David Davis | ukwatch.net

What does David Davis stand for? (Part 2)

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:52:56 +0000

This is the second of a two-part article examining the political history of Conservative MP David Davis, who resigned his parliamentary seat in protest at Labour’s terror legislation enabling 42 days’ detention without trial. Part one can be viewed here.

In concluding his speech on the campaign to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme, the former director of Britain’s National Association of Port Employers, Nicholas Finney, explains:

“We knew that confrontation would be inevitable and when at last the government announced on the 5th April 1989 that they were going to repeal the dock labour scheme we knew we had won a famous victory. What we then had to do was put our plan of action into operation. We set out to achieve reform as fast as possible using a £35,000 redundancy payment provided by the government in its repeal bill, to break the strike and to shed labour. Under UK labour law you can actually dismiss workers lawfully providing you are not selective. If all workers are on strike you can say ‘either you come back to work or you are sacked.’ We were accused of ‘gangster tactics.’ Nevertheless, that was the threat and it certainly had a major effect on breaking the strike, because of the potential loss to the dockers of their £35,000 sterling redundancy payment.”

He then cites the accomplishments made after just one year:

“We had 9,221 dockers on April 5th 1989. In October 1990, there are less than 4,000 dockers left and many ports where there are no ex registered dockers at all. The restructuring of the labour force has been complete.”

He boasted that “We” had removed “all national agreements…all port agreements…all industry Conciliation and Arbitration procedures…developed entirely new work patterns, totally flexible shift patterns” and “introduced part time working/contracting out.”

“But,” he concludes, “I think the greatest of our achievements (and this is an achievement for the company as a whole) is that we destroyed for the foreseeable future the power of trade unions to hold the country to ransom by calling a national dock strike, which is so wrong for any democratically elected government. I think these achievements are worth learning from.”

There is not a word uttered by Finney from which Davis could legitimately attempt to distance himself. Whether he was one of the three MPs cited by Finney or not, he acted as “an influential voice in parliament” and as a member of the “influential political body,” the Centre for Policy Studies, to help wage the propaganda war against the dockers preceding the abolition of the National Docks Labour Scheme.

How David Davis wanted to criminalise strikes

David Davis next ventured into print for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in November 1989, with a pamphlet that went even further than his plans for the docks. Advocating a major assault on the democratic rights of working people, his objective was nothing less than to outlaw strikes altogether in vast areas of the British economy.

The CPS pamphlet, “The Power of the Pendulum” is subtitled, “Reducing strikes by ‘final offer’ arbitration.” In it, Davis writes of the “rumblings” that the government might face from a series of strikes in a “summer of discontent,” which were “symptoms of a dangerous factor in industrial relations—the great difficulty of reforming the state sector unions.”

By “reform,” Davis means preventing strikes. He complains that while strike activity was at its lowest level for 50 years in the private sector, public sector strikes had not declined to the same degree.

The need for “reform” was not mediated by privatisation, he argued, because the recently privatised companies still often enjoyed a large or monopolist position.

Between them, the “combined state sector and recently privatised monopolies…can effectively bring the country to a halt. They can impose vast losses on other people and other businesses. They employ six or seven million people, about a quarter of all employees; and for all these reasons their continued productivity is a proper cause of government concern.”

Davis’s solution is to make strikes illegal throughout this entire sector, while bringing in a system of compulsory arbitration. He favours what is termed “pendulum” arbitration. As opposed to conventional arbitration, where the arbiter decides on pay and conditions based on a consideration of the positions of management and unions—and usually decides a settlement somewhere in the middle ground, Davis wanted a decision backing either one or the other position. If they faced the “pendulum” swinging against them, he believed this would force the unions to make more “moderate” demands.

Davis makes clear that his call to illegalise strikes goes much further than legislation to prohibit strikes in what are usually described as essential services—a demand that has often been raised by the political right.

He writes, “It has been suggested, both in Parliament and outside, that essential services are the proper area for restriction of the strike weapon…. This paper addresses the issue from a slightly different angle, that of monopoly industries.”

Listing the scope of his proposal, he continues, “Water, obviously, qualifies as an essential service which is in effect a monopoly. So does the National Health Service. But what of gas, electricity, telephones and the postal service?... [T]his paper’s policy proposals are aimed at all monopoly suppliers, not just state sector or ‘essential services.’ ”

Davis rejects the right to strike

Civil liberties are often represented as individual rights that are inalienable to the citizen. But for working people, faced with the power of major corporations and the state, the preservation of individual democratic and civil liberties has always been bound up with the right to organise collectively in furtherance of common social and political interests.

