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From The Sunday Times

October 26, 2008

My farewell plea to MPs: defend liberty

Simon Jenkins

Is Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, a pocket dictator? Is there no drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no fear of a repressive state? Or is she just another home secretary? This month she apparently felt obliged by dark forces beyond her control to add another weapon to the armoury of illiberal power. She wants to record at her Cheltenham communications headquarters every mobile phone call, text and internet message of every Briton living. This is close to madness.

Home secretaries always speak with forked tongues. Like Augustine they cry, “God make me liberal, but not yet, not while someone is watching.” They explain their latest click of the authoritarian ratchet by wailing, “You can’t imagine the pressure we were under.” On leaving office they tend to patronise some civil rights charity, as if in penance.

This year’s Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of the European league for surveillance and civil intrusion, a miserable state of affairs for the home of Magna Carta.

Smith’s GCHQ “interception modernisation programme”, reportedly at a staggering £12 billion, will run alongside the ID card register, the driving licence centre, the numberplate recognition computer and the CCTV network in a “pentagon” of control. Its data bank will one day and for sure fuse with banking and employment records and that stumbling giant, the National Health Service personal records computer, each polluting the other with crashing terminals, uncorrectable inaccuracies and false trails.

We know from Russian hacking services that such information will be freely available because it cannot be kept secret from intruders, thieves or the laptops of careless officials. That is why the pages of Computer Weekly are crammed with snake-oil salesmen claiming “total security” packages. I remember a shack in a Bangalore suburb offering to “break all computer encryptions known to man”.

The spider at the centre of this web of control, GCHQ’s Iain Lobban, appears to have so mesmerised Smith that officials at the Home Office last week leaked a warning that his demands were “impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful”. Smith was unmoved. Like every home secretary, she wants, at the flick of a switch, to know who is doing what, when and where anywhere in Britain and in real time. This is truly Big Brother stuff.

Since 9/11 there has sprung into being a war-on-terror version of the “military-industrial complex”, against which Eisenhower warned Americans as the cold war developed in the 1950s. The complex roams seminars and think tanks with blood-curdling accounts of what Osama Bin Laden is planning. Visitors need go no further than the biennial defence sales exhibition in London’s Docklands to see Eisenhower’s monsters on parade. They feed on the politics of fear, a leitmotif of this government. The entire nation is regarded as under suspicion.

Never was the adage of Louis Brandeis, the US justice, more relevant: free men are naturally alert to the wiles of evil-minded rulers but “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding”.

Last week GCHQ lobbyists took to the press declaring that any opposition to Smith’s surveillance plan would be “disastrous” for national security. They even wheeled out the familiar back-up argument for those who might regard £12 billion as a ludicrous overreaction to terrorism alone. Without the 500,000 intercepts placed on mobile phone calls each year, The Times reported, “we could not begin to solve any kidnap whatever”. Likewise the proponents of ID cards call them “vital” for public services and those of the NHS computer “a life saver” for accident victims. They are nothing of the sort.

A feature of this campaign is its sheer mendacity. Smith last week promised that her surveillance regime would cover only details of electronic communication, not contents. This is incredible. It reminds me of the old Home Office lie that all phone taps “require the home secretary’s personal authority”. Smith’s apparatchiks want to read the lot.

A similar line was spun last year by James Hall, the head of Home Office “identity and passport services”, in claiming that identity details would be safeguarded and not sent abroad. At the last Lisbon conference, European Union members agreed to “cross-border interoperability . . . highlighted in electronic identity and e-procurement”, with Lady Scotland, the attorney-general, in active participation. Hall must have known this.

ID cards were defended by David Blunkett, a former home secretary, as to “protect identity”. He knew they would be churned out from a Bombay back street at £5 a time. The government does not know the meaning of the term “safeguard”. A year ago all 25m recipients of child benefit were told their personal details, addresses and bank accounts had been handed to contractors and lost.

Each new repressive law is abused, sometimes blatantly. This month Gordon Brown used the 2005 antiterror law to seize the assets of Icelandic banks, an outrage that passed without protest from parliament or the courts. The same law has been used by local authorities to monitor school catchment areas and rubbish disposal. When ministers take untrammelled power, they lie.

