But the government's attack on civil liberties is finally driving ordinary citizens to protest
-
- The Observer,
- Sunday October 19 2008
larger | smaller - Article history
Thirty years ago when I was irresponsible, full of beans and working for an evening newspaper there used to be a technique to divert the attention of the libel lawyer. The trick was to write a wholly outrageous allegation into the first few paragraphs of a story, then place the fact that you wanted to publish lower down. The libel lawyer would skid to a halt beside your desk clutching several sheets of copy - newspaper articles were then typed with three pieces of carbon paper and presented with one paragraph per page - and gibber that you could not call someone a glue-sniffing pederast in print. A tussle would ensue but after several minutes you would surrender the allegation. I lost count of the times my treasured fact got into print.
The government's tactics on the counter terrorism bill remind me of this - at least in effect. We know how much Jacqui Smith wanted 42-day detention without charge from her graceless capitulation in the Commons, but look at what remains in the bill and you will see that she's far from defeated. You may go further and reach the conclusion that in their claim to defend our free society the government, Home Secretary and the Home Office have become its greatest threat.
Still intact are the measures for post-charge questioning, which may add to the presumption of guilt; the confiscation of property without trial; extra punishment without trial beyond the original sentence; a new offence for volunteer workers of not giving police information; and a new offence of providing information about the armed forces.
This last measure was raised in a letter from Lord Rea, Sir Geoffrey Bindman and others to the Guardian in June: 'We fear this will become yet another convenient tool for use against the peace movement,' they said. Others believe that the bill's measures will, 'provide for the possibility of travel bans and long-term daily reporting or surveillance arrangements for anyone convicted of an offence under anti-terrorism legislation, without any regard for the seriousness of the offence'.
In other words we have still got one hell of a fight to preserve British liberty, and while there are many other serious calls on our attention these days we should pay attention to Ms Smith who towers over our democracy like some comic-strip super-villain dominatrix. She is wrong, corrosive and arrogant.
As Molière said: 'A woman always has her revenge ready.' Having been defeated by what for most was a heart-warming majority in the Lords she announced a draft bill for extended detention without trial that she said she would keep until a time of crisis when she could push it through Parliament without opposition. What does that say for her respect for the calm deliberations that defeated 42 days last week or the government's opportunistic use of the menace of terrorism?
The Home Secretary is remorseless. Last Wednesday she announced a typical New Labour consultation on the government's Interception Modernisation Programme that will gather and store the information from all emails, internet connections and phone calls. 'I want this (consultation),' she said, 'to be combined with well-informed debate, characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness.' I wonder how 'openness' trumps 'mere opinion' in her mind. At any rate it is clear 'reasonableness' in this context means going along with the government and giving up our freedoms, as we have been doing for 10 years now.
Let us just be clear that this new proposal represents a very great threat to individual privacy and in practice it is no different from the original idea of collecting the content of all emails and phone calls. 'The government is proposing to record - for life - the details of everyone you call or write to and what websites you visit,' said Phil Booth of NO2ID. Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs select committee, Lord Carlisle, the government's independent reviewer of terror laws and the left-wing backbencher John McDonnell - none of them in the front rank of civil libertarians - all expressed grave alarm at this idea.
So did the Times and Daily Mail. So did the audience of BBC's Question Time: when Geoff Hoon, the new Secretary of State for Transport said he would go a long way to undermine civil liberties to stop people being killed by terrorists, the mockery of the audience, to say nothing of the guilt and irritation on Hoon's face, was palpable.
Two years ago I wondered in these pages when the penny would drop with the British public and the media about the attack on civil liberties. It is plainly beginning to. The public is worried about the shoddy laws the government tries to rush past them with its phony calls for consensus and reasonableness.
A small incident in Liverpool last week seemed to indicate something was happening. When police tried to break up a demonstration in support of the Freedom Not Fear organisation, it was passers-by who shouted, 'free speech' and 'you're a disgrace' as the police made arrests.
The change of attitudes has come about partly because of the government's appalling record on data security. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a security lapse. Last week the Armed Forces minister Bob Ainsworth was forced to admit that the Ministry of Defence has lost a hard drive which may contain the details of 1.7 million people. This follows the news that the Home Office has lost a mere 43 laptops and 93 cell phones in three years, that a memory stick containing records of 84,000 prisoners has gone missing and that the personal details of 18,000 NHS staff vanished in the post. When the government asks the public to trust it with their data the response is: 'Why the bloody hell should we?'