The right to a decent standard of living meant challenging the tyranny of the owners of capital. It meant the right to organise in trade unions, to collectively bargain and to withdraw labour, if necessary through strike action. This in turn meant preventing not only the individual worker being victimised, but also the collective union body from being subject to attack by the employers or the state.

On the political front, the struggle for the right to vote led inexorably to the struggle to break the monopoly of the parties of big business. This meant, of necessity, to establish and fund a party that would represent working people.

This is the only way that civil liberties can be properly understood. But as far as Davis is concerned, these collective rights do not properly exist and can be done away with.

Davis always writes of the “right to strike” in quotation marks, arguing that “British law does not explicitly recognise a ‘right to strike.’ ”

Instead, he acknowledges only a “combination of immunities in civil and criminal law” that “render strikes a viable tactic for trade unions and workers under certain conditions” [emphasis added].

After briefly describing how in 1906 trade unions secured freedom from liability for losses occurred during strikes, he states that because of the damage they can inflict in monopolistic sectors this freedom from prosecution for liability should no longer hold.

He believes this should be the case not only regarding official strike action, but also when the union does not actively prevent unofficial wildcat action by effectively policing its members. Any no-strike legislation, he insists, “must be able to deal with this sort of difficulty: able to deter guerrilla action which is apparently (and often only apparently) leaderless…. We should recognise that a trade union is its membership. Therefore if it has the majority of the membership of the bargaining unit involved, and that bargaining unit takes disruptive action, then in the absence of effective action to put the matter right the union is guilty of a breach.”

He concludes, “Any union that breaks this constraint should face sequestration of its assets.”

To make the legislation even more far-reaching, he proposes that prosecutions “should recognise who is the real victim of such action; and allow customers of the service or industry to initiate the action for sequestration of assets.”

Thus, Davis wanted a situation in which any Tory party activist could initiate legal proceedings against a union taking strike action, paralysing or even bankrupting them.

David Davis—then and now

Davis and his defenders might argue that he no longer calls for these measures and, like the rest of the Tory Party, has suffered an acute attack of niceness. In reality, he does not make these issues his central concern because—as he argues in his only other CPS pamphlet, “Modern Conservatism,” written in 2005—the Tories have successfully dealt with “overweening union power.”

That is why he continues to hail Margaret Thatcher for having secured “our freedom from the threat of the Soviet Union” and “from socialism at home.”

Even in 1989, he was able to cite as examples that should be emulated the “single-union ‘no strike’ agreements,” and the industrial relations pursued by Japanese companies investing in Britain—which were signed with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbers Union and Amalgamated Engineering Union, now part of Unite. He then noted that “more surprisingly, the GMB, TGWU and ISTC are also signatories to no-strike pendulum arbitration deals.”

Since 1989, the phenomenon of no-strike deals has proved to be only one manifestation of the transformation of the trade unions into an adjunct of corporate management. The imposition of no-strike legislation was not necessary, because trade unions hardly ever called a strike, ingratiating themselves with the employers during year after year of record low levels of industrial action.

Nevertheless, should the trade union bureaucracy prove unable to prevent an eruption of militant activity as a result of today’s worsening recession, Davis and the Tories, together with Labour, would not hesitate to impose the harshest sanctions they deem necessary. Even more likely, they will demand measures targeting anyone who leads an unofficial action outside the control of the trade unions.

It is not David Davis who has moved to the left, but the Labour “left” and erstwhile liberal milieu that have moved inexorably to the right. They have not met Davis on the political middle ground, or recruited him to the cause of civil liberties. Rather, they have ceded any claim to defend the basic democratic rights and essential social interests of the working class to the Tory party’s big business agenda. In the process, they have abandoned even the pretence of an independent political existence or purpose.

What does David Davis MP really stand for? (Part 1)

JamieSW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:59:44 +0000

This is the first of a two-part article examining the political history of Conservative MP David Davis, who resigned his parliamentary seat in protest at Labour’s terror legislation enabling 42 days’ detention without trial. Part two will be published tomorrow.

