In his first statement to Parliament as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said:
“Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the
individual.” Little noticed among the cascade of pronouncements about
constitutional reform, was a promise to reconsider the ban on unlicensed
political protest in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. Mr Brown
implied that when it came to balancing the need for public order with the
right to public dissent, this was a law too far.
A commitment to personal liberty is only to be expected from a British prime
minister, and especially from a son of the manse brought up in Adam Smith’s
home town. Yet Mr Brown sat in a Cabinet that did more than any other in
recent years to alter the balance in the relationship between the State and
the individual.
If Clement Attlee is remembered for postwar welfare provision and the NHS,
Harold Wilson for Sixties’ optimism, Edward Heath for joining Europe, James
Callaghan for the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher for reducing the
size of government and John Major, however unfairly, for sleaze, then we
will look back on the Blair years as marking a serial assault by the State
on the civil liberties of the citizen.
The State always wants to limit the liberties of its people. But it is
normally restrained by an executive that understands the limits of
illiberalism or is contained by a Parliament that considers itself to be a
guardian of freedoms.
For a number of reasons, neither of these brakes was applied under Tony
Blair’s premiership. The huge Commons majority he enjoyed, the craven
pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the
consequent absence of opposition, other than in the Lords – and, to an
extent, in the courts – conspired with a genuine, though irrational, fear of
terrorism and rising street crime to let the State take greater control over
the citizen than it has enjoyed before in modern peacetime.
Under Mr Blair, the State recaptured territory that it must have thought had
been buried forever under a mountain of human rights laws and beneath all
the freedoms that would normally make it more difficult to control the
individual, such as ease of communication and of movement. But the
technology that has made us feel freer has also given the State the
wherewithal to keep control over us and to say that it does so for our own
good.
This assault has come from many directions. Surveillance of a sophistication
never dreamt of in Orwell’s worst nightmares; the gradual dismantling of the
judicial protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases, even to the
point of questioning the presumption of innocence; the criminalisation of
dozens of activities that would never previously have been considered
unlawful; the limits on freedom of speech; restrictions on movement and
detention without trial or even charge; and the creation of databases
containing information on us all and which will track the movements of our
children and theirs from cradle to grave.
As Mr Brown conceded in the Commons, freedom of expression is a basic liberty
that risks being eroded, a statement that seems at odds with a world of
incessant internet chatter and unrestrained blogging. Despite this, probably
not since John Milton railed against restrictions on the press in the 17th
century has this country been so confused about where the boundaries of free
speech lie. People used to be free under the criminal law to speak their
minds, provided they did not incite others to commit violence or infringe
public order.
Speaker’s Corner, in Hyde Park, London, came to symbolise a democratic
tradition of which the country was proud and whose parameters were also
understood. Rabble-rousers trying to whip up the mob have never been the
beneficiaries of this latitude. Parliament Square was, rightly, off limits
to rioters but a magnet for those who wanted to shout in the ear of their
legislators. Now, unless permission is granted, it is not even possible to
whisper criticism of the Government.
Maya Evans found this out when she stood by the Cenotaph to recite the names
of Britain’s Iraqi war dead. For this she was arrested, arraigned and left
with a criminal record. It is hard to conceive of a police officer a
generation ago taking any notice of her since she was causing no public
order problem at all.
But Ms Evans had fallen foul of a clause in the Serious and Organised Crime
and Police Act which established a one kilometre zone around the Palace of
Westminster, within whose boundaries political criticism can be voiced only
on application to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Or ask Lynette Burrows about free speech. She had offered her opinion on the
radio that two homosexual men should not be allowed to adopt a boy, which is
a view with which you may agree or disagree, but does not warrant a call
from the local constabulary. She was told that, although a crime had not
been committed, it was policy to record details of such complaints, so Mrs
Burrows is now, presumably, on some sinister register of people who express
views that are not considered acceptable. Needless to say, she was
flabbergasted to receive such a call. “This is a free country and we are
entitled to express opinions on matters of public interest,” she said.
But are we a free country any longer? Were we ever? It is said, though less
often now than it used to be, that the basis of English liberty is the rule
of law, under which everything is allowed unless specifically prohibited.
