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Liberty In London?
Critics of Tony Blair's government insist that controversial legislation passed since 2001 is undermining civil liberties in Britain.
In a special campaign on civil liberties (now probably archive-only thanks to the Independent's hopeless and irritating pay-to-read policy, the newspaper reports on how the front bench has been forced onto the offensive following a campaign against 'authoritarian' laws.
In rebuke, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has published a 14-page critique. In a speech last night, he claimed that the liberal media had injected a "pernicious and even dangerous poison" into the debate on the government's civil liberties record. He singled out the Guardian, its sister paper the Observer and the Independent as major offenders, warning,
"In the absence of many of the genuinely dangerous and evil totalitarian dictatorships to fight - since they've gone - the media has steadily rhetorically transferred to some of the existing democracies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, some of the characteristics of those dictatorships.
"So some commentators routinely use language like 'police state', 'fascist', 'hijacking our democracy', 'creeping authoritarianism', 'destruction of the rule of law', whilst words like 'holocaust', 'gulag' and 'apartheid' are regularly used descriptively of our society in ways which must be truly offensive to those who experienced those realities(...)
"As these descriptions and language are used, the truth just flies out of the window as does any adherence to professional journalistic standards or any requirement to examine the facts and check them with rigour.
"In the case of often complex debates, for example on the appropriate balance between liberty and security, much media comment reduces itself to simplistic and flowery rhetoric."
Opponents of Mr Blair charge him with grievous faults such as legislation which allows holding suspects for up to 90 days without charge, control of ID cards and a ban on glorification of terrorism.
Roger Smith, director of pressure group Justice, says: "The question is how much Charles Clarke is in charge of the Home Office agenda. It's pretty clear that the Prime Minister is".
It's not an easy issue to take sides on. It is surely true that all who are in power at Westminster have a near-sacred duty to protect the nation's citizens against harm. Furthermore, few outside the human rights industry, the media and firebrands among minority communities complain when people suspecting of planning terrorist atrocities have their collars felt. There is a widespread feeling that the current threat is extraordinary, and that extraordinary measures should be used to combat it.
Additionally, the need to protect civil liberties in the war against terrorism needs to be squared with widely-felt revulsion against violent crimes committed against individuals. Yesterday, EURSOC linked to an article comparing the criminal justice system's response to two horrendous assaults with the government's zeal to stamp out smoking and one policeman's response to idiotic comments from a student. We probably aren't alone in wishing that the government and the courts should get their priorities right on violent crime and terrorism - without compromising the freedoms of law-abiding people.
The debate revolves around whether the maintenance of law and order has gone that bit too far in its regulation of a kingdom historically associated with freedom.
The difficulty of squaring tough action on violent crime and an otherwise liberal programme might explain the Conservative opposition's silence on the matter - if you were feeling charitable. Perhaps they haven't got a clue - or, more likely, Tory leader David Cameron doesn't want to come out demanding hooligans be locked up longer for fear of being labelled a nasty fascist by the liberal press.
The Tories have also been slow to tie the goverment's attitude to civil liberties in the war on terror to its other incursions into personal liberty - the ban on smoking, for example, or the ban on foxhunting. There is an opportunity for the Opposition to make the abuse of civil liberties a Conservative issue (and championing hunting would certainly distance them from the left-leaning press), but instead Cameron's men prefer to sit back and watch the press do their job for them.
Luckily the Daily Telegraph is there to batter some sense into both sides in its leader column:
"Charles Clarke may have acted in some respects in good faith to try to prevent our country coming under murderous attack from terrorists," it says, "He has also, however, sought to introduce illiberal measures that belong to a time of total war, such as identity cards, control orders, detention without trial and restricting the jurisdiction of ordinary courts...
"The Government has always sought an obedient Parliament, a compliant judiciary, a supine press that takes dictation from its spin doctors and a police force designed purely to implement its policies. Mr Clarke fails to see the huge dangers for a country such as ours of institutional arrangements such as these."
Charles Clarke, it claims, is the old-fashioned totalitarian here - a habit the former student radical picked up from his days visiting the Soviet Union.