Veteran Labour “left” Tony Benn, Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty and a plethora of liberal journalists from the Guardian and the Independent all hailed David Davis for leading a campaign in defence of civil liberties after his resignation triggered a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

The Socialist Equality Party stood Chris Talbot against this attempt to corral hostility to the Labour government behind Davis, advocating an independent socialist perspective to defend democratic rights. On the day of the vote, we explained, “The end product of allowing Davis to be identified as the leader of a supposedly non-partisan movement in defence of civil liberties is to maintain the exclusion of the working class from political life. At the very point where the necessity of breaking with Labour is becoming clear to millions of people, and when the most thoughtful layers are looking for a political alternative, workers are urged to either remain loyal to Labour despite everything or to back the Tories.”

Just what it means to lend credence to Davis’s pretensions to be a civil libertarian, and what the working class can expect from any government of which he is a part, is illustrated by his own writings.

Davis is hardly prolific when it comes to setting pen to paper. However, in the late 1980s, he did publish two pamphlets for the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) that refute any and all claims he and his newfound allies might now make for him to be a guardian of democratic rights. They make clear that as far as working people were concerned, Davis’s aim was to deprive them of any possibility of mounting an independent defence of jobs, wages and conditions.

In the name of “allowing management to manage,” he sought to both utilise and extend the draconian anti-union laws enacted by his party leader and political idol Margaret Thatcher in order to outlaw strikes and bust any unions that defied the Tories’ sweeping privatisation programme and the “rationalisation” of industry and public services, at the expense of thousands of jobs.

As someone representing a constituency adjoining the seaport of Hull, Davis centred his attention initially on plans to deregulate Britain’s docks.

In 1988, the then MP for Boothferry, largely merged into Haltemprice and Howden in 1996, published a pamphlet for the CPS, entitled, “Clear the Decks: Abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme.”

The National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) was first introduced by the Labour government in 1947, in response to the rank-and-file wildcat dock strike of 1945. The strike was opposed by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), and the government used troops to keep the ports open. It ended after six weeks when the striking dockers accepted an assurance from the TGWU leaders that they would negotiate a “Dockers’ Charter” with the government.

The NDLS promised an end to casual labour by giving dockers the legal right to minimum work, holidays, sick pay and pensions. It was administered by a National Dock Labour Board, made up of equal representation from unions and management, and also gave the unions a veto over dismissals and control over recruitment.

Registered dockers who were laid off by any of the 150 firms bound by the scheme had to be taken on by another firm or be paid compensation. By the time of Davis’s pamphlet, employers at the 60 British ports were all covered by the scheme.

Davis wanted an end to this situation. Above all, he sought the destruction of dual union-management control, the guaranteed employment rights for Registered Dock Workers (RDW) and other protections. He denounced these measures as “restrictive practices.”

The preamble in his pamphlet declared, “This paper demonstrates how unjust and ludicrous existing legislation is. If Britain is to seize fully the economic opportunities which will be offered by the Single European Act after 1992, the Dock Labour Scheme must be abolished. Legislation must be brought forward to end the Scheme; and steps be taken by the Government to secure the profitable expansion of Britain’s ports industry in order to meet the demands of a single European Market with 320 million consumers.”

Davis complains that a docker fired by an employer could not then be prevented from working elsewhere in the industry without the agreement of the Local Board. He cites as an extreme case one worker who was convicted of “smuggling” but continued to work on the docks. He lists various “abuses” such as “bobbing or welting”—setting too high a figure for workers needed for a particular job so some “bob-off” home—and “Ghosting”—enforcing a non-registered dockworker carrying out work on the docks to be monitored by an RDW.

All of this is used to portray the registered dockers as a group of corrupt time-wasters, who should be dealt with for the benefit of everyone else. What he actually wanted was to impose massive job cuts and greater levels of exploitation and thereby secure bigger profits for his corporate friends.

Strike-breaking and union-busting

One passage is revealing in that it explains how Davis saw the attack on the dockers as a continuation of the destruction of Britain’s mining industry, after the defeat of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. He states, “Another difficulty which arises from the Scheme is that the port employers can be powerless to prevent political strikes.”

He gives as his example a July 9 strike in 1984 at Immingham that escalated to a national strike, when the British Steel Corporation used non-registered dockers to unload iron ore. “In light of the miners strike,” he writes, “it was important for British Steel that the work should continue.”

The national strike was to continue until July 21. Davis was incensed, as this was a rare example of an industrial action breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of Tory anti-union laws prohibiting so-called secondary action: “This example shows how the TGWU is able to manipulate the Scheme for its own political purposes, in this case giving support to the miners.”

