Henry Porter | ukwatch.net

Why I Told Parliament: You've Failed Us On liberty

Ellie Keen — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:30:42 +0000

Two things are striking as you read through the oral evidence presented to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The first is the measured calm of the majority of your witnesses and, indeed, of the majority of the committee, in the face of the most serious attack on personal freedom and privacy ever mounted during peacetime in this country. British democracy is on the brink of being changed beyond recognition, yet nothing seems to disturb the equanimity of your proceedings. Even allowing for the well-mannered traditions of parliamentary committees, the lack of urgency and of a sense of crisis seems remarkable.

The second point that occurs to an outsider unfamiliar with parliamentary routines is that this campaign against Britain’s historic rights and freedoms began at almost the precise moment the European Human Rights Convention was incorporated into British law as the Human Rights Act (HRA) in 1998. In other words, the HRA, a Bill of Rights by any other name, has allowed the executive and Civil Service to roll back individual liberty and privacy and has done almost nothing to defend the British public from the accumulation of centralised power.

Let me make it clear that the HRA has brought many benefits, for instance in the questioning of rape victims, treatment of old people and ensuring that foreign prisoners who may be tortured in their countries are not deported. But despite its many advantages, the reality is that the HRA does not work effectively as a Bill of Rights and cannot guarantee the civil liberties necessary for a free society, a point perhaps tacitly admitted by the appearance of Gordon Brown’s green paper last summer.

The shocking loss of rights in Britain is now being noticed with bafflement abroad by people who do not understand this turn of events in one of the oldest democracies in the world. On a book tour last month in France, I was repeatedly asked by journalists: ‘Why in Britain? Why are there no demonstrations?’

There are complex answers to these questions, but an obvious one is that the government has consistently advanced the argument that new laws meet singular threats from crime, terror and antisocial behaviour. We accepted these appeals with a rare faith in the wisdom and benevolence of our leaders, a faith, incidentally, that I increasingly do not share. After a decade, the account shows a devastating loss of the freedoms that we once regarded as our birthright, the self-evident and self-perpetuating virtue of the British people and their constitution.

The shocking part of it all is that it has occurred with almost no coherent analysis, scrutiny or opposition in Parliament, no debate about the direction of our society and only a little understanding and exposition in the media.

We have taken a false sense of security from the HRA. Indeed, there seems every reason to suspect that it has served the executive and Civil Service as an alibi, while the balance between state power and individual freedom has been critically altered in the state’s favour. If the maintenance of civil liberties is the best measure of a code of rights, then the HRA must surely be declared a failure.

But this is not due to any innate problem with the act, rather to the state of parliamentary democracy, which I will come to later.

To show how the HRA fails us in practice, I want to draw the committee’s attention to the key article eight in the act, the one that guarantees ‘the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence’.

By far the most dramatic threat to ordinary people’s freedom in the last decade has been the growth of the database state. Under Labour’s plans for ‘transformational government’, an almighty surveillance structure is envisaged, through which, by the admission of the man in charge, Sir David Varney, the state will know ‘a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experience, beliefs, needs or desires’.

As Jill Kirby pointed out in a recent Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, the government’s intention is to centralise and share all information on the citizen, both horizontally and vertically, without the citizen’s knowledge. It is hard to imagine a more sinister apparatus of intrusion, and so control, but the project advances untroubled by the scrutiny of Parliament.

The state’s nightmarish lust for our personal data does not stop there. Already, all journeys undertaken on motorways and through town centres are recorded by the network of automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, with the information retained for two years. Under the National Identity Register, it seems that 49 pieces of information will still be required by the state and that every important transaction in the citizen’s life recorded. And there is a new proposal to collect 19 pieces of information, including mobile phone and credit-card numbers from people travelling abroad, which the government plans to use for ‘general public policy purposes’ – that is, the mass surveillance of a free people. I remind the committee of something American cryptographer and computer expert Bruce Schneier wrote: ‘It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could some day facilitate a police state.’

