Why I told Parliament: you’ve failed us on liberty

Why I told Parliament: you’ve failed us on liberty


After a celebrated two-year campaign to protect our freedoms, The Observer’s Henry Porter was called last week to give evidence to a panel of peers and MPs assessing whether a Bill of Rights is necessary for Britain today. Here is his impassioned submission

Henry Porter
The Observer,
Sunday March 9 2008
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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday March 09 2008 on p33 of the Comment section. It was last updated at 00:04 on March 09 2008.
Two things are striking as you read through the oral evidence presented to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The first is the measured calm of the majority of your witnesses and, indeed, of the majority of the committee, in the face of the most serious attack on personal freedom and privacy ever mounted during peacetime in this country. British democracy is on the brink of being changed beyond recognition, yet nothing seems to disturb the equanimity of your proceedings. Even allowing for the well-mannered traditions of parliamentary committees, the lack of urgency and of a sense of crisis seems remarkable.

The second point that occurs to an outsider unfamiliar with parliamentary routines is that this campaign against Britain’s historic rights and freedoms began at almost the precise moment the European Human Rights Convention was incorporated into British law as the Human Rights Act (HRA) in 1998. In other words, the HRA, a Bill of Rights by any other name, has allowed the executive and Civil Service to roll back individual liberty and privacy and has done almost nothing to defend the British public from the accumulation of centralised power.

Let me make it clear that the HRA has brought many benefits, for instance in the questioning of rape victims, treatment of old people and ensuring that foreign prisoners who may be tortured in their countries are not deported. But despite its many advantages, the reality is that the HRA does not work effectively as a Bill of Rights and cannot guarantee the civil liberties necessary for a free society, a point perhaps tacitly admitted by the appearance of Gordon Brown’s green paper last summer.

The shocking loss of rights in Britain is now being noticed with bafflement abroad by people who do not understand this turn of events in one of the oldest democracies in the world. On a book tour last month in France, I was repeatedly asked by journalists: ‘Why in Britain? Why are there no demonstrations?’

There are complex answers to these questions, but an obvious one is that the government has consistently advanced the argument that new laws meet singular threats from crime, terror and antisocial behaviour. We accepted these appeals with a rare faith in the wisdom and benevolence of our leaders, a faith, incidentally, that I increasingly do not share. After a decade, the account shows a devastating loss of the freedoms that we once regarded as our birthright, the self-evident and self-perpetuating virtue of the British people and their constitution.

The shocking part of it all is that it has occurred with almost no coherent analysis, scrutiny or opposition in Parliament, no debate about the direction of our society and only a little understanding and exposition in the media.

We have taken a false sense of security from the HRA. Indeed, there seems every reason to suspect that it has served the executive and Civil Service as an alibi, while the balance between state power and individual freedom has been critically altered in the state’s favour. If the maintenance of civil liberties is the best measure of a code of rights, then the HRA must surely be declared a failure.

But this is not due to any innate problem with the act, rather to the state of parliamentary democracy, which I will come to later.

To show how the HRA fails us in practice, I want to draw the committee’s attention to the key article eight in the act, the one that guarantees ‘the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence’.

By far the most dramatic threat to ordinary people’s freedom in the last decade has been the growth of the database state. Under Labour’s plans for ‘transformational government’, an almighty surveillance structure is envisaged, through which, by the admission of the man in charge, Sir David Varney, the state will know ‘a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experience, beliefs, needs or desires’.

As Jill Kirby pointed out in a recent Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, the government’s intention is to centralise and share all information on the citizen, both horizontally and vertically, without the citizen’s knowledge. It is hard to imagine a more sinister apparatus of intrusion, and so control, but the project advances untroubled by the scrutiny of Parliament.

