Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested
Part
of an Independent
article by Henry Porter
In
the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony
Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from
Parliament and the British people. Henry Porter charts a nine-year
assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom
for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave
In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of
Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small
group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea
party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like
Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other
members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the
afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.
Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this
occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the
question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It
is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of
nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This
collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped
out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a
new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a
little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not
first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of
British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the
protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances
to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.
The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If
anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then
he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is
arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the
square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of
demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were
charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the
Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred
yards away.
Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice
trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights
and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime
Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of
Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total
surveillance of society.
There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least
15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The
Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it
be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me.
Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal
e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home
with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister
in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal.
Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule
so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for
action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.
The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the
Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he
attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles
Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics
naming me and two other journalists and complaining about the
pernicious and even dangerous poison in the media.
So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British
Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack
the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten
something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more
serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called
"the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a
government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it
to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.
Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is,
that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of
experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often
well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under
legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned
about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within
one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime
and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by
the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people
in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial
behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone
from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person
breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five
years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed
to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to
control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical
company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company
that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in
sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.
But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the
scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right
to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is
a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same
offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption
of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour
legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right
not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken
is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect
is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet,
without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him -
house arrest in all but name.
Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice
and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is
now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old
graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the
direction of two mounted police officers, Mate, you know your horse
is gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that. He was given one
of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the
result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown
Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks
likely to cause disorder.
Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few
people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite
whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that the small measures of
increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely
different flavour. That is exactly the phrase I was looking for.
Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it
necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a very
different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons
agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil
liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist
threat: The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive
government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify
their actions, I am not one to underestimate the threat of
terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have
no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively. And Bob
Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on
Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone
of government - says of his boss: Underneath, there is an unstable
authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party.
Tony Blair is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the
processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid -
and often true - picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer
areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the
problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint
called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.
Please speak to the victims of this menace, he wrote.
They are
people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live
next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music
loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often
into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because
of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.
It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which
the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in
each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for
what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they
can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack
not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people,
and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would
mean they go to prison.
Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real
live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle
legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to
suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious
criminals to harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave
the country. It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he
mention the process of law or a court.
He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in
which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical
context of the criminal-justice system. I believe we require a
profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate, he said in a
speech in May. The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties
but what that means in the early 21st century. He now wants
legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human
Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human
Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested
it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.
There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of
2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the
Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers
while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies
Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in
which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up,
assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in,
particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to
occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess
the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he
cannot be punished.
I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into
the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has
been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say
that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws
without reference to elected representatives.
Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress
in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until
recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of
coverage in the British media.
The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity
theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised
database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details
of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped
as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or
insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by,
among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the
domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the
entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system
of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on
British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card,
under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical
records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone
it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.
Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as
being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being
between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of
terrorism and ID theft.
Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the
average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of
the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping
litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or
she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA
sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is
before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be
dropping litter or shooting someone.
So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no
reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference
speech, Blair said this: The whole of our system starts from the
proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly
convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal
justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow
law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of
thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding
whose come first. The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is
that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which
mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and
proof of the living virtue in it.
The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best
expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics,
who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a
wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his
findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense
of personal liberty has been lost in the British people: We have
reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is
possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and
surveillance within an open and free environment, that architecture only
has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the
Government to have control.
That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to
their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public
good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights.
Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public
interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even
intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must
learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual
freedom.
Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being
in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of
impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope
from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young
eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are
a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead
in Britain.
Charged for quoting George Orwell in public
In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political
protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the
latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police
Act.
On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George
Orwell quote: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act. In his possession, he had several copies of an
article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big
Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. The
implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was
being accused of handing out subversive material, said Mr Jago.
Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote
to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing
concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if
such articles were used in evidence under the Act.
Mr Porter said:
The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically
motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to
break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity
Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated'
and evidence of conscious law-breaking.
Scotland Yard has declined to comment.
Police
made up the law to stop protestors travelling
This
must be one of the most worrying stories for a long time. The Police
seem to be setting up a law where 'offence' is criminalised and yet we
know how easily 'offended' religious people are. 
One
has to sympathise with the flag makers. Surely there aren't many people who
actually want to wave them anymore. And now you can't even buy them to burn.
The
Men may be barred from baring their chests - and stomachs - in public
under new local laws being considered by town halls. 
The
High Court has criticised the way anti-social behaviour laws were used
to prosecute a 17-year-old schoolboy. 
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