The story of the HRA’s failure gets worse when you reach the guarantees on the privacy of family life, home and correspondence. The act simply doesn’t perform. There are now five databases that will, in various degrees, breach the privacy of children and their families. The home is threatened for the first time since 1604 by new regulations concerning bailiffs who, under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act, are about to be allowed to offer violence against the householder. As to our correspondence, with more than half-a-million intercepts of post, email, and internet connections a year, with nearly 700 authorities allowed to apply for phone records and to intercept a person’s communications on the thinnest pretext, it is clear the HRA has not and will not guarantee the privacy of our communications.

I hope I will not be thought melodramatic when I say that if this trend continues, there will be some who will not feel able to continue to live in this country.

There is a profound but unacknowledged crisis in this country. Our liberties have been attacked, but we have also suffered a collapse in what I would call the liberty reflex, both in and outside Parliament. Twenty years ago, the measures I describe above, which are often brought into law by statutory instrument – effectively ministerial decree – would have been unthinkable. The media would have been inflamed; former members of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) such as Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt would have been talking about a police state and there would almost certainly have been marches and protests. But today we just let it go.

This is why I believe a new Bill of Rights is imperative. But it must be a Bill of Rights that is clearly British in origin and that draws its potency from our traditions and culture, and from the settlements of 1689 and Magna Carta, insisting, for example, on the right to trial by jury, which is not found in European charters and conventions. There is no question that such a bill would include the alleged guarantees in the HRA, but, crucially, the drafting would be part of a process of general political renewal, in which there was a rebalancing of powers at the very top of our democracy. It should be a work of simplicity and eloquence in which the British people, not Parliament or a team of ministerial scribblers working from some bogus consultation process, define their inalienable rights as part of a new covenant between the people and Parliament and between the executive and Parliament.

It goes without saying that it should be entrenched, that is, placed beyond the reach of the authoritarian tendencies that are obviously alive in the Civil Service and the current administration and permitted by an easily manipulated parliamentary majority.

Conventional thinking says such laws cannot be ‘entrenched’ and that no parliament can bind its successors. But in reality this is nonsense. All constitutions, however strongly codified, always allow for a process of amendment. The Parliament Act may be amended so that a Bill of Rights could be altered only in circumstances where there was a consensus. The result would be the people’s prized possession, a thing that every child would learn at school and could perhaps quote at will later in life.

As you see, I do not recoil from the idea of unelected judges deciding where Parliament has overstepped the mark, because over the last few years, it has been the judiciary that has so often supported the principles of liberty and rights. MPs would be wise to agree with this and stop pretending to the public that they are the sole defenders of the public realm.

Parliamentary sovereignty is the reason why discussion about a Bill of Rights never gets anywhere. Its mystical power is unquestioningly viewed as the secret, or, at least, the guardian, of our free society. But is that really so? In the political context, the OED defines sovereignty thus: ‘Supremacy in respect of power, domination or rank; supreme dominion, authority or rule.’ Parliament is obviously not sovereign, because the executive runs everything. The government decides on and schedules parliamentary business, appoints the chairs of select committees and controls and smothers debate by means of standing orders and standing committees. The truth is that Parliament can offer the public little effective protection because it is itself in the thrall of the executive.

There is a temptation in this debate to think in rather academic terms about concepts of law and sovereignty, yet I am struck by the vivid examples of change that you hear about every day – the spread of unnecessary and intrusive CCTV; the appearance of immigration officials – plus heavies with earpieces – randomly stopping people outside London tube stations to question them about their status; the pupils being fingerprinted at their school library; the use of the ‘mosquito’ to control young people; the commands barked through speakers telling people to behave; the appearance of listening devices on the streets of Westminster.

Certainly our society has its problems, but I feel certain that this hectoring attitude stems from the government’s fundamental disrespect for the people and their rights. The attitude is at the heart of the transfer of power from the individual to the state.