The state’s nightmarish lust for our personal data does not stop there. Already, all journeys undertaken on motorways and through town centres are recorded by the network of automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, with the information retained for two years. Under the National Identity Register, it seems that 49 pieces of information will still be required by the state and that every important transaction in the citizen’s life recorded. And there is a new proposal to collect 19 pieces of information, including mobile phone and credit-card numbers from people travelling abroad, which the government plans to use for ‘general public policy purposes’ - that is, the mass surveillance of a free people. I remind the committee of something American cryptographer and computer expert Bruce Schneier wrote: ‘It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could some day facilitate a police state.’

The story of the HRA’s failure gets worse when you reach the guarantees on the privacy of family life, home and correspondence. The act simply doesn’t perform. There are now five databases that will, in various degrees, breach the privacy of children and their families. The home is threatened for the first time since 1604 by new regulations concerning bailiffs who, under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act, are about to be allowed to offer violence against the householder. As to our correspondence, with more than half-a-million intercepts of post, email, and internet connections a year, with nearly 700 authorities allowed to apply for phone records and to intercept a person’s communications on the thinnest pretext, it is clear the HRA has not and will not guarantee the privacy of our communications.

I hope I will not be thought melodramatic when I say that if this trend continues, there will be some who will not feel able to continue to live in this country.

There is a profound but unacknowledged crisis in this country. Our liberties have been attacked, but we have also suffered a collapse in what I would call the liberty reflex, both in and outside Parliament. Twenty years ago, the measures I describe above, which are often brought into law by statutory instrument - effectively ministerial decree - would have been unthinkable. The media would have been inflamed; former members of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) such as Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt would have been talking about a police state and there would almost certainly have been marches and protests. But today we just let it go.

This is why I believe a new Bill of Rights is imperative. But it must be a Bill of Rights that is clearly British in origin and that draws its potency from our traditions and culture, and from the settlements of 1689 and Magna Carta, insisting, for example, on the right to trial by jury, which is not found in European charters and conventions. There is no question that such a bill would include the alleged guarantees in the HRA, but, crucially, the drafting would be part of a process of general political renewal, in which there was a rebalancing of powers at the very top of our democracy. It should be a work of simplicity and eloquence in which the British people, not Parliament or a team of ministerial scribblers working from some bogus consultation process, define their inalienable rights as part of a new covenant between the people and Parliament and between the executive and Parliament.

It goes without saying that it should be entrenched, that is, placed beyond the reach of the authoritarian tendencies that are obviously alive in the Civil Service and the current administration and permitted by an easily manipulated parliamentary majority.

Conventional thinking says such laws cannot be ‘entrenched’ and that no parliament can bind its successors. But in reality this is nonsense. All constitutions, however strongly codified, always allow for a process of amendment. The Parliament Act may be amended so that a Bill of Rights could be altered only in circumstances where there was a consensus. The result would be the people’s prized possession, a thing that every child would learn at school and could perhaps quote at will later in life.

As you see, I do not recoil from the idea of unelected judges deciding where Parliament has overstepped the mark, because over the last few years, it has been the judiciary that has so often supported the principles of liberty and rights. MPs would be wise to agree with this and stop pretending to the public that they are the sole defenders of the public realm.

Parliamentary sovereignty is the reason why discussion about a Bill of Rights never gets anywhere. Its mystical power is unquestioningly viewed as the secret, or, at least, the guardian, of our free society. But is that really so? In the political context, the OED defines sovereignty thus: ‘Supremacy in respect of power, domination or rank; supreme dominion, authority or rule.’ Parliament is obviously not sovereign, because the executive runs everything. The government decides on and schedules parliamentary business, appoints the chairs of select committees and controls and smothers debate by means of standing orders and standing committees. The truth is that Parliament can offer the public little effective protection because it is itself in the thrall of the executive.

There is a temptation in this debate to think in rather academic terms about concepts of law and sovereignty, yet I am struck by the vivid examples of change that you hear about every day - the spread of unnecessary and intrusive CCTV; the appearance of immigration officials - plus heavies with earpieces - randomly stopping people outside London tube stations to question them about their status; the pupils being fingerprinted at their school library; the use of the ‘mosquito’ to control young people; the commands barked through speakers telling people to behave; the appearance of listening devices on the streets of Westminster.

