[selected.by.rael at rael-science.org: [rael-science] Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested]

[Eugen Leitl]

Source:  http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1129827.ece

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ttrraaddiinngg ffrreeeeddoomm ffoorr sseeccuurriittyy
-- aanndd mmuusstt hhaavvee CChhuurrcchhiillll
ssppiinnnniinngg iinn hhiiss ggrraavvee
BByy HHeennrryy PPoorrtteerr
PPuubblliisshheedd:: 2299 JJuunnee 22000066
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
CChhaarrggeedd ffoorr qquuoottiinngg GGeeoorrggee
OOrrwweellll iinn ppuubblliicc
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.
EEnneemmiieess ooff tthhee ssttaattee??
MMaayyaa EEvvaannss25
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.
HHeelleenn JJoohhnn68, and SSyyllvviiaa BBooyyeess 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.
BBrriiaann HHaaww56
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.
WWaalltteerr WWoollffggaanngg82
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.
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.



----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
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