Henry Porter

With Labour addicted to regulating how we live, the lone rebel deserves support if we want our freedoms to remain intact

Henry Porter
Sunday June 29, 2008
The Observer

The Spanish parliament last week voted overwhelmingly to enshrine a system of rights for the great apes - orang-utangs, chimps, gorillas and bonobos, the species that is closest to man and fashions tools to winkle termites from their mounds. The law will mean that the non-human hominids have the right to life and freedom and may not be tortured. The move is welcome, though there is no mention of the two lesser apes - the gibbon and the siamang - and it seems odd that this comes from a country whose national pastime is the terrorising and slaughter of bulls.

Still, civil libertarians have to take what they can get these days. It would be ridiculous, and dishonest, to attempt any contrast between the concern for the rights of the great apes in Spain and the wholesale attack on rights in Britain, or the worrying signs in Italy where Silvio Berlusconi's government has plans to fingerprint the children of gypsies. But there is something to be drawn from the Spanish law which captures the essence of any system of rights -for great apes or humans - and that is the empathetic Christian tenet to treat others as you would be treated yourself. This is civilisation, progress.

Forget bonobos. In Britain, we have regressed and that is the trend which David Davis is importantly drawing attention to in the run-up to his byelection and no doubt beyond. Rights, liberties and the liberty instinct are evaporating in this country, partly through ignorance of the historic struggle to win our freedoms - and the civilising effect this had on the world - and partly from selfishness and fear that has been remorselessly encouraged by the tabloid press. Into this gap have stepped sinister forces in the Civil Service and a government programmed to think of governance as no more than control.

We may be at the stage where we should coldly ask what is the point of personal freedom in our society? Russia has democracy without liberty and China has capitalism without democracy or liberty. Does the 21st century need to bother with the thing that tied up so much effort in the previous 250 years? Have personal freedom and rights become redundant, rather like the familiar objects that are gradually disappearing in our de-physicalised world - letters, CDs, road maps, photos, address book, albums?

Would it not be simpler if we handed over our rights to people like Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who last week announced that the state will identify children as young a five as being at risk of becoming criminals and troublemakers and force their parents to sign legally binding contracts to control those children? Do we sacrifice the freedom to bring up children as best we can, to assembly, to protest, to free speech and privacy of communication and movement for the - unguaranteed - freedom from terror, crime and antisocial behaviour?

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister a year ago, for a brief moment it looked as though he might just provide some of the right answers to these questions. A couple of months after he succeeded Tony Blair, the Department of Justice published a fat report entitled 'A British Bill of Rights: Informing the Debate'. We haven't advanced on a bill of rights and there wasn't even much of a debate. However, three months later, Justice Secretary Jack Straw declared: 'Yes, the sun does rise in the East. And yes, we have deepened and extended civil liberties for all', sentences which should earn him a pelting with soft fruit whenever he appears in public.

As Davis points out, Brown has banged on about Britishness in an attempt to bolster the Union, but in successive measures, culminating in 42-day pre-charge detention, has attacked the very essence of Britishness. It is interesting that among the strongest responses to Davis's stand is the fierce bewilderment of people who remember the last war and what we were fighting for.

So who is to answer those questions? Certainly not Labour, though there are many good people on the backbenches. The Liberal Democrats already have done so because, to a man and woman, they are ardently for freedom, even though they could do much more to contribute to the public understanding of the issues. So it must be the Tories, right? Well, maybe. In an essay to be published on the Our Kingdom website, constitutional campaigner Anthony Barnett says: 'The action David Davis took was profoundly radical because what he was saying from the steps of the House of Commons is that Parliament won't defend us because it is corrupted and suborned.'

There is some truth in that. If the Tory party was totally at ease with the issues of liberty and rights and did not fear being boxed into a corner by another terrorist attack, there would be no need for Davis to resign his seat. With Labour's dreadful showing in the polls, the Tories may be tempted to sit on their hands and simply watch the beleaguered Brown without making any big analysis. A trawl along the frontbench last week provided some interesting reactions, especially from those regarded as authoritarian. There was greater warmth for Davis than I had expected, though it is still hedged with doubt about his resignation. They concede that he has received more support than they thought was out there and better coverage than they expected.

In terms of individuals, David Cameron, whom I regard as unreadable, is said to be more libertarian than his friend, the shadow Chancellor George Osborne. Dominic Grieve, who has succeeded Davis as shadow Home Secretary, is solidly libertarian. Andrew Lansley (health), David Willetts (innovation, universities and skills), Nick Herbert (justice), and Michael Gove (children, schools and families) are said to be less absolute. Gove offered this about Conservatives in general: 'In my observation of Tory grassroots, there are grave concerns about liberty and civil liberties in particular. The Conservatives of England are more exercised about the erosion of civil liberties than the centre.' That may explain the popular support for Davis.

The mystery perhaps is why he is left to make the big argument, because there are political opportunities here. The first is that Labour has betrayed its mission to champion the poor and vulnerable. A report by Independent Scheme Assurance Panel on ID cards found that not only would there be inbuilt mistakes in the database, but that poorer people would suffer a greater risk of fraud. This follows the pattern set in Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act, which allows bailiffs to offer violence to householders while seizing goods in settlement of fines, and in the thousands of criminal justice measures that place people beyond the law who were not previously guilty of any offence.

What is fascinating about New Labour's seeming horror of the underclass and frustration with its problems is that both display a lack of the empathy required in any system of rights or in those who fight for social justice. This overlap is important because it underlines the truth that there can be no social justice without a proper respect for the rights of everyone. The Tories could surely demonstrate Labour's failure in this department.

The second opportunity concerns the traditional Conservative mission to champion the individual and roll back state power. Last week, the Poynter review on the loss of 25 million records from HM Revenue & Customs was published. The culprits - Gordon Brown, Dawn Primarolo MP and David Varney, the former head of the HRMC - have all moved on to other jobs, in Varney's case to the Transformational Government project that will oversee the merger of all government databases in a monstrous implement of surveillance. Forget privacy, let's just think about the appalling, and expensive, mess that this is likely to result in. And while we're about it, the waste of public funds in local government surveillance operations and CCTV systems which Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville, Scotland Yard's CCTV expert, declared an 'utter fiasco'.

With the Tories' post-bureaucratic theme, there is surely more to be made of the relentless aggregation of power to the centre, seen in the planning bill that seizes democratic rights from the people and places them in the hands of an unelected quango or the measure proposed in the counterterrorism bill that allows ministers to interfere with the running of coroners' courts. What do Conservatives stand for if not smaller government, much less matronly interference, devolution of power, privacy and the freedom of the individual to express and fulfil him or herself to the maximum of their potential?

Parliament had better begin to address these issues soon or a chimpanzee living in Spain will have more rights than you and me.