Certainly our society has its problems, but I feel certain that this hectoring attitude stems from the government’s fundamental disrespect for the people and their rights. The attitude is at the heart of the transfer of power from the individual to the state.

Entrenching a Bill of Rights would go a long way to arresting the trend. But what we don’t need is a placebo bill drawn to act as a new alibi. I believe there is a very good reason why a Bill of Rights has been put on the political agenda by a government that is already responsible for the HRA. It recognises the strength of the case that has been made against it by civil libertarians and wants to answer that case before the next election with a measure that seems incontestably wedded to the principles of a free society.

It is a shrewd and cynical exercise, because at the same time the government will attempt to own the process and so ensure that nothing that remotely threatens executive power reaches the statute book.

Finally, I want to say something about the phrase ‘rights and responsibilities’ used by Jack Straw and Gordon Brown in respect of a new bill. This springs from the telling belief among ministers that rights are somehow in the gift of the government and that they are entitled to require people to sign up to a list of responsibilities in exchange. This is arrogant nonsense. The citizen’s responsibilities are defined by common, civil and criminal law and ministers display a constitutional impertinence by suggesting otherwise.

henry.porter@observer.co.uk

How this government has undermined society
Communications

· Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2002), government agencies make 500,000 secret interceptions of email, internet connections and standard mail.

· Since summer 2007, the government and some 700 agencies have had access to all landline and mobile phone records.

Databases

· Police build network of ANPR cameras on motorways and in town centres. Data stored for two years.

· The National Identity Register will store details of every verification made by ID card holder. Data used without knowledge of citizens.

· ID card enrolment will require biometric details and large amount of personal data.

· The Home Office plans to take 19 pieces of information from anyone travelling abroad. No statutory basis.

Free expressions

· Public-order laws have been used to curtail free expression.

· The Race and Religious Hatred Act (2006) bans incitement of hatred on religious grounds.

· Terror laws are used to ban freedom of expression in some areas.

The courts

· Asbo legislation introduces hearsay evidence which can result in jail sentence.

· The Criminal Justice Act (2003) attacks jury trial.

· Admissibility of bad character, previous convictions and acquittals.

· The Proceeds of Crime Act (2002) allows confiscation of assets without prosecution.

· Special Immigration Appeals Court hearings held in secret.

Terror laws

· Terror laws used to stop and search. Current rate is 50,000 per annum.

· A maximum of 28 days detention without charge.

Henry Porter

March 9, 2008 2:23 AM

I am afraid there is little hope Henry, a large proportion of the population of this country has no interest in freedom, justice, or preserving their rights as individuals.
The lack of historical perspective, the corrosion of the state education system, and the failure of the media to inform the citizen of the extent of the abuse and destruction of what little freedom he has left, is truly terrifying, the rights of the citizen are being destroyed every day.
We need PR and an election; if Labour gets in again, I will get out, and leave this country to it’s thoroughly deserved fate.Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
thirdrail


March 9, 2008 2:27 AM

A powerful submission. Clearly, if the machinery is installed, it will eventually be used. It may help to ask, “Why now?” What has changed?Of course, it may be that it is as simple as authoritarian villany. They can, and so they do. But perhaps there is more to it; and that brings us to what has changed. That something is cheap energy.

Luminaries from Churchill to Bernecke have noted that exponential economic growth has nothing to do with benevolence, but a lot to do with crowd control. When the poor have something to look forward to, however small, they remain docile. This economic growth has been fueled by cheap energy, which may be coming to an end.

If the era of cheap energy is over, so is the era of economic growth. That means discontent, unless the rich decide unilaterally to share their wealth. The time tested alternative is the authoritarian state.