We have got a long way to go and that is due to the authoritarian habits that have become so deeply ingrained in government departments, principally in the Home Office. The worry must be that whatever the government, the Home Office rolls on with its own agenda, a state within a state bent on increasing the power of centralised authority.
The government's tactics on the counter terrorism bill remind me of this - at least in effect. We know how much Jacqui Smith wanted 42-day detention without charge from her graceless capitulation in the Commons, but look at what remains in the bill and you will see that she's far from defeated. You may go further and reach the conclusion that in their claim to defend our free society the government, Home Secretary and the Home Office have become its greatest threat.
Still intact are the measures for post-charge questioning, which may add to the presumption of guilt; the confiscation of property without trial; extra punishment without trial beyond the original sentence; a new offence for volunteer workers of not giving police information; and a new offence of providing information about the armed forces.
This last measure was raised in a letter from Lord Rea, Sir Geoffrey Bindman and others to the Guardian in June: 'We fear this will become yet another convenient tool for use against the peace movement,' they said. Others believe that the bill's measures will, 'provide for the possibility of travel bans and long-term daily reporting or surveillance arrangements for anyone convicted of an offence under anti-terrorism legislation, without any regard for the seriousness of the offence'.
In other words we have still got one hell of a fight to preserve British liberty, and while there are many other serious calls on our attention these days we should pay attention to Ms Smith who towers over our democracy like some comic-strip super-villain dominatrix. She is wrong, corrosive and arrogant.
As Molière said: 'A woman always has her revenge ready.' Having been defeated by what for most was a heart-warming majority in the Lords she announced a draft bill for extended detention without trial that she said she would keep until a time of crisis when she could push it through Parliament without opposition. What does that say for her respect for the calm deliberations that defeated 42 days last week or the government's opportunistic use of the menace of terrorism?
The Home Secretary is remorseless. Last Wednesday she announced a typical New Labour consultation on the government's Interception Modernisation Programme that will gather and store the information from all emails, internet connections and phone calls. 'I want this (consultation),' she said, 'to be combined with well-informed debate, characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness.' I wonder how 'openness' trumps 'mere opinion' in her mind. At any rate it is clear 'reasonableness' in this context means going along with the government and giving up our freedoms, as we have been doing for 10 years now.
Let us just be clear that this new proposal represents a very great threat to individual privacy and in practice it is no different from the original idea of collecting the content of all emails and phone calls. 'The government is proposing to record - for life - the details of everyone you call or write to and what websites you visit,' said Phil Booth of NO2ID. Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs select committee, Lord Carlisle, the government's independent reviewer of terror laws and the left-wing backbencher John McDonnell - none of them in the front rank of civil libertarians - all expressed grave alarm at this idea.
So did the Times and Daily Mail. So did the audience of BBC's Question Time: when Geoff Hoon, the new Secretary of State for Transport said he would go a long way to undermine civil liberties to stop people being killed by terrorists, the mockery of the audience, to say nothing of the guilt and irritation on Hoon's face, was palpable.
Two years ago I wondered in these pages when the penny would drop with the British public and the media about the attack on civil liberties. It is plainly beginning to. The public is worried about the shoddy laws the government tries to rush past them with its phony calls for consensus and reasonableness.
A small incident in Liverpool last week seemed to indicate something was happening. When police tried to break up a demonstration in support of the Freedom Not Fear organisation, it was passers-by who shouted, 'free speech' and 'you're a disgrace' as the police made arrests.
The change of attitudes has come about partly because of the government's appalling record on data security. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a security lapse. Last week the Armed Forces minister Bob Ainsworth was forced to admit that the Ministry of Defence has lost a hard drive which may contain the details of 1.7 million people. This follows the news that the Home Office has lost a mere 43 laptops and 93 cell phones in three years, that a memory stick containing records of 84,000 prisoners has gone missing and that the personal details of 18,000 NHS staff vanished in the post. When the government asks the public to trust it with their data the response is: 'Why the bloody hell should we?'
We have got a long way to go and that is due to the authoritarian habits that have become so deeply ingrained in government departments, principally in the Home Office. The worry must be that whatever the government, the Home Office rolls on with its own agenda, a state within a state bent on increasing the power of centralised authority.
Read amazing stories to your kids on Messenger Try it Now!
No comments:
Post a Comment