According to A.V. Dicey, the 19th-century constitutionalist, this was one of
the features that distinguished England from its continental counterparts,
where people were subject to the exercise of arbitrary power and were
actions that where not specifically authorised were proscribed.
Effectively, this principle limited the scope of the State to intervene in
people’s lives. Law set the boundaries of personal action but did not
dictate the course of such action. Some limitations on personal freedom are
introduced ostensibly for our own good and some, obviously, predate the
Blair Government, such as the compulsory wearing of seat belts in cars and a
requirement to wear a crash helmet on a motorbike; but, since 1997, the pace
of proscription has grown alarmingly, encompassing smacking to smoking.
Another aspect of liberty is privacy. It may be hard to believe in a world
where people crave televised notoriety that there are still many who cherish
anonymity. In a truly free society it should be possible for someone who
does not wish to come to the attention of the state to remain unnoticed
provided he breaks no laws. As A. J. P. Taylor observed, before the First
World War the average citizen’s interaction with the Government was largely
limited to paying tax.
“He could live where he liked and as he liked,” the great historian wrote. “He
had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his
country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission.”
Of one thing he could be certain and that was the inviolability of his home.
But recent research has uncovered 266 separate powers under which the police
and other state agents can enter your home, often using force to do so.
The proliferation of state databases, again very much a recent development,
has also rendered the concept of the private individual a thing of the past,
and from the earliest age. We are, almost without realising it, becoming the
most snooped-on democratic nation on earth, electronically tracked from cot
to coffin, our most personal details to be stored for ever, all in the name
of modernisation, efficiency and, we are told, our own good.
When it comes to softening up the country for an ID card, the Home Office has
been prepared to play a very long game. As Peter Lilley, the former minister
who led the Cabinet revolt that resulted in the abandonment of the last ID
scheme, observed: “There is no policy that has been hawked, unsold, around
Whitehall for longer than identity cards. It was always brought to us as a
solution looking for problems.”
September 11 and the threat from international terrorism was the problem it
had most been looking for. The dust was duly blown from the plan the Tories
had rejected and resubmitted to the Blair administration, tweaked to reflect
the latest justification for its disinterment and given the added lure that
played to new Labour’s modernistic fetishism: biometrics.
Suddenly, ID cards became a panacea and civil liberties considerations were
simply brushed aside. Ministers decreed that the argument had been won “in
principle”. Tony Blair emphasised the personal benefit of having a national
identity system, as though it were being established solely for the benefit
of the citizen, and merely facilitated by the State.
Yet even to conduct this debate exclusively around the practicalities of an ID
card system is to find the arguments of ministers thoroughly unconvincing.
Just because biometric technology is available does not justify
fingerprinting the entire population, nor does it necessarily give us a
secure identity. However sophisticated the system, there will be false
matches and false nonmatches, and these increase in number the larger the
database.
The innocent will be most inconvenienced – or even criminalised – by these
inevitable glitches, accused of being someone they are not or not accepted
as who they are. Crooks will simply find a way of attacking the system, and
the temptation to do so will be all the greater precisely because people are
being falsely led to believe that it will be foolproof.
There are people who remember carrying the old wartime ID cards, scrapped in
1952, and cannot see what all the fuss is about. It is about the database,
not the card. This is not about protecting our identities but about placing
them at the disposal of the state and sundry other organisations that will
have access to them. We are being asked to subscribe to an identity system
that is insecure and will rarely fulfil the grand ambitions that ministers
claim for it. Worse than that, it is increasingly being done on the cheap
because the vast cost of the enterprise is gradually sinking it.
It is this extension of state control through the unfettered and unthinking
deployment of modern surveillance technology and databases for which the
Blair years (and those of his successor, unless he does something dramatic
to change course) will most be remembered. Our children, and theirs, will be
perplexed as to why their forebears came so easily, and with so little
public debate, to allow the State to manipulate their lives.
Philip Johnston is home affairs editor and assistant editor of The Daily
Telegraph
The Charles Douglas-Home Essay
This is an abridged version of this year’s winner of the annual Charles
Douglas-Home Memorial Trust Award, established in 1986 in honour of the
former Editor of The Times. Previous winners include V. S . Naipaul and
Michael Gove. Read the full-length version of the essay at
timesonline.co.uk/comment