Many would argue that an authoritarian state, however odious, is preferable to anarchy. Perhaps the current power pawns in parliaments and congresses and executives are among them. If so, the attempt to restrain their tendencies is not a winning long-term strategy. What is required is to expose and refute their premises, that an authoritarian state is necessary to maintain order.

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calumlaw


March 9, 2008 3:04 AM

Good, important piece, but i’m not convinced we need a Bill of rights which would need a standing Supreme Court-type body and lead to political appointments, as in the US.Porter’s campaign is making the mistake of conflating too many issues and hence failing to highlight any. With such things as phone-tapping and extending detention without trial, most citizens (rightly) see this as over-their-heads stuff to do with combatting islamic terrorism. To them such things are worth the risk (to the philosophical concept of Liberty). Frankly, I’m with them.

Porter would be on stronger ground if he limited his campaign to the surviellance/database phenomenon - something people can plainly see the inherent danger in. Just as capitalism has an internal logic which forces business to work to maximise profit and hence act ever more rapaciously, so too is the internal logic of the Bureaucracy fatally attracted to the control afforded it as a result of technological advance.

It is imperative that a genuinely popular debate be initiated about just how far this technology be allowed to encroach, and fanciful speculation about a Bill of Rights (which would take years to come to fruition)is ultimately obfuscatory.

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Strangebrew


March 9, 2008 3:21 AM

Nobody cares. You are talking about a country that re-elected a war criminal. As long as people get to breed, eat sugary snacks and watch reality television, nothing will change.Have you not realized that democracy has been over for some time?

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CraigTorso


March 9, 2008 3:50 AM

There, unfortunately, are far too many people in the country that believe they are law abiding citizens and therefore as they’ve nothing to hide they’ve nothing to fear, so seem happy to sleep walk into a surveillance state, although with the speed legislation is introduced in this country and the number of new laws that have been created by the home office over the last decade, how anyone can be expected to know them all, and be law abiding is beyond comprehension.
I commend the stance taken in your columns, but I fear that the vast majority of the population are utterly blind to what is happening whilst they diligently vote for their favourite next failed pop starOffensive? Unsuitable? Email us
Kimpatsu


March 9, 2008 3:57 AM

As with all politicians, New labour is stuffed full of authoritarians who view the electorate with contempt. And the electorate is asleep, becasue they are sheeple who docily believe that these assaults on freedom are for their own good. They don’t care how many innocent people are wrongly imprisoned, so long as they aren’t one of them. As long as this “I’m all right, Jack” attitude–this absence of empathy–continues, Britain will continue to spiral downwards into being a police state. We need a libertarian prime minister who will also stand up to America on issues like private information of people boarding flights. The simplest solution is tit-for-tat. Until that day, we are all slaves and serfs.Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
Wyndley1857


March 9, 2008 6:50 AM

There’s further confirmation of the trend elsewhere in today’s Observer.It seems children’s DNA is being added on the DNA database when they have committed no crime, and a “spokeswoman for the National Policing Improvement Agency” could only add - by way of reassurance?! - that:

“If a young person has DNA stored on the database but does not have a conviction, this database record will not show on criminal record checks for education or employment matters.”

So why, exactly, is the DNA not removed? What’s it there for?

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OneDayAbcNeverGiveIn


March 9, 2008 7:18 AM

Your article is so correct, but our MPs are such supine boot-lickers that nothing will come of it. Defenders of our freedom!Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
chris32uk


March 9, 2008 7:25 AM

“I hope I will not be thought melodramatic when I say that if this trend continues, there will be some who will not feel able to continue to live in this country.”Yes please do Mr Porter, perhaps Burma or North Korea, then you really will have something to moan on about…

[Edited by moderator]

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BritishAirman


March 9, 2008 7:47 AM

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wddr


March 9, 2008 8:08 AM

@chris32uk: “Yes please do Mr Porter, perhaps Burma or North Korea, then you really will have something to moan on about…”A brilliant argument. Because the UK is not as bad as some of the world’s most repressive countries, we have nothing to worry about. Presumably no-one in the UK should be worried about crime, because Columbia is more violent; no-one should worry about health because things are worse in Somalia; no-one should care about children’s education because our kids are better off than those in Afghanistan.

chris32uk - You don’t deserve to live in a country where people have sacrificed their lives in the cause of freedom.

