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UK going down the crapper; no one shocked
Topic Started: Apr 30 2007, 12:18 PM (76 Views)
Ecopoeia
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Grumpy Old Men
Henry Porter's fast becoming my favourite political commentator. Here's another piece from grauniadinmulited concerning the erosion of civil liberties in Blighty.

Linky

Your chance to tell politicians: it's we who are watching you

Throughout history, people like Charles James Fox have fought for our liberty. On Thursday, give his successors your support

Henry Porter
Sunday April 29, 2007
The Observer


On election day this week, the late Tony Banks's collection of political art comes up for sale at Bonhams in London. Banks, who died suddenly in 2006, a year after being made a peer, was a passionate and shrewd collector, particularly of the portraits, busts and medallions of Whig politician and defender of Parliament, Charles James Fox.

The date for the auction of more than 40 images of the great man, with his paunch, five o'clock shadow and luxuriant eyebrows, could not have been chosen better. During the 1790s, Fox resisted twin attacks on individual liberty and the independence of Parliament which are eerily similar in motive and pretext to the ones we face today.

Initially, Fox's campaign seemed hopeless. Following the execution of Louis XVI, William Pitt the Younger introduced a number of emergency measures including sedition laws and the suspension of habeas corpus. Fox opposed them, arguing that the terror in France did not pose a real threat and that Pitt and the king were using it to limit the freedom of the individual and Parliament. It was a power grab by the executive, exactly as we see happening today.

He told the Commons: 'All the true constitutional watchfulness of England was dead to the only real danger... we are come to the moment when the question is, whether we shall give to the king, that is the executive government, complete power over our thoughts.' Fox was defeated by 290-50 and lost subsequent votes, but he kept the flame of liberty alive while most of the political establishment were busy giving in to Pitt and their own hysteria.

That moment Fox talked about is with us again. There are many dedicated libertarians in Parliament, but the majority of MPs seem content to go along with the government, as though this loss of liberty and standards was a natural outcome of technology and modern life. Instead of standing up for the people's interest, MPs are now aping the contempt shown by the executive. Nowhere is this better seen than in the support for David Maclean's private member's bill to exempt MPs and the Lords from the Freedom of Information Act. If passed, it will allow MPs to keep their expenses and correspondence with ministries secret.

This maggot of a bill has crept on to the floor of the chamber while the front benches have looked the other way. It was heroically talked out once by MPs like Mark Fisher, Norman Baker, David Winnick and Richard Shepherd, all decent men who work tirelessly in Parliament and without much thanks. But despite their efforts, the bill returns with reinforcements of the living dead on 18 May.

David Maclean is a former Conservative chief whip who likes to be known as a straight-talking guy. But he has hardly said a word to the media about his bill. Why? Because it is indefensible. The hypocrisy of pretending the measure is to protect constituents' confidentiality does not seem to bother David Cameron. Last week, I asked his office if this was an indication of the party's respect for public accountability and was met with silence.

Little wonder that the Guardian's recent poll showed that support for both the major parties has dropped and that one in three voters plans to take their votes elsewhere at the local elections. Voters have picked up a vibration from the Conservatives that once in office they would have no more respect for the people than the Labour front bench. Just as Margaret Thatcher influenced Labour in the Eighties and Nineties, so Labour now skews the standards of the new, open-collared Tories.

This may explain Cameron's failure to make that great speech about Labour's attack on individual liberty and rights. David Davies, Dominic Grieve, Malcolm Rifkind and Ken Clarke have all had a creditable go, but the leader has danced round the open goal smiling, tying his boot laces and remarking on the weather. Why does he hesitate? The analysis has been done, the bills are on the statute book for all to see.

For the voters next Thursday, here are some of the liberties and rights you've lost or are in the process of losing:

Your communications are no longer private. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 500,000 emails and pieces of mail are intercepted every year.

Your home is no longer your castle. A report by the Centre for Policy Studies reveals that the state and its agencies now have 266 powers to enter your home without a warrant. Labour has done more than any other government in the last 50 years to extend these powers. A new act will mean that bailiffs may enter your home to collect traffic penalties and eventually to make good the vast number of fines imposed on those who refuse to bow to the ID card bill.

You may not demonstrate within a kilometre of Parliament Square without first asking a policeman's permission, not even with a blank placard or a quote from George Orwell

Terror legislation means that suspects may be held for up to 28 days without charge. This is punishment without a normal court deciding that the law is broken. Control orders have the same result. Foreign suspects may not instruct their own legal representatives or learn of the evidence against them.

You are about to surrender your privacy forever. The ID card bill will set up databases to record all your important transactions and allow scores of government agencies to monitor your life without your knowledge. Journeys by road are being recorded by ANPR cameras and the information kept for two years.

Defendants' rights are being reduced by the day. Hearsay evidence is allowed in Asbo cases. The proposed serious crime prevention orders will also make hearsay evidence admissible and give courts almost unlimited powers to impose conditions on a person before he or she has been found guilty by normal court proceedings. Trial by jury is suspended when there is a risk of jury-tampering or in complicated fraud cases where the jury is held to be too stupid to decide whether someone is telling the truth. The Carter reforms on legal aid result in pressure to plead guilty.

Labour has introduced some 3,000 new offences. Under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, if arrested, you are now required to be photographed and provide a DNA sample and fingerprints. These are kept by the state regardless of whether charges are brought or not.

I could go on about the 33,000 people being stopped and searched under terror laws each year and how these laws are being used to pursue ordinary criminal matters, about the use of public order laws to police people's opinions, but I am conscious that I have written about these things before. Still, it's no small matter that due process, privacy, legal safeguards, the freedom to demonstrate, to write and move about without being observed or obstructed by the state are all under attack.

There is far too little anger about all this. Few grasp that in this moment of unusual self-obsession and fear, there is a takeover in progress. We are reaching a point where democracy and liberty can no longer be said to be the loose synonyms they once were. To reverse that process, we should use our votes on Thursday and, with something of Fox's passion, tell politicians and the executive that we know what they have been up to.
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Ecopoeia
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And more. Go Henry, go!

Link

Taking liberties

Jack Straw preaches the importance of Britain's history of freedom, but his government is responsible for removing much of it.

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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Allech-Atreus
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I fear for the folks across the pond.

not so much as I fear for the people in Iran who are no longer allowed to get western haircuts, but it's up on the list.
Also known as Snefaldia and Palaam
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Ecopoeia
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Heh. Perspective is important, yet somehow it feels more important when it's on your doorstep, yeah? But we're still very lucky not to be Persians right now, no doubt about it.
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Allech-Atreus,Apr 30 2007
08:20 PM
I fear for the folks across the pond.

So do I...
East Hackney ACA
"I ain't a communist necessarily, but I been in the red all my life"
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Allech-Atreus
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East Hackney,Apr 30 2007
08:44 PM
Allech-Atreus,Apr 30 2007
08:20 PM
I fear for the folks across the pond.

So do I...

Like a mirror, ain't it? :D
Also known as Snefaldia and Palaam
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