Apart from this incident, the TGWU, like the rest of Britain’s unions, never did challenge the anti-union laws and bring out their members in solidarity with the striking miners—who were isolated and defeated. In contrast, Davis was prepared to do whatever was necessary to defeat both the miners and the dockers, using the legal powers of sequestration against the TGWU to possibly bankrupt and break the union that earlier had been employed against the National Union of Mineworkers.

Davis anticipated that the TGWU would call a strike should the government determine to abolish the NDLS. He stressed that the combined effect of the anti-union laws and the propaganda campaign he played a part in would isolate the dockers, noting that if a strike were to involve non-scheme ports then it would be illegal:

“If the TGWU is to have immunity from civil actions for damages resulting from a dock strike, it would have to be recognised by the law as a ‘trade dispute’...if the eventual decision went against the TGWU it would risk a large fine and the possible sequestration of all its assets if it persisted with a strike.”

He continues,

“The legislation, however, on trade unions and industrial disputes brought in by this Government, has laid down that a sympathy strike, by definition, cannot be ‘in contemplation, or furtherance of a trade dispute.’ Therefore if the non-Scheme workers were called out on strike in sympathy with the Scheme port RDWs, the employers in the non-Scheme ports would be able to obtain injunctions against the trade unions involved and damages for any losses incurred.”

The National Dock Labour Scheme was finally abolished in 1989, the year after the publication of Davis’s pamphlet.

A revealing speech

The dockers came out on strike in July of that year, but this was defeated without the need to implement Davis’s full agenda.

However, a speech delivered in Australia in 1990 by the former director of Britain’s National Association of Port Employers, Nicholas Finney OBE, vividly describes the nature of the campaign waged against the dockers in which Davis played such a prominent role.

Finney describes how the port employers prepared for the abolishing of the Scheme:

“When the confrontation came, a number of important factors made a difference to the outcome…

“We held two major conferences before we were sure the government was actually ready and these conferences were to try to persuade employers to plan in advance how they would go about setting new working patterns, how they would set about breaking down the demarcation lines, how they would go about setting new pay agreements, new manning levels, etc. Fundamentally and long before the government repealed the scheme, we took the decision that the employers were going to abandon all national and port pay bargaining.

“The campaign was conducted through parliament by using every possible parliamentary device. Early day motions, adjournment debates, etc. We had three MPs who really acted as our voice in Parliament. They did all the hard work, they talked to the other MPs, they introduced briefing materials into the House of Commons, and we made sure that they were always well supplied with appropriate material.

“We talked to influential political bodies (like your own) such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the No 10 Policy Unit, the Aims of Industry. We made sure that those people who really had influence in government were fully committed and would themselves talk to a wide range of people. It was too serious an issue to just leave to transport or employment ministers. We knew that it would be a Cabinet decision; we knew we had to get people like the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary on our side. So we used every political body which had influence. We also used the press and media. We constantly searched out and supplied the media with anti-docker stories, headlines such as ‘welcome return even if the man’s a thief’ or ‘ghosts who keep vanishing’; ‘twenty things you never knew about fiddling dockers,’ ‘they can’t be fired.’ These headlines were all designed to make it easier for the dockers to be isolated. By the time government acted every national newspaper at one time or another had published an editorial calling for the government to end the dock labour scheme.

“We had a Times columnist write headlines like ‘dock ages on the docks,’ ‘queer seaside customs,’ ‘legalised extortion racket,’ ‘time to end it,’ ‘block those dock rip offs.’ We also encouraged radio and television to do documentary programmes on the docks scandal.

“We commissioned economic studies. One particularly important economic study (and perhaps it is worth thinking of using in the Australian scenario) was to try and prove that by getting rid of the dock labour scheme, you actually create many more jobs than you lose. Getting rid of the restrictions on the waterfront meant a whole new world in ‘investment opportunity.’ We sought two benefits from this approach. One, to make it much more difficult for the Labour Party and for the unions to argue against repeal, and secondly to make sure we could drive a wedge home to isolate dockers and describe them as a selfish, small group of workers who were actually stopping people from gaining jobs in unemployment black spots which frequently were in under-developed city dock areas which had been derelict for many years.”

To be continued

SEP speaks to voters in Cottingham and Willerby

tim — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:23:39 +0000

Chris Talbot is the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party in the July 10 by-election in the constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was called following the resignation of sitting Conservative MP David Davis in protest at government “anti-terrorist” legislation enabling police to detain individuals for up to 42 days without charge.