Entrenching a Bill of Rights would go a long way to arresting the trend. But what we don’t need is a placebo bill drawn to act as a new alibi. I believe there is a very good reason why a Bill of Rights has been put on the political agenda by a government that is already responsible for the HRA. It recognises the strength of the case that has been made against it by civil libertarians and wants to answer that case before the next election with a measure that seems incontestably wedded to the principles of a free society.

It is a shrewd and cynical exercise, because at the same time the government will attempt to own the process and so ensure that nothing that remotely threatens executive power reaches the statute book.

Finally, I want to say something about the phrase ‘rights and responsibilities’ used by Jack Straw and Gordon Brown in respect of a new bill. This springs from the telling belief among ministers that rights are somehow in the gift of the government and that they are entitled to require people to sign up to a list of responsibilities in exchange. This is arrogant nonsense. The citizen’s responsibilities are defined by common, civil and criminal law and ministers display a constitutional impertinence by suggesting otherwise.

How this government has undermined society

Communications

Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2002), government agencies make 500,000 secret interceptions of email, internet connections and standard mail.
Since summer 2007, the government and some 700 agencies have had access to all landline and mobile phone records.

Databases

Police build network of ANPR cameras on motorways and in town centres. Data stored for two years.
The National Identity Register will store details of every verification made by ID card holder. Data used without knowledge of citizens.
ID card enrolment will require biometric details and large amount of personal data.
The Home Office plans to take 19 pieces of information from anyone travelling abroad. No statutory basis.

Free expression

Public-order laws have been used to curtail free expression.
The Race and Religious Hatred Act (2006) bans incitement of hatred on religious grounds.
Terror laws are used to ban freedom of expression in some areas.

The courts

Asbo legislation introduces hearsay evidence which can result in jail sentence.
The Criminal Justice Act (2003) attacks jury trial.
Admissibility of bad character, previous convictions and acquittals.
The Proceeds of Crime Act (2002) allows confiscation of assets without prosecution.
Special Immigration Appeals Court hearings held in secret.

Terror laws

Terror laws used to stop and search. Current rate is 50,000 per annum.
A maximum of 28 days detention without charge.

We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms

JamieSW — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:28:39 +0000

Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you’re allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.

Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.

We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.

There is no end to Whitehall’s information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number.

Combined with the ID card information, which comes on stream in a few years’ time, the new travel data means there will be very little the state won’t be able to find out about you. The information will be sifted for patterns of travel and expenditure. Conclusions will be drawn from missed planes, visits extended, illness and all the accidents of life, and because this is a government database, there will be huge numbers of mistakes that will lead to suspicion and action being taken against innocent people.

Those failing to provide satisfactory answers will not be allowed to travel and then it will come to us with a leaden regret that we have in practice entered the era of the exit visa, a time when we must ask permission from a security bureaucrat who insists on further and better particulars in the biographical section of the form. Ten, 15 or more years on, we will be resigned to the idea that the state decides whether we travel or not.

Who pays for the £1.2bn cost over the next decade? You will, with additional charges made by your travel agent and in a new travel tax designed to recoup the cost of the data collection. But much of the money will go to Raytheon Systems, the US company that developed the cruise missile and which, no coincidence, has embedded itself in Labour’s information project by supporting security research at the party’s favourite think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The odour that arises from the Home Office contract with Raytheon is as nothing compared to that created last week when the Home Secretary and Prime Minister used the announcement of the ‘E-borders’ scheme as well as increased security at shopping centres, airports and railway stations to create an atmosphere that would push MPs to double the time a terrorist suspect can be held without trial. It also helped to divert attention from the mess in another Home Office database concerning upwards of 10,000 security guards who may be illegal immigrants.

On detention without trial, no new arguments have been produced by Gordon Brown. He won’t say how many days he wants and he won’t answer David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, who points out that all the necessary powers to keep people in jail after a large-scale attack are provided in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

To this, Brown replies that declaring a state of emergency would give terrorists ‘the oxygen of publicity’. How does he square this absurd statement with the high alert being sounded by police, politicians and spies over the past two weeks, which has given the greatest possible publicity to the power of the Muslim extremists to change our lives?

