of cultural stagnation interrupted by brief
phases of undiscriminating assault on its vital traditions and
institutions: dominated in both phases by the intellectually
second-rate but socially and politically effective."
There seems no doubt that we have passed through just such a period of
assault and that last phrase certainly describes New Labour but there
is a real obligation on us to guard against stagnation and the lazy
addiction to fear.
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