Angela Morkos is a mature student at Hull University and lives in Cottingham.

“I am familiar with all the issues that people are standing for. The SEP stands for more or less what I agree with,” she said.

“I am against the war in Iraq, I don’t like big business and I think David Davis is mobilising right-wing policies in Britain. I watch the news on TV and I suspected this. And I would never trust a Conservative anyway, to be quite honest.”

Angela said she fully agreed with the SEP’s aim of preventing Davis mobilising the popular hostility to the Labour government for his own right-wing agenda. She explained that she opposed all the attacks on democratic rights carried out by successive Conservative and Labour governments.

“I think Gordon Brown has been disappointing. I supported Blair when he first came into power but I was disappointed over the Iraq war. I didn’t believe all this about weapons of mass destruction when I heard about it on the TV. I think it was a bit like Maggie Thatcher and the Falklands War, that Blair wanted to be the next Churchill. I think he had delusions of grandeur.

“Before this election I have tended to support Liberal Democrat policies in Parliament.”

Angela said that she wasn’t aware that the Liberal Party were not standing their own candidate and that they were calling for a vote supporting Davis. The SEP explained that this showed how far the Liberals have moved in a right-wing direction, that they can now support an avowed anti-working class politician such as David Davis.

Angela said she supported the fact that only the SEP was putting forward a coherent programme representing working class people.

In response to questions about the impact of the worsening economic crisis on working class people, Angela said, “I think it very worrying. I am on a low income. I feel that around here businesses exploit me. I am on Disability Living Allowance. I think there is a prejudice against people who are unable to work. I am doing my best and am actually studying to improve my situation and I find I am just exploited.

“All the basics are going up—milk, cheese, butter. I have to live on lentils basically and people lending me a couple of quid because they feel sorry for me. That is not very healthy and I’m anaemic as it is.

“Then there are dental charges and I don’t know how I am going to afford those. I also have to take regular medication and I am just glad that at least prescription charges are free at the moment for people on Disability Living Allowance.

“I think all this stems from Margaret Thatcher anyway. Tony Blair said that he agreed with her and I think it all worsened right from the beginning with her. And the governments after Thatcher have just continued in the same vein since then”.

Kate Webster is a retired doctor’s receptionist and lives in Cottingham.

Socialist Equality Party members and supporters campaigned in the villages Cottingham and Willerby on July 2 and a reporting team from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers, students and youth about the issues raised in the election.The WSWS reporting team asked her what she thought of David Davis, the Labour Party and their attitude to the question of democratic rights.

“I don’t think David Davis stands for democratic rights. I thought the Conservatives are always for the richer people aren’t they? What I can’t understand is him resigning and then trying to get re-elected. What is all that about?”

Katie agreed that both the Labour Party and the Conservatives are right-wing formations, hostile to the working class.

“I wouldn’t have voted for Davis and I think the Labour Party are too right-wing. I saw that the NSPCC [a national child protection organisation] was trying to get smacking stopped, but Davis wasn’t interested in that.

“I didn’t agree with the Iraq war. The Labour Party are more like capitalists now. They are giving themselves a great big raise and the credit crisis is not affecting their pay is it?

“There is no party now for the working class. I will read the SEP election statement and I will vote for Chris Talbot,” Katie said.

During the campaign in Cottingham several other local residents told the SEP that they had heard about the party’s campaign and would be supporting Chris Talbot. Among these was a currently unemployed bricklayer, who said that he had read the SEP election statement a few days ago and that he agreed with a revolutionary socialist programme. He said he would like further discussion on the role of new left formations in Europe and the Socialist Workers Party. He added that he was going to attend the Eve of Poll meeting being held by the SEP at Cottingham Civic Hall on July 9.

During the day Chris Talbot was filmed and interviewed by a student from the University of Sheffield who was covering the by-election as her final project.

The Guardian divided on response to David Davis

tim — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:59:32 +0000

The decision by David Davis to resign and force a by-election based on opposition to the Labour government’s erosion of civil liberties has produced divisions within what passes for Britain’s liberal milieu. A conflict over whether or not to support Davis, based on his campaign against the extension of detention without trial to 42 days, is being fought out in the pages of the Guardian and the Observer.