The truth is that while his government limps, heaves and splutters with an incompetence only matched by its unearthly sense of entitlement, the Prime Minister has become fixated with this issue as though it were a virility test. So his chief Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, who had voiced his doubts about raising detention without trial on Radio 4, was hauled into Number 10 to have his thoughts rearranged. Less than an hour later, he appeared like an off-duty ballroom dancing champion and adjusted his conviction as though it was no more than a troublesome knot in his very plump, very yellow silk tie. He will not resign of course. What is a mere principle placed against his recent elevation to the Lords and the thrilling proximity to power?

How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.

Is it simply that the fear of terrorism has stunned us? The threat is genuine and the government is right to step up some security measures, but let us put it into perspective by reminding ourselves that in the period since 7/7, about 6,000 people have been killed on our roads. And let’s not forget the bombings, assassinations, sieges, machine-gunning of restaurants and slaughter that occurred on mainland Britain during the IRA campaign. We survived these without giving up our freedoms .

Or is there some greater as yet undefined malaise that allows a sinister American corporation to infiltrate the fabric of government and supply a system that will monitor everyone going abroad? I cannot say, but I do know that an awful lot depends on the 40 or so Labour MPs needed to defeat Brown’s proposals on pre-trial detention. They should be given every encouragement to defy the whips on the vote, which is expected within the next fortnight

It is important that the press has moved to the side of liberty. The Daily Mail, which I wrongly excluded from the roll of honour last week, attacked Jacqui Smith for ‘her utter contempt for privacy’ and warned against the travel delays and inevitable failure of another expensive government database. And Timothy Garton Ash, who has so far stayed above the fray, wrote in the Guardian last week that ‘we have probably diminished our own security by overreacting, alienating some who might not otherwise have been alienated’. Labour MPs should listen to these voices.

The Prime Minister is found of quoting Churchill, so I will again: ‘If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only precarious chance for survival.’

Sinister ID Project

Alex Doherty — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:04:34 +0000

You may have noticed the vaguely menacing tone of recent government advertising campaigns. Here is a current example: ‘If you know a business that isn’t registered for tax, call the Revenue or HM Customs – no names needed.’ Another says: ‘Technology has made it easier to identify benefit cheats.’

Whether the campaign is about rape, TV licences or filling in your tax form, there is always a we-know-where-you-live edge to the message, a sense that this government is dividing the nation into suspects and informers.

Reading the Identity Cards Bill, as it pinged between the House of Commons and the Lords last week, I wondered about the type of campaign that will be used to persuade us to comply with the new ID card law. Clearly, it would be orchestrated by some efficient martinet like the Minister of State at the Home Office, Hazel Blears. Her task will be to put the fear of God into the public at the same time as reassuring us that the £90 cost of each card will protect everyone from identity theft, terrorism and benefit fraud.

The ads might imagine any number of scenarios. Here is one. ‘Your elderly mother has fallen ill,’ starts the commentary gravely. ‘You travel from your home to look after her. She has a chronic condition but this time, it’s a bit of a crisis and you need to pick up a prescription at the only late-night chemist in town. Trouble is, she has mislaid her identity card and you never thought to get one. Under the new law, the pharmacist will not be able to give you that medicine without proper ID. So, get your card. It’s for your own good – and Mum’s.’

It became clear last week that the government will do anything to get this bill through parliament, including ignoring its own manifesto pledge to make the cards voluntary, a fact that we should remember as each of us entrusts the 49 separate pieces of personal information to a national database. By the end of last year, the government had already spent £32m of taxpayers’ money on the scheme and, at the present, the expenditure is edging towards £100,000 a day. No surprise that Home Secretary Charles Clarke dissembles about Labour promises.

Labour’s manifesto said: ‘We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.’