[Edited by moderator]

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jamesc23


March 9, 2008 8:17 AM

What an excellent an inspiring article from Henry Porter - a summation of everything he’s been arguing for the last couple of years. Could he be the new Tom Paine?Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
freespeechoneeach


March 9, 2008 8:43 AM

I would add that the creation of Thought Crimes (Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill), such that it will merit three years’ jail to have unfashionable opinions, mark the Labour Government as the most oppressive in history.Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
sanuk8


March 9, 2008 9:47 AM

An excellent piece Henry. I’ve recently cancelled my 30 year membership of the Labour Party after voicing such concerns about our freedoms and the growth of the surveillance state to no avail. Most debates within local Labour Parties are about tombola stalls and binge drinking now. When I joined Labour, it was about a belief in liberation of individuals in some way and fighting the Tories’ repression of civil liberties. Funny how all has changed and we are treated to David Davies banging on about civil liberties now. I would never have believed that I would, living in Scotland, support the case for more power to the Scottish Government but I do now. Thankfully Labour are not in power here and we do seem to have an administration who will fight Labout dictat even if it’s about political point scoring.What do I care anyway. I’m emigrating with my partner in a few months and don’t think that I’ll miss this place.

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KingOfNothing


March 9, 2008 9:48 AM

Henry,I’m sure you are aware of this, but what you are battling against is the ability of the government (in collaboration with the media) to control the discourse to such a point where the public become resigned to it.

It is one thing being aware of this discourse, but another thing altogether is trying to create an alternative, post 9/11, discourse which prizes our rights above that of the power of the state.

Good luck.

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LittleTyke


March 9, 2008 9:55 AM

At the end of the day, what it comes down is to people like Henry Porter and others, like me, who support his campaign totally, saying to the government of Britain, you are wrong. And the government of Britain responding: No, we are right, and moreover we have the power, so sod off. The government is not the slightest bit interested in wanting to hear the views of the electorate. If it listens at all, it picks the favourable opinions, like: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” And thus having garnered the favourable opinions and made them out to be received wisdom, everyone else is disenfranchised, marked down as a recalcitrant or worse, and the government goes ahead in its merry, all-nannying, beneficent way to further tighten its hold on our short ‘n’ curlies. Soon it will be telling us the right way to use the toilet and to be sparing with the toilet paper, in case excessive usage belies an underlying medical problem that could cost “the taxpayer” lots and lots to sort out later.In other jurisdictions - Romania under Ceausescu comes to mind - eventually the people had enough and resort to civil unrest as the only means of making their point. That will also inevitably follow in Britain, too, eventually. It’s difficult to imagine how an army of middle class mercenaries could be gathered from the Sunday morning lawn mowing men and women of suburbia, but given enough provocation, anything is possible. And people are getting weary of waiting for an election. We were supposed to get one back in the autumn, until Brown bottled it, because the outcome seemed unfavourable to New Labour. Now we are supposed to bite our tongues, grit our teeth and summon up yet more stamina from our bottomless wells of tolerance for the next eighteen months to two years.

At the moment the BBC is showing episodes of a drama supposedly set in a Britain of the future which has introduced extensive mass surveillance measures to control its citizens. Many of those controls are here already and the mental attitude which would push the levers with glee is already present in many of the New Labour uptake, especially if one includes the unelected minions behind the façade of Newspeak, all beetling away to lock down Britain in what can only be described as a police state. Put the lawn mowers back in the garage, ladies and gentlemen! Think of your country for once, not the long grass that can hide so much.

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Gulfstream5


March 9, 2008 10:07 AM

Yes we need a ‘Macro Carta’ before this country becomes a replica of the USSR.If it were not for the Lords and the judiciary it already would be.