The issue for some goes beyond simply deciding whether or not to register a protest against 42 days detention and other measures undermining democratic rights. What is being fought out is whether to remain loyal to Labour while nodding occasionally towards the Liberal Democrats, or to transfer political allegiance to the Conservatives.

The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, the Observer, was initially cautiously supportive of Davis, describing his resignation in its June 15 edition as “A wild move but the principles are correct.”

“Opinion polls show broad public support for the government’s position on 42 days,” the Observer claimed, before adding, “Mr. Davis hopes, and it is a decent aspiration, that a by-election campaign will change minds more effectively than parliamentary debate. But, meanwhile, the business of passing or rejecting this bad law falls to the Lords. They must heed the principled arguments that should have defeated the government in the Commons last week.”

The belief that the public backed the government was quickly proved to be wrong. It soon became clear that Davis had more correctly judged the national temper.

Pro-Davis, Pro-Tory?

A number of Observer and Guardian feature writers were far less cautious and began openly speculating about whether Davis and even the Tory Party itself could be supported against Labour.

Chief political commentator Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the same edition of the Observer, “David Davis is vainglorious, mad and really rather terrific.”

“It tells you quite a lot about David Davis that his nose has been broken five times,” Rawnsley declared. “David Davis is no saint. There’s truth in some of the accusations that are being hurled at him by furious Tories…. In tabloid cliché, he is usually described as a bruiser. I see a man who is actually a romantic, not least about himself…. So, yes, there is ego here … But there is also an extremely strong element of fiercely held belief.”

Finishing his eulogy to Davis, the man of action and principle, Rawnsley opined, “In the background, there is a serious and significant philosophical and political divide in the Conservative party which will matter hugely if and when they return to power. It is a tension about whether the Conservatives are essentially a libertarian or an authoritarian party.”

Others commissioned by the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” seemed to have lost their heads and even their hearts to Davis. Jan Morris wrote breathlessly on June 25 how, “In defending 800 years of hard-won political rights, this rebel is also standing up for a crucial part of the national spirit…. It is not just a matter of those 42 days, of habeas corpus or even of human rights in the political sense of the phrase: it is an elemental struggle that is dividing the British again into two nations, as Benjamin Disraeli saw them long ago.”

Morris accused half of the British people of having been “Brainwashed by a tabloid press of brilliantly insidious techniques, then, numbed by the relentless mediocrity of television,” “willingly forfeited the right to make up their own minds, and mutely accept[ed] indoctrination.”

In contrast, Davis is hailed for defending “not just political liberty but liberty of the mind, of the identity, of the spirit—even, patriots might sententiously say, of the national soul…. So perhaps Davis is a prophet as well as a politician. When he talks of habeas corpus he is echoing ideas far older and more profound, reaching back to the earliest yearnings of antiquity, the first glimmerings of human individuality, when our ancestors began to break from tribal disciplines and devise preferences of their own.”

The coverage in the Observer and the Guardian never again reaches these levels of hero worship, but on occasion its own writers have come close.

On June 27, the Guardian’s G2 supplement ran several pages on Davis by Nicholas Watt under the heading, “Maverick or freedom fighter?”

Watt begins by describing how, “Narrowing his gaze with the poise of a former SAS officer, David Davis shifts slowly in his armchair and points through his sitting room window to a line of trees in the distance. ‘The key to security is the line of sight’ ... Davis will take no lectures about failing to appreciate the threat of terrorism. ‘I was on an IRA death list,’ he says. ‘We’ll have none of that nonsense about being soft on terror.’ “

Like a passage from a 1950’s Boys’ Own comic, Watt describes Davis as “A Tory bruiser,” known to some as “the Knuckleduster.” We learn yet again of how Davis frequently succeeded in breaking his nose, while playing Rugby, swimming and intervening “to save a friend who was being mugged on Clapham Common.” In addition, “The Davis clan have all been taught to be toughies, thanks to an imposing climbing wall in an outhouse.”

The most explicit political exposition regarding the significance of supporting Davis is made by Henry Porter, who writes regularly on civil liberties.

He insists in the June 29 Observer, “We can’t leave David Davis to carry the fight on his own.”

It is when he explains who he means by “we” that Porter asks, “So who is to answer those questions?”

Answering his own question, he replies, “Certainly not Labour, though there are many good people on the backbenches.” The Liberal Democrats are patted on the back for being “ardently for freedom.”

But in reality, Porter insists, “it must be the Tories, right?”