It turns out that there is nothing voluntary about it. If you renew your passport, you will be compelled to provide all the information the state requires for its sinister data base. The Home Secretary says that the decision to apply for, or renew, a passport is entirely a matter of individual choice; thus he maintains that the decision to commit those personal details to the data base is a matter of individual choice.

George Orwell would have been pleased to have invented that particular gem. Yet this is not fiction, but the reality of 2006, and we should understand that if the Home Secretary is prepared to mislead on the fundamental issue as to whether something is voluntary or compulsory, we cannot possibly trust his word on the larger issues of personal freedom and the eventual use of the ID card database.

Clarke has now established himself as a deceiver, even in the eyes of his party. Labour democrats such as Kate Hoey, Diane Abbott, Bob Marshall-Andrews and Mark Fisher all understood that the Lords’ amendments of last week simply sought to underline this concept of a voluntary scheme, which complied with the 2005 manifesto. Oddly enough, the compulsory provision of personal information to the government database is not the greatest threat to our freedom, though it is in itself a substantial one. The real menace comes when the ID card scheme begins to track everyone’s movements and transactions, the details of which will kept on the database for as long as the Home Office desires.

Over the past few weeks, an anonymous email has been doing a very good job of enlightening people on how invasive the ID card will be. ‘Private businesses,’ says the writer, ‘are going to be given access to the national identity register database. If you want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a London underground Oystercard or supermarket loyalty card or driving licence, you will have to present your card.’

You will need the card when you receive prescription drugs, when you withdraw a relatively small amount of money from a bank, check into hospital, get your car unclamped, apply for a fishing licence, buy a round of drinks (if you need to prove you’re over 18), set up an internet account, fix a residents’ parking permit or take out insurance.

Every time that card is swiped, the central database logs the transaction so that an accurate plot of your life is drawn. The state will know everything that it needs to know; so will big corporations, the police, the Inland Revenue, HM Customs, MI5 and any damned official or commercial busybody that wants access to your life. The government and Home Office have presented this as an incidental benefit, but it is at the heart of their purpose.

Last week, Andrew Burnham, a junior minister at the Home Office, confirmed the anonymous email by admitting that the ID card scheme would now include chip-and-pin technology because it would be a cheaper way of checking each person’s identity. The sophisticated technology on which this bill was sold will cost too much to operate, with millions of checks being made every week.

That is a very important admission because the government still maintains the fiction that the ID card is defence against identity theft and terrorism. The 7 July bombers would not have been deterred by a piece of plastic. And it is clear that the claim about protecting your identity is also rubbish because chip-and-pin technology has already been compromised by organised criminals. What remains is the ceaseless monitoring of people’s lives. That is what the government is forcing on us.

Practically every week in these columns, I urge you to pay attention to the government’s theft of our liberties. I would feel a bore and an obsessive if I hadn’t pored over the ID card bill last week and read Hansard’s account of the exchanges in both houses. One of the most chilling passages in the bill is section 13 which deals with the ‘invalidity and surrender’ of ID cards, which, in effect, describes the withdrawal of a person’s identity by the state. For, without this card, it will be almost impossible to function, to exist as a citizen in the UK. Despite the cost to you, this card will not be your property.

People keep asking me what they can do about the lurch into Labour’s velvet tyranny and I keep replying that the only way for us is to re-engage with the politics of our country. But it is difficult. The new Conservative regime under David Cameron has not yet found the voice to articulate the objection to the radical changes proposed in our society. Edward Garnier, the Tory spokesman on ID cards, did his best in the Commons last week, but we need to hear his leader express the principled outrage that comes from conviction and unyielding values. If we don’t, we may justifiably wonder if the Conservatives are sitting on their hands in the belief that they will eventually inherit Labour’s apparatus of control.

Outside parliament, what needs to happen is the formation of the broadest possible front against these changes, a movement which deploys the most principled democratic minds in the country to argue with the lazy and stupid view that if you’ve got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from Labour’s attack on liberty. I believe that will happen.