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Taking liberties
Jack Straw preaches the importance of Britain's history of freedom, but his government is responsible for removing much of itHenry Porter Monday, 30 April 2007 Guardian Cif Jack Straw has made what is described as a rallying call for the story of freedom in Britain. He says we should imitate America by telling stories of how the country came to be what it is today. Writing in the Chatham House Journal, The World Today, he says we should stress that freedom lies at the heart of the story. "That means freedom through the narrative of the Magna Carta, the civil war, the bill of rights, the Scottish enlightenment, the fight for votes. And the emancipation of Catholics, non-conformists, woman and the black community." In the decade-long attack on liberty and rights by this government, there has never been a more astonishing nor more hypocritical statement made by any member of Blair's team. It is a measure either of the extraordinary absence of self-awareness in New Labour, or a wholly cynical exercise in propaganda during election week. Either way, no member of this government has the right to descant on freedom as Mr Straw does, least of all in the cause of national unity. What he conveniently forgets is that there has been no government in the last 60 years, possibly the last century, that has withdrawn or compromised the very freedoms that he says define our culture as much as New Labour. In terms of privacy, defendant's rights, the liberty to protest when and where we want, to say what we want and to move about and communicate without being observed by the state, we are far less free than we were in 1997. You need only look at the ID card bill in all its fussing, intrusive detail to know that New Labour presents a very great threat to British traditions of freedom. Mr Straw, now Gordon Brown's campaign manager, has been a member of the cabinet ever since Tony Blair won power 10 years ago, yet not once have we heard him speak out against the campaign against British liberty. There is no hint that, even in private, he has opposed Blair's statement that "civil liberties arguments were made for another age". Straw has gone along with everything without the slightest visible qualm or the merest whisper of criticism. How can he possibly say "I believe that the more we can strengthen and make explicit the rights and responsibilities which come with being a citizen, the more we can make democracy and identity compatible in a way which protects and celebrates all manner of identities"? Perhaps he hopes that this article will somehow obscure the government's true record: that we have become so sloppy in our thinking that we will be reassured by his affirmation of the core values of "democracy, freedom, fairness, tolerance and plurality". Like so many who contributed to the excellent debate on CiF following my Observer column yesterday, I am more worried than ever about the direction of New Labour's policies, in particular its sense of entitlement over the life of the individual, of the trend towards centralisation and the contempt for parliament and the people. Jack Straw has always struck me as one of the more feline and adaptable individuals to rise to the heights of British politics. He is a survivor par excellence and he has a good nose for new scents on the wind, which may explain why he has written this article. But his claim to respect British history is completely new in a government that has thrilled to the exercise of power - yet rarely good management - and has introduced thousands of reforms in the name of modernisation. Modernisation is Blair's only ideology and a crucial part of it was his year zero disdain for all that has gone before. History had nothing to offer Blair or his colleagues when it came to thinking about modern problems. When in my Observer articles I mentioned the bill of rights and Magna Carta Libertatum (to give the charter its full title) or the struggles of John Wilkes and Charles James Fox or Mary Wollstonecraft, one could almost hear New Labour's exasperation that someone was banging on about issues that were alive two hundred or more years ago. To New Labour history never mattered. Of course this article by Straw is chiefly aimed at the problems of integration Britain faces today. He hopes to provide some kind of unifying sense of Britishness to the communities that produced the men who were today found guilty of plotting explosions across the country. And his intervention should be seen as flowing from his concern about women wearing the full veil when they visited him in his constituency surgery. At the time, I agreed that he had a point, but let us just be clear that if you are to lecture the British people on our shared history of freedom, you must at the same time support the principles of liberty in your programme of legislation. If Labour feels so strongly that liberty is part of the British story why hasn't the government made it part of the national curriculum? One answer may be that if you bring up an entire generation to understand the extent of individual rights under the unwritten British constitution, it is far less easy to remove those rights. Labour has been able to do what it has over the last 10 years because people are on the whole rather hazy about what is in Magna Carta and the bill of rights. They have little idea what Wilkes or Fox or John Stuart Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft did, and the incremental victories on the way to British democracy are a mystery to them. So, yes, let us become more aware of the story of liberty in Britain but until New Labour comes to terms with what it has done we can hardly expect anyone to take Jack Straw seriously, least of all the disenchanted of Blackburn, Beeston and Birmingham.
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