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Friday, January 11, 2008

Civil liberty

I wrote the following article for the comment page of the Guardian following various attempts to claim that we are less free than in the past. This article gives a different view.

As they had recently run articles on this issue they decided another right now was not needed but suggested it should go on the comment is free site. I agreed to this so now you can read it twice!

Follow the link below.

There is a dangerous fallacy around, fed by a newly resurgent Conservative Party, that Britain under Labour is less free than it used to be. It’s not true.

I am a fully paid up member of Liberty and also of the ever growing Sharmi Chakrabati fan club. She is necessary in any healthy society and ought to be cloned and exported widely! This however does not put her above criticism. She is wrong in saying that Britain is worse than other countries and I nearly made a claim to the Advertising Standards Council on Liberty’s recent advertisement about comparative international incarceration rates without charge. I think she just about stayed within the letter of the ASA code but certainly not the spirit of it.

France locks terror suspects up for anything up to four years and then deports them to beacons of civil liberty like Algeria. The British governments proposals on detention without charge requires a weekly review under the eyes of a judge (not a magistrate as in Europe) and are unlikely to happen more than once a year if that. That doesn’t make it right but it does make a comparison with Europe a bit bizarre.

The political risk the critics run by overstating their case is that they give a great deal of support to the Tory Party who already relish the sight of a Labour government being described by its supporters as worse than any other. So let’s look at the recent (forgotten) past.

In the 1970’s Britain locked up close to 2000 people for up to two years without charge or trial. That couldn’t happen now. In the 1970’s, 80’s and early 90’s we had internal exile – something we hadn’t seen in Britain since Henry the VIII’s time. People could be prevented from travelling from one part of the UK to another - initially on the signature of the Home Secretary alone. Under constant criticism from Labour and other quarters (but not the Liberal democrat’s who gave reliable support to the then Tory Government on the PTA) John Major’s government finally dropped that part of the Act.

And remember the wrongful convictions in Birmingham and Guildford to name but two? At that time there was no recording of police interviews and no contact with solicitors, relatives or friends in the first week of detention. That doesn’t happen now.

At its height there were around 6000 people per annum picked up for questioning under the old Prevention of Terrorism Act compared to around 1000 now. Northern Ireland was the cause of much of that late and unlamented legislation.

Republican and Unionist terrorism was a serious threat but considerably less serious and less difficult to deal with than suicide bombers who fly passenger aircraft into buildings and blow themselves up on the tube. I don’t think the proposed legislation is workable in its present form and I don’t understand why we don’t apply continental law to this tiny number of people and hold them – not for as long as the French, German’s and others do - but for a period longer in exceptional cases than the present 28 days while questioning continues under judicial supervision.

I think Lord Carlisle the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has it about right when he says that Britain’s terror laws are in advance of most other countries. But then we learnt from experience.

We should not fall into the trap of agreeing that we have lost liberties when we have gained so many. Neither should we make the mistake of thinking that only middle class values on liberty matter. Opposition to ASBO’s and cameras in public places are the classic examples of a misplaced set of standards on civil liberties. The people I used to represent in high crime areas actually enjoy the civil liberty of going out with a far lower fear of crime then they did previously.

ID cards which are common in so many democracies will make people trafficking more difficult. Although their advantages are probably overestimated they are not a serious threat to civil liberties in the way that some allege.

There are other civil liberties at risk because we are overly sensitive to some relatively harmless data bases. I would happily allow my DNA go on to a data base in the knowledge that such a practice would be a significant deterrent to some potential offenders in extreme cases like rape and murder. The civil right of a woman not to be raped is important and easily trumps concerns about possible undefined misuse of the data. Indeed if anyone wants to check my DNA from a hair off my head (despite serious deforestation problems) they can have one!

I have a long memory of politics going back to the Attlee Government. All Labour governments came to a point where many of their middle class supporters cried betrayal.

The Attlee government was good but that was not how it was seen in 1951 by many on the left. Attlee, they said, took us into a US led war costing well over a thousand British lives – Korea. Worse still he created NATO! And there was the small matter of the Atom bomb. There was also a tough law and order policy not to mention capital punishment. It wasn’t civil liberties that lost Attlee that election it was rising unemployment and loss of morale.

Many critics on the left abandoned Labour in the 1950’s and we went into opposition for 13 years. After about five years our best middle class supporters were saying “That Attlee government was really good – pity they lost”. True. The trouble is it could happen again.

Some Labour supporters love a betrayal – it gives them something to complain about. It’s called a conservative government.

Yes, Gordon Brown does have to get his act together if he is not to lose the next election but so do some of Labour’s left of centre supporters.

I hope you've checked out the 'Comment Is Free' site to see how few agree with you.

Did you ever vote against the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act?

"Opposition to ASBO’s and cameras in public places are the classic examples of a misplaced set of standards on civil liberties. The people I used to represent in high crime areas actually enjoy the civil liberty of going out with a far lower fear of crime then they did previously."

I understand that it is estimated that though UK has less than 1% of the world's population we have around 20% of the western world's surveillance cameras. What a chilling statistic. Why ever would the peaceful people of UK need that level of surveillance?

Also, your views are at odds with those of the government's information commissioner who has expressed the fear that we are sleep walking into a surveillance state.

And octogenarian Walter Wolfgang, who was detained under the prevention of terrorism legislation for simply shouting 'rubbish' (or 'nonsense') at Jack Straw, what heinous crime did commit?

As for ID cards, researxh has shown that the majority of us in Britain value our privacy too much to submit such a gross intrusion - and anyway we no longer trust the government to manage our personal data. I agree with the majority.

I'm not old enough to remember Atlee's government, though I am old enough to have sung 'They're changing the guards at Buckingham Palace' to him during a Coronation Day a street party in Walthamstow. I don't believe Atlee would have wanted peacetime ID cards either.

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