Government computers are protected by safety measures costing the taxpayer millions. Yet this summer almost 2m personal details from the defence ministry were dispersed by EDS, the American firm.

The employment records of the constitutional affairs department, including of the lord chancellor, were also lost. Revenue & Customs treats every Briton’s tax details as vulnerable to freedom of information. As for bank accounts, a newspaper found them available from a Russian website at $75 a batch.

Smith parrots the totalitarian’s answer that “the innocent have nothing to fear”. But they do. They know from experience that government cannot be trusted with private information. In addition, any errors in that information are almost impossible to correct. Ask anyone whose credit rating has been falsely challenged by a bank computer.

This month some worms started to turn. The Lords rejected Smith’s demand to be allowed to detain suspects for 42 days without charge. A galaxy of former judges, law officers and ministers opposed her. In response to the proposed expansion of surveillance, Sir Ken Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions, accused Smith of going down a path “in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state”. Even the Association of Chief Police Officers warned that collecting so much data was “a real threat to the individual”.

The war on terror has been a wretched blind alley in British political history. It has revealed all that is worst in British government – its authoritarianism, its sloppiness and its unaccountability. Yet restoring the status quo ante will be phenomenally hard.

In all my years of writing this column, from which I am standing down, I have been amazed at the spinelessness of Britain’s elected representatives in defending liberty and protesting against state arrogance. They appear as parties to the conspiracy of power. There have been outspoken judges, outspoken peers, even outspoken journalists. There have been few outspoken MPs. Those supposedly defending freedom are whipped into obedience. I find this ominous.

Next month Simon Jenkins takes up the chairmanship of the National Trust

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

So said Benjamin Franklin in around 1775.

I'm not sure that anyone in the current era has expressed the nub of the argument more succinctly

Mark, Guildford, UK

Sad to see the end of many years of well argued fine articles. I will certainly miss Mr Jenkins crusade for proper sane and accountable local government, in fact for the ideal of localism which he has expoused for so long. What is NT's gain is the ST's loss. I wish you well in your new post.

Richard Morgon, Fareham, Hants

I am so sorry to hear you are standing down from your column. I concur wholeheartedly with C. Lyon's comments . You are too precious a commodity not to be heard by a wide audience. Why not start a blog site?

Angela, Teddington, uk

Absolutely spot on ! 1984 was a warning not a template ..But then Smith and this government are so scared of 'not doing enough' they'll do everything to crush our privacy and freedom.

Tony, Cardiff ,

If only Simon Jenkins was running this country, perhaps with other sane spirits such as Ken Clarke , Vincent Cable and Frank Field. The NT could be run by a lesser person, we´ll pay the membership anyway.

Crista Lyon, Chislehurst, U.K:

Thanks Simon,
We need to get back to the basic idea that we appoint them to run our public services, not to govern us. We say to them "Go and catch some baddies" and they say " Then we need to spy on all of you". No thanks.

Anthony, Richmond,

Instead of enforcing and improoving the way the existing laws, Government (on both sides) have knee jerked unneccessary and heavy handed POLICE STATE laws on to our declining democracy. Thier percieved need to fix something has led us to the point where most citizens consider any election as a joke.

Simon, Norwich, Former Democratic Rep' of GB

Can't believe that you will not be writing this column any more. Thankyou for your insight and splendid articles. I shall miss them.

Aubrey Smith, Bath, UK

Thank-you Sir Simon for yet another excellent article and for your many years of service to journalism and to Britain.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who will miss you and wish you great good fortune in your new job.

Dr Richard Bruce , Cape Town, South Africa

"If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" is the mantra of the control freaks.

Any of us may have something to hide, in the sense that it's legal but we prefer to keep it private - our business and nobody else's.

To be a nosey-parker was once shaming - but no longer, it seems!

Mike, Cardiff,

Good journalism. The 12bn is only the capital cost, after cost overruns and maintenence overheads perr annum.. how much? Whilst i hate to say life is cheap, this is overvaluation.

