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The Rights Stuff
The Independent is being brave today, republishing an article from Vanity Fair which, it warns, "could get you arrested" if you read it.
Apparently, earlier this month police arrested a man for protesting too close to parliament. When searched, he had a few photocopies of the Vanity Fair article in his pocket. The article, written by London editor Henry Porter, attacks the British government for its recent crackdown on human rights - such as its determination to go ahead with the introduction of ID cards.
The police, apparently, judged the photocopies "politically motivated material" - itself a worrying illustration of the realities of protest in Britain in 2006.
The Indie reckons its striking a blow for freedom by republishing Porter's article. It would be easier to take the Independent's determination to support press freedom seriously if it had reprinted the cartoons of Mohammed that caused such a stir earlier this year: Press freedom really was under threat then, when fanatics threatened to murder editors and journalists daring to demonstrate solidarity with their colleagues in Denmark. The Indie, like other British newspapers, bottled out.
Too bad, really, as Porter's article is a good one. Rather than simply rounding up the usual civil liberties professionals and "human rights lawyers", Porter talks to conservative figures equally troubled by the government's actions. Former Tory home secretary Kenneth Clarke warns of how numerous "harmless" laws get used in ways which become alarming. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, says,
"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."
He speaks to conservative columnist Charles Moore, who claims that authoritarian politics are in New Labour's DNA:
"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist," says Moore, and Porter adds: "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."