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Strangebrew


March 9, 2008 10:09 AM

“The government is not the slightest bit interested in wanting to hear the views of the electorate.”Of course they are. If this were a vote swinging issue, they would be falling all over themselves. But it isn’t.

Stop blaming the government. The voters are to blame because most of them don’t really care enough to do anything about it. Democracy doesn’t work, at least not in Britain. No doubt if you go somewhere like Sweden, you will see a proper democracy in action, but it just doesn’t work in Britain because the public just don’t care.

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bobdoney


March 9, 2008 10:29 AM

“the spread of unnecessary and intrusive CCTV; the appearance of immigration officials - plus heavies with earpieces - randomly stopping people outside London tube stations to question them about their status; the pupils being fingerprinted at their school library; the use of the ‘mosquito’ to control young people; the commands barked through speakers telling people to behave; the appearance of listening devices on the streets of Westminster.”And all this in the land of Saint Orwell. He meant “1984″ as a warning, not the first draft of a plan.

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harbinger


March 9, 2008 10:46 AM

Henry needs all the support he can get. It will do not good as his sane and sensible arguments fall on deaf ears. The authorities love all this Big Brother stuff just as they did in the Old Soviet Union and in East Germany, and for the same reason - controlling people is the wonderful gift of power. That one set of authoritarian figures was Communist and the current bunch run a democracy makes no difference: they both justify their actions in the name of the society they believe they are protecting. The Stasi leaders were utterly convinced they had right on their side and indulged in arrest without trial and torture just as western governments have done. The difference was the severity of repression used. The greater the perceived danger the more stringent the measures against ‘the enemy within’. Porter is right to point out that this is the door the current government has opened. We have not passed through it yet, but we will once people rebel against the kind of government they have. During the Second World War a government obsessed with an imaginary fifth column rounded up and locked up 22,000 people of German origin who had lived peacefully in Britain for decades. So don’t tell me it can’t happen here.Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
HarryTheHorse


March 9, 2008 10:48 AM

Green ink …. blah blah blah …. paranoia …. blah blah blah …. move to North Korea …. blah blah blah.I just thought I get the responses of the supporters of the sureillance state and the National Identity Register in first.

However as someone who supports the position you are advancing Henry, I think you might usefully adopt a new rhetorical approach, as your tone of continual outrage is becoming wearing and is not likely to win the undecided to the cause of liberty. It’s a bit like those scientists who drone on and on about global warming in apocalyptic terms so that most unengaged people think ‘well if we’re doomed I might as well have a good time’!

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steviescally


March 9, 2008 10:50 AM

they would never let the proles run the asylum, they prefer the middle class university types like Brown and Blair to get office on the backs of the working class and jump ship the minute they have to produce policies that will ensure all the principles they once said they possessed don’t complicate things. It’s called pulling the drawbridge up, do you think a socialist would toady to Thatcher, employ failed PFI f….ups to run the tube, get in bed with the arms trade to manufacture wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, penalise working class parents who wanted a university education for their kids…no Mr Porter. You are right.Offensive? Unsuitable? Email us
vonScharnhorst


March 9, 2008 10:53 AM

The only thing the British people are interested in is their cheap pornography (Read “I am a”star” get me out of here”, “Eastenders”, “page 3 of the Sun”, etc), Cheap and nasty alcohol, and their betting shops/lottery tickets.You have a “Government” that keeps telling you you are at war, therefore you need to be supervised, and have your every move watched, yet where do we see the evidence of this war” O.K so every so often, just to keep you on your toes mind, they arrange a little “bomb plot” somewhere in Britain.

For years we were “at war with East Europe”, now we are all friends, it was a big mistake, “we were NEVER at war with East Europe. We were ALWAYS at war with the Middle East”.

Words that are centuries old are now banned as “un PC”, they have been replaced with new words.