Rod McLeod, Ostrava, Czech Republic

that awful Smith woman is just not bright enough to control the closet Fascists that hide in the Home Office, they will never let her see this excellent article which should be on the front page, she is clearly under their thumb and should be ashamed of herself

peter c, Devizes, Wessex

She is just implementing the EU's Futures Group's requirements as laid out in ther 1999-2004 Tampere Programme, the 2005-2009 Hague Programme and the already agreed 2010-2014 Stockholm Programme.

David Ashton, Cheshire, England

This column is not quite accurate. I would suggest "Terror and Consent" by Philip Bobbitt as a better starting point for a discussion about the "dirty bomb" scenario discussed today in The Australian. The issues are far more complex than Mr. Jenkins pictures them. What is a nation's duty to protect?

Clayton Burns, Vancouver , Canada

In the early days of the Hitler administration, their government authorised the police to enter any home or private premises without a legal warrant. Their reply to criticism was 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' . Now we are hearing this from members of the UK government?

bruce, Apt, France

The Anti-terrorist laws have been used more times against ordinary British citizens than they have on suspected terrorists. It speaks volumes about the authoritarian anti-democracy mindset of the British Government and their paranoid fears of the populous they want to control. It's State terrorism!

JRH, Oslo , NORWAY

In the US members of the House of Representatives got calls,faxes and emails which warned them of the groundswell against the 700 million bank rescue. They took notice. The way to make our MPs take notice is to write to them. Have a look at 'theyworkforyou' on the web and lobby your mp like mad.

Peter Ryder, Middlewich, UK

Not only does GCHQ want to use our money to spy on us all, they use our money to pay lobbyist who argue their case.

Have they forgotten they are our servants?

Talk about snouts in the trough.

Time to slash the civil service by at least 25%

Andy Davies, Glos, UK,

Louis Brandeis's "well-meaning but without understanding" tag unfortunately applies to large numbers of our elected representatives, especially those on the Left. The gradual erosion of our civil liberties will not stop even when Labour is out of office, but it would be a good start.

Andrew Undershaft, London, UK

Simon ,for 40 years we have been having the (second ) Industrial Revolution of the Mind, after the first,the Matter. It is the Information Explosion which started early last century & expands exponentially. The solution to avoid drowning has yet to emerge The aged N.T. needs your new broom.

Kenneth Perry, Street,Somerset BA16 0TD,

You will be a sad loss, Simon. I do hope that it will not be literally the last word we will hear from you: you have graced journalism, in my view. And David Ireland's point about it being ironic that it is only House of Lords which tries to protect us from all this is accurately made.

brian kelly, reading, UK

I too am sad that Simon Jenkins will no longer write this column. I have long believed that his pieces should be compulsory reading for our legislators. I am scared that so much power in the hands of this collection of dimwit incompetents bodes disaster for us all in terms of civil liberties.

Tom Healy, Plymouth, UK

I hope who ever replaces you is up to the job, I need someone I can rely on to tell me how it really is. Goodbye and the best of luck in your new job.

Susan, Barry, S Wales

MPs' obedience to the whips is bought with the promise of advancement, or at least of re-selection. Since they are so spineless, perhaps we should introduce secret ballots within the Commons. Then the whips would be powerless. Or perhaps we should all vow to vote out any consistently obedient MP.

Richard Baron, London,

Liberty is not seen as important in Britain because we do not know what the loss of it means. In May 1945 most of Europe was broken as the echoes of jackboots faded. We in Britain experienced none of that first hand. We didn't see truckloads of Jews being led away. We were cocooned on our island.

Mike Mitchell, Spalding, England

What a pity you are leaving. There are so few journalists who have the wherewithal, or guts to report the blunt facts as you have done.

Good luck in your new position.

Jane, Cambridge,

The biggest threat to liberty is the shift of power to the bureaucracy. Institutions are being subverted. The police face more government control. The legal framework protecting people's rights must remain inviolate. Peter Evans, author "Within the Secret State".

Peter Evans, St Albans, U.K.

It's good to see commentators around the world taking an interest in this piece by Mr Jenkins. Now, if we could just raise the dozy giant of the resident UK populace........

Gareth, Brighton, UK

Thank you for your service, your wise observations and you disclosure of the fault lines. Gizmos have always been sold to the Gov. ever since the first salesman was born!

