Ind: Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested
kuac...@yahoo.com
In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony
Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from
Parliament and the British people. The author charts a nine-year
assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom
for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave
By Henry Porter
The Independent
Published: 29 June 2006
Photo: http://tinyurl.com/qqt5j
In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of
Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A
small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a
tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much
like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while
other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on
the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.
Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this
occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the
question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It
is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of
nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This
collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had
stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging
a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or
a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not
first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of
British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the
protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances
to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.
The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law.
If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech,
then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is
arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the
square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of
demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were
charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the
Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred
yards away.
On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected
that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting
on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If
you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can
easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory
will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you
will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious
chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight
when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than
to live as slaves."
Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always
revered the ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I
imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward
Downing Street - without security, of course - there to address Tony
Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain's
Parliament and the people's rights.
For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago
as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of
optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that
respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the
elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact
almost a historic phenomenon - is the harm his government has done to
the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone
really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting
mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy
became subject to a silent takeover.
Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice
trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights
and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime
Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of
Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total
surveillance of society.
There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at
least 15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The
Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it
be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me.
Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal
e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London
home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime
Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal.
Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule
so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for
action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.
The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between
the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in
which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary,
Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of
Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about
"the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.
So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British
Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack
the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten
something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more
serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once
called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where
a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses
it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for
security.
Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is,
that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of
experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often
well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under
legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned
about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within
one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime
and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected
by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search
people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial
behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone
from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person
breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five
years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed
to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to
control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical
company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a
company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated
conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as
harassment.
There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a
former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary,
despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being
harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which
is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow
Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone
on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit
your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate -
habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would
have locked me up."
Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is
difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms.
But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated
fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not
to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy -
no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised,
especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes
hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a
court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of
control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving
about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage
being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all
but name.
Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice
and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is
now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old
graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the
direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is
gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that." He was given one of
the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the
result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown
Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic
remarks likely to cause disorder.
There are other people the police have investigated but failed to
prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging
aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little
Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir
Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not
acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".
The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting
that my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their
truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust
debate - are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting,
second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to
build with what he calls his "respect agenda".
Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few
people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite
whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of
increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely
different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for.
Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it
necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a
very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of
Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and
civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the
terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or
repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist
threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to
underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to
justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism
effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a
number of others on Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply
worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, "Underneath,
there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the
[Labour] Party."
Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains:
"If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will
sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold
water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the
pan and boil to death. It's like that." In Blair you see the champion
frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute
impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me
he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency in
some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the
victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to
invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour
order, or Asbo.
"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are
people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they
live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their
music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are
often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play
because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.
"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which
the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve
in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment
for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead,
they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that
attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to
people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which
would mean they go to prison."
How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates'
court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be
the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble
do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and
the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour - which may be
nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the
street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence
are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay -
that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to
have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in
prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in
effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.
Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real
live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle
legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to
suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious
criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave
the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he
mention the process of law or a court.
He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in
which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical
context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a
profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a
speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties
but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants
legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human
Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human
Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested
it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.
Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his
generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle."
Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can
categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I
agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a
moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and
tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of
scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.
There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of
2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for
the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of
ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil
Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state
of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts
may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from,
or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might
be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance
to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad
faith, he cannot be punished.
One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government
investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set
its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and
terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of
government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once
were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the
executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does
Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to
statutory regulation.
I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into
the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has
been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just
say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws
without reference to elected representatives.
Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the
Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet
until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper
of coverage in the British media.
Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still
energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet
reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair
denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then
swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal
establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these
actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of
legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest -
for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human
Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights
Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it
does allow the courts to strike down the act of our 'sovereign
Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian,
remarked, "It does no such thing."
How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle
concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so
exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is
probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of
The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of
Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather
sinister political DNA.
"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in
ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several
senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid,
recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign
secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared
Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred Blair project of
modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this
is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or legal
institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things
he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."
One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings
together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative
peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head
of New Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of
IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop
group Pet Shop Boys.
The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism,
identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the
centralised database - the National Identity Register - will log and
store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID
card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital,
pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be
inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and
MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and
track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the
national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to
go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that
the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a
person's medical records, you realise that the state will be able to
keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private
parts of a person's life.
Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as
being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being
between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems
of terrorism and ID theft.
George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of
time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a
terrorist isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."
Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and
voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that
we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way
to Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity
card?' I don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may
leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't
live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect
us."
Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's
former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute
book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is
there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are
not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship
between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of
the state's entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws
that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be
arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the crucial
point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and
photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral
swab - by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been
found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting
someone.
So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no
reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party
conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts
from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from
being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty
of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be
to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete
change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means
deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill
noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict
equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and
criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation,
and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."
The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the
police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes,
but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory
retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of
all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of
white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until -
heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.
Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal
critics of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial
Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating
account of her own party's waywardness. She accused government
ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather
than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.
"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the
experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and
when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and
no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest
standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on
civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the
Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to
produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of
who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is
there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."
The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best
expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics,
who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a
wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his
findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive
sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have
reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is
possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and
surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That
architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become
compliant for the Government to have control.
"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to
their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public
good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual
rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in
the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond,
not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries
must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of
individual freedom."
Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of
being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn
someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do
take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the
numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming
months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and
dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.
This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair
Charged for quoting George Orwell in public
In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political
protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the
latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and
Police Act.
On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George
Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an
article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big
Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication
that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being
accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday,
the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir
Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern
that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such
articles were used in evidence under the Act.
Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically
motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to
break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of
Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically
motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."
Scotland Yard has declined to comment.
Enemies of the state?
Maya Evans 25
The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the
names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person
to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and
Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission
before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.
Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62
The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of
Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US
military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach
any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or
fined £5,000.
Brian Haw 56
Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating
Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police
Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being
arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates'
court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.
Walter Wolfgang 82
The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his
speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr
Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by
stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained
under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.
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Ken Clarke brands Cameron plan for Bill of Rights as 'xenophobic'
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1129827.ece