Have you ever tried getting hold of an archived news paper from before, say 1995? Try it. You will be AMASED at just how many have destroyed, or made unavailable, their archived material from before the web took of in a big way.

Now for a free carrot, can any one tell me WHICH book the “Government” is using as a training manual?

Von Brandenburg-Preussen.

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mynameisleghorn


March 9, 2008 11:17 AM

“As you see, I do not recoil from the idea of unelected judges deciding where Parliament has overstepped the mark, because over the last few years, it has been the judiciary that has so often supported the principles of liberty and rights. MPs would be wise to agree with this and stop pretending to the public that they are the sole defenders of the public realm.”And that’s where you lost me Henry. It’s precisely because unelected and barely accountable lawyers with horse wigs have been allowed to pass laws that the sinister stuff you rightly condemn has been allowed to sale through. Like most white baby boomers, judges are obssessed with a narrow set of sexual and personal liberties and frankly couldn’t give a toss if the government is collecting DNA from newborns. Never mind the right to association or trial by jury then. That’s what happens when you place the constitution in the hands of a narrow clique with particular prejudices and biases, and you can’t throw the bastards out if they screw up, we’re stuck with them.

“A maximum of 28 days detention without charge.”

Quick question. Why is 28 days OK but say 42 not? You’re back sliding a little bit here.

Even during the darkest days of IRA terror, when the entire British cabinet was almost wiped out in a terrorist attack, Thatcher saw no reason to enact the kind of draconian and far reaching changes we’re currently seeing. Then again Maggie was a small government conservative, 10 years of inane nu-lab propaganda about the enabling state have softened the British people up nicely for this crap.

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Lionel


March 9, 2008 11:27 AM

“[I]t must be a Bill of Rights that is clearly British in origin and that draws its potency from our traditions and culture….”I’m with you all the way, Henry, but am just as pessimistic as you probably are yourself. Traditions and culture mean little when we are numbed twenty-four hours a day by the forces of consumerism, which no politician of rank will take steps to attenuate.

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HowSoonIsNow


March 9, 2008 11:41 AM

Great stuff Henry - keep at it. Those who try to defend the growth of government monitoring and control, and their spineless allies who say ‘nothing can be done’, need to be argued with at every turn.This vile process can be stopped, and the damage can be fixed, but not by a Labour government - indeed, I expect no-one with any sense to trust a Labour government ever again. I don’t think it’s too much to hope that when they are defeated in the next election the Labour Party collapses into a shattered heap for another 20 years - it’d be all they deserved.

As the only party who can expel Labour are the Tories, the most important things now are to voice our opposition to government surveillance and monitoring (not just the growth of it, the very existence of it) at every turn and to force/ persuade/ encourage the Tories to take the firmest stand possible against it. This should include reaffirming that they will cancel ID cards and the NIR when they come to power, which ought to have a salutory effect on the willingness of the private sector to invest anything in the project.

‘As you see, I do not recoil from the idea of unelected judges deciding where Parliament has overstepped the mark, because over the last few years, it has been the judiciary that has so often supported the principles of liberty and rights. MPs would be wise to agree with this and stop pretending to the public that they are the sole defenders of the public realm.’

Judges and the Lords. As a republican I used to be in favour of a fully elected second chamber and the abolition of inherited titles but over the last five or so years I have completely changed my mind.

See me in my study after assembly department :

chris32uk - get lost you brain dead troll. What other names do you post under, I wonder ?

BritishAirman - will you please stop posting links to irrelevant religious crap on your boring website every Sunday ? It has nothing to do with the article - you are merely abusing CiF. If I were a mod I’d ban you.

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Buckley


March 9, 2008 11:56 AM

“It goes without saying that it should be entrenched, that is, placed beyond the reach of the authoritarian tendencies that are obviously alive in the Civil Service and the current administration AND PERMITTED BY AN EASILY MANIPULATED MAJORITY”And this majority under our electoral system is a phoney majority. Compare the way the Labour government can operate at Westminster, with a majority of 66 achieved by the government under first-past-the-post (even though in 2005 nearly 80% of the electorate did not vote for it), with the way the SNP Holyrood executive has to operate.