Ronald Reagan had a memorable one-liner: "Hello, we are from the government and we are here to help you!"

Ali E., Tehran, Iran

What A Fantastic Piece,I One Thousand Percent Agree With Everything You Have Written,Simon Jenkins Will Be Missed
Thank you For Many Pieces Of Brilliant Writing.

Thomas Denny, Surbiton, uk

I am in complete agreement Simon, this government has no idea how to safeguard the information of private individuals. I would not trust them with the details of my old Post Office savings account (Now long defunct). We must all stand up now and say no more state control. Fear of terrorism must end

Jim, London, Uk

Does the 'amazed' Jenkins not see a connection between the spinelessness of Britain’s elected representatives in defending liberty and protesting against state arrogance and the European Union, of which he is a supporter?

With most of our laws now made in Brussels they are one of a piece.

Tony , Oxted, GB

It is said that few men cannot be bought either by money or a woman's thighs, but we are told that civil servants can be trusted not to reveal secret information. well I believe in fairies, do you ?

Eddy, Bury St.Edmunds,

Could not this wonderful journalist please be persuaded to stay on or at least to help turn the National Trust into a campaigning body that seeks also to preserve, protect and project national trusting of its institutions and so called leaders.

WAK Coe, Llandudno, Upper Wales

You are unfortunately quite right, Simon. Welcome to Her Majesty's Open Prison UK - You are all suspects!

Adrian Ryan, Donegal, Ireland

No-one is more illiberal as a liberal in charge. You get what you elect!

Adam Richards, Sydeny,

Well said. The comparison drawn between the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower's era & modern Britain is as accurate as it is worrying. The government has forgotten that the role of the state is to protect its people AND their freedom whilst being accountable for the way it protects.

Tony White, Amster, The Netherlands

If you keep voting for Socialists you eventually wind up with the Stasi. Thanks Simon.

Philip Batten, Christchurch, UK

Damn right. Also - I noticed something weird the other day: On choosing to 'tag' a photo in Facebook it automatically highlights the users face (even in a group of people). Could Facebook do exactly what it says on the tin? Hook this up with CCTV systems?

Dave, Dubai,

A great thinker of our times - as the above piece proves !!!!

Good luck Simon !!!!

IAN PAYNE, Walsall,

A fantastic piece of journalism. But it has to be acted upon. Simon must push this matter further. MPs must stand up and be counted. As a society we are sleep walking into a loss of liberty. Simon, please take this further to the television media. Someone such as Andrew Marr who has integrity.

Roger Smy, London, England

I have always enjoyed Simon Jenkin's column and was dismayed to see that this is his last. Few journalists or commentators are as perpicacious or astute in bringing the encroaching Orwellian nightmare to the public attention. I hope we'll still see the not-too-occasional column from him.

Suzie, Hebrides, Scotland

Why should British citizens pay £12B so that their own Government can spy on them?

Jaqui Smith should publish the analysis that shows that the forecast benefits significantly outweigh the costs. Then there should be a public debate to show whether the electorate agrees with this analysis.

Martyn Thomas CBE, Bath, UK

It's very sad to read that this will be Simon Jenkins' final colum in the Sunday Times. In this, his final piece, he demonstrates yet again, one of the main thenes that permeate his writing. Freedom, liberty and democracy are not givens in this world. Constant vigiliance is required by all of us.

Dr. Ross Grainger, Yicheng, PR China

Is it not ironic that only the unelected, non-democratic House of Lords still protects us from all this?

David Ireland, Singapore, Singapore

Again I ask.Has this legislation,survelilance and inconvenience when we catch a plane,made the world safer? Has it caught Bin Laden? Who has been the real victim of intrusive legislation?the more power politicians have,the more they want,under the pretence of defending liberty.Soon there'll be none!

Zen, Kalgoorlie, Australia

A great swan song. Thank you for providing the sanest and most thought-provoking of columns. Old soldiers don't die: I suspect the same applies to journalists and look forward to the (hopefully frequent)occasional contributions from you in the future.Thank you very much indeed Mr Jenkins. Good luck!

Roddy Campbell, Christchurch, New Zealand

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