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While ideological baggage and European strategy boded ill for British liberties, New Labour tactics would only make matters worse. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the other architects of New Labour correctly calculated that winning back public confidence in the Labour Party meant seizing the centre ground of politics. In order to achieve this, a policy of triangulation was constructed. In crude terms, the electoral plan of attack involved dumping the most obvious outward trappings of the party’s socialist heritage, outflanking the Conservative Party by matching, if not surpassing, its tough stance on crime and security and promising Labour’s grassroots supporters a step change in investment in public services – a more subtle and publicly palatable means of redistributing a large volume of the nation’s wealth than a sustained programme of nationalization.
The second element in this equation would tempt the government, time and time again, to embark on grandiose security gestures that rode roughshod over fundamental liberties with negligible countervailing benefits in terms of public safety. The third element, massive additional spending on public services, would harness the expansion of the idea of human rights, well beyond anything previously recognized in Britain, as a visible vehicle for claiming credit for fighting the social injustice that New Labour claimed to have inherited from the Thatcher years.
The outcome of the election in May 1997 added a further practical consideration, which strengthened the government’s hand in the looming assault on liberty. Having secured a landslide overall majority of 179 seats in the House of Commons, the new administration was well placed to force through virtually any legislation without serious risk of defeat. The sheer volume of new criminal law and security measures, introduced by the new government over the course of a decade, would displace the common law presumption in favour of personal freedom that held sway in this country for centuries.
In this way, a constellation of disparate factors gathered that would pose the most serious threat to the British legacy of liberty in post-war history. Built from scratch, nurtured and defended – through periods of monarchical despotism, civil war and attempted foreign invasion – ancient British freedoms found themselves under siege from an unconventional and unscrupulous wolf in sheep’s clothing. The previous rough consensus on the minimum fundamental rights of the citizen – shared more or less by successive Conservative and Labour governments – was cast aside, as the new Labour administration prepared to embark on a relentless and historically unprecedented assault on British liberty.
‘We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.’
KARL POPPER
Since New Labour came to power Britain has suffered a sustained attack on its tradition of liberty, with the government regularly claiming that stronger measures are justified to strengthen our security and make us safer. This unprecedented assault on our fundamental freedoms has been waged on diverse fronts, with justifications clustered around three principal rationales.
First, the government has argued that decisive action is needed in response to a unique danger, namely the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda and related fanatical groups. Second, it has justified its actions in the sphere of law enforcement and criminal justice on the basis of the overriding imperative to cut crime and tackle anti-social behaviour. Third, it has massed a range of powers to watch, intercept and gather private details on its citizens on the basis that such inroads on our privacy will make the individual, and our society as a whole, safer. The common denominator is the assumption that, when push comes to shove, security can be traded for – and should be prized above – liberty, a tough but necessary choice that many, at least at first sight, may intuitively be inclined to accept.
The difficulty with this analysis is that liberty and security are rarely stark alternatives or juxtaposed choices. The government has assumed the existence of a hydraulic relationship between freedom and security, a zero-sum game in which we have a genuine choice to pay a price in terms of our personal freedom, in order to yield a security dividend that provides greater public protection against violent crime and terrorism. But is the real world that straightforward, and does this paradigm provide more than a simplistic gloss, a political crouch that obscures a more complex picture? Draconian measures will always undermine liberty. But there is scant evidence that they have made us safer.
An alternative assessment, supported by a growing body of evidence over the last eleven years, is that the government’s attack on our core freedoms has not yielded any clear, significant or demonstrable security dividend; indeed, it has often had the reverse effect, jeopardizing rather than strengthening our security.
In the field of counter-terrorism, the government’s approach has fixated on a number of high-profile gestures, including extending detention without charge for terrorist suspects, introducing control orders and pressing ahead with ID cards, amongst a package of other authoritarian measures. While the government has moved to raise the limit on pre-charge detention sixfold since 2003, the rate of home-grown radicalization and the numbers involved in terrorist-related activity have only grown faster, at a current rate of 25 per cent per year according to MI5 – hardly the symptoms of successful policy.
When it comes to fighting crime, the government has created more than three thousand new criminal offences and attacked fundamental pillars of British justice, including the presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury. Yet, at the same time, violent crime has nearly doubled, the UK has the second highest crime rate in Europe and fatal stabbings and gun violence have surged.
Nor has the exponential increase in surveillance powers by the state improved public safety. Eighty per cent of CCTV footage is not fit for purpose. The government loses personal data on a regular basis, exposing those it is charged to protect to unnecessary risk. And, far from helping police to crack down on fraud, one Chief Constable predicts the government’s flawed proposals for ID cards will set the ‘gold standard’ target for criminal hackers.
As one commentator, Jenny McCartney, characterized the approach:
A pattern is emerging in the way that Britain deals with any kind of threat…It acts like a terrified but sieve-brained householder who tries to foil prospective burglars by putting expensive, complicated locks on the top windows while frequently leaving the back door swinging open…
The Faustian bargain that New Labour has traditionally offered the public is that we should submit to ever more intrusion in exchange for greater security. What we are getting now is intrusion and insecurity – and even Faust managed a more attractive deal than that.
Time and time again since it came to power in 1997 the government has presented tough measures that infringe fundamental liberties as a price worth paying to make the public safer. The serious charge to be laid against this government is that its confused approach has been driven as much by considerations of PR as national security. The government has deployed increasingly dramatic rhetoric with each new announcement, СКАЧАТЬ