The SNP’s claim to power is that under a PR system fairly representing the views of the MAJORITY of the electorate it achieved one more seat than its nearest rival - the Labour party. It has no phoney overall majority to manipulate; and if it steps out of line (for instance by trying to go ahead with Scottish independence) the rest of the assembly would vote it out of office.

Even if the SNP had managed to form a coalition, and thus a majority - instead of a minority - government, it would still not have had “an easily manipulated (overall) majority”, and would have had to take account of the views of its coalition partner(s) in formulating policy, thus in effect taking into account the views of the majority of the electorate, instead of operating an elective dictatorship as under our undemocratic Westminster system.

To stay with the SNP example: in the unlikely event of its ever achieving an overall majority, such a majority would be a true majority representing the majority of the electorate (unlike, for example, what we saw in the eighties with Thatcher, with enormous overall phoney majorities, ramming her vicious policies down the throats of the majority of the electorate, even though she never had the support of more than a third of them).

While electoral reform is not a universal panacea it is a sine qua non for the reforms envisaged by Porter. I wonder why he does not even mention it!

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Strangebrew


March 9, 2008 12:04 PM

“Even during the darkest days of IRA terror, when the entire British cabinet was almost wiped out in a terrorist attack, Thatcher saw no reason to enact the kind of draconian and far reaching changes we’re currently seeing.”That was before the internet. Ordinary people can now monitor their government and respond in a publicly accessible medium immediately. Political leaders before the internet were helped by the fact that the dissemination of information regarding their activities was the preserve of a few, mostly from the privileged classes.

For example, the Iraq war was not too much different than many older dubious foreign interventions, but opposition was immediate, massive and well-organized, simply because the millions of people who thought it was bullshit found that there were no barriers separating them from like minded people.

Politicians simply think they can carry on as normal, and have just chosen to ignore the torrent of criticism. It’s an old tactic, not confined to our species. When the alpha male of a band of chimpanzees is too old to physically defend his position against younger males, he resorts to simply ignoring them. Even though this strategy eventually fails, it buys him more time than direct confrontation. This is why our elected representatives seem to have been living in a bubble these last few years. It’s essentially the same strategy that Blair used over Iraq.

The political class in Britain essentially serves the interests of a few at the expense of everyone else. That’s fine, except that most people are pretty egalitarian except in the case where they are threatened. Fear increases authoritarianism and acceptance of a hierarchical society. Social psychologists have understood this for years. So did the Nazis. If you make people believe that they are under threat, and that you can protect them, they will let you do pretty much anything. That is why the Tories (the authoritarian party) and their supporting media constantly exaggerate both the occurrence and severity of crime.

Labour are not much different these days. Since the Cold War ended, there aren’t any obvious or real threats to scare the public into submission. So terrorism and Muslims have to fit the bill. Terrorism actually used to be much worse and much more common in the 70s and 80s, when governments tended to treat it as the nuisance it was (The Baader Meinhof gang were never a real threat to European society, nor are Al Qaeda a real threat to us). Even then, the actual terrorists are more often comical and a danger to themselves rather than the public. Witness the idiot who set fire to himself.

But if the terrorists are incompetent, then no-one will take the threat seriously. In order that the threat be taken seriously, it has to look as though we are under threat. Hence, the ridiculous security and erosion of liberties. Similarly, the government makes crime look more serious than it is by putting cameras in public and getting “tough”. All this even though the crime rate has generally been falling in developed countries since the 1990s. But you’d think that the country was on the verge of collapse from reading the tabloids.

This fear politics is a ridiculous self-reinforcing farce. Of course thinking people won’t fall for this, but fear tends to kill thought, so many people simply don’t give a damn as long as they are satisfied the government is protecting them from the “evildoers”.