He places caveats on adopting a pro-Conservative stance, but argues for it nevertheless. He goes so far as to compare the democratic and freedom-loving credentials of various prominent Conservatives. Party leader David Cameron is “said to be more libertarian than his friend, the shadow Chancellor George Osborne. Dominic Grieve, who has succeeded Davis as shadow Home Secretary, is solidly libertarian,” and so on.

He then appeals to the Conservatives to “make the big argument, because there are political opportunities here.”

“The first is that Labour has betrayed its mission to champion the poor and vulnerable…. The Tories could surely demonstrate Labour’s failure in this department.

“The second opportunity concerns the traditional Conservative mission to champion the individual and roll back state power.”

To portray the Tories as a party of civil liberties at best expresses an extraordinary level of political disorientation amongst a petty-bourgeois layer who once would have recoiled at such a description. But to some degree it is also a recognition of the direction in which the wind is blowing.

Cameron and a future Tory government would, after all, have need of apologists and converts with a vaguely leftist background if they were to have any chance of maintaining a grip on power. The same phenomenon—former social democrats and liberals transferring their allegiance to the new political order—has already been amply demonstrated in France following the coming to power of Gaullist President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Pro-Labour, pro-Jill Saward?

Even so, to even begin to advance Davis and Cameron as defenders of democratic rights is testimony to how far to the right Labour itself has travelled.

Not everyone is quite so prepared to abandon the sinking New Labour ship. But those opposing support for Davis are, if anything, advancing positions more politically grotesque than their journalistic colleagues.

On June 20, with Labour refusing to stand against Davis, the Guardian published a comment by Olly Kendal, former adviser to Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, entitled, “Wanted: an election challenger.”

He appealed for anyone whatsoever to stand “who will serious challenge the former shadow home secretary.”

Kendall insisted that any high-profile public figure that came forward as a “credible candidate” would do. And he or she certainly need not oppose 42 days, “as important and fundamental to our society as it is.”

Instead he proposed a single-issue campaign on the burning issue of MP’s pay, suggesting as a candidate—“Who better than the man who in 2000 took over the helm of the BBC, promising to ‘cut the crap’ at the corporation”—Greg Dyke.

Kendall closes by acknowledging a small flaw in his proposal, given that Dyke, “refused to stand as London Mayor unless he could stand as a unity candidate for both the Lib Dems and Tories.”

Nevertheless, the search for a supposedly “credible candidate” was clearly being pursued in earnest.

On June 25, the Guardian’s senior political correspondent Andrew Sparrow wrote in his politics blog, “David Davis may find himself facing serious by-election candidate after all.”

The person in question was Jill Saward. Sparrow designated her as a “serious candidate” not merely because she supposedly has a “high-profile” for having “waived her right to anonymity after being raped at her Ealing Vicarage home in 1986, [and] has made her name as a campaigner on behalf of the victims of sexual violence.”

Sparrow is boosting Saward because she intends to use the issue of rape as an emotive argument against Davis and in a way that helps Labour.

He quotes at great length from Saward’s web site, in which she defends the use of closed-circuit TV cameras and the amassing of a national DNA database on the basis that this helps the police track down and convict rapists.

Sparrow adds, as if presenting a profound insight, “Interestingly, she also criticises Davis for not accepting the result of the Commons vote on 42-day detention. ‘Why would anybody want to stand as a member of parliament if they are not prepared to accept the will of parliament when it makes a decision?’ she asks.”

On June 26, Sparrow moved to the Guardian’s print edition to again proclaim Saward as “Davis’s most prominent opponent,” devoting an entire article to presenting her views, before merely listing the names of six of the other candidates standing against Davis. (Chris Talbot, the Socialist Equality Party candidate, was omitted, as is the norm.)

Though Saward is standing as an independent, Sparrow makes even clearer that she is being given such preferential treatment in large part because she functions as a proxy candidate for Labour. He writes, “Saward floated the idea of standing as a candidate in an article on her web site on Tuesday. She said that, at that stage, it was her own idea, but that since the article appeared she had received encouragement from party politicians.

“She would not say who was urging her to stand. But it is known that Labour is very keen for a high-profile candidate to challenge Davis.”

The debate being conducted in the Guardian and the Observer could end with them taking opposed positions on the Haltemprice and Howden ballot or not taking a position at all. But the fact that these two publications respond to the growing threat to civil liberties by discussing whether to continue supporting Labour or to back the Tories is a measure of the profound decay of liberal thought in Britain.