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Blair's new laws leave us at the mercy of future tyrants
Freedoms we should strenuously preserve have been systematically
dismantled by this illiberal government
By Henry Porter
02/19/06 "The
Observer" -- -- Osama bin Laden's achievement was
not to mastermind the flying of jets into the Twin Towers, not
to franchise his brand of terrorism to a lot of savage young
men, not even to inspire the invasion of Iraq. No, it was to
spook the West and to fill our minds with fear so that we let
security oppress liberty and turn us away from the abuse and
torture occurring in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
When the Australian television programme Dateline broadcast
photographs of Iraqis tortured by Americans, evidence, by the
way, which has been seen by members of Congress but suppressed
by the Bush administration as too inflammatory, the reaction was
markedly less of shock than when we saw the first, less
horrific, images from Abu Ghraib 18 months ago. At best, there
was impotent rage; at worst, a shrug of the shoulders. We have
got used to these things. We are evidently content to let men
suffer in what the American military lightly calls 'Gitmo',
isolated from justice as the inmates of the Soviet gulag were,
abused for, as much as anything, religion and race.
We have failed to grasp that when we do not protest and demand
an end to atrocities committed in our name, something trips in
the deep-brain cynicism of the governing psyche, which takes
heart from the passivity it finds and devises more ways to
control and enforce its will. It is no coincidence that the
abuse of rights on foreign fields has led now to the suspension
of rights at home; no accident that our plausible Prime Minister
spits out the words 'civil liberties' as he bristles with the
high purpose of his protective mission.
The genius of bin Laden was to strike at the West when its
leaders were so callow, so unread, so lacking in wisdom, so
unversed in the democracies they eagerly sought to lead, in the
culture of rights and liberty which they so hastily dismiss.
George W Bush and Tony Blair have the arrogance of the
generation that grew up in the Sixties - and the ignorance.
Nothing that happened before has impinged on their actions since
9/11. They have come to consider themselves as divinely
empowered to take all necessary action. They have both deceived
their peoples and are bent on stripping them of ancient and
hard-fought-for liberties.
It is worth remembering that Tony Blair's mandate derives from
just 35 per cent of the votes cast in the last election. This
may indeed be the price we pay for having a careless and inexact
parliamentary system, but no Prime Minister in the past 100
years has taken so much power for himself and with such an
awesome sense of entitlement.
The attempt to make it a crime to 'glorify terrorism' is
quintessentially Tony Blair. It is first of all silly. Every act
prosecutable under this new offence could have been dealt with
by existing legislation. When a lot of hotheads called for
beheadings and terrorist attacks during the Danish cartoons
controversy, the police were entirely within the law to arrest
those carrying the placards. If they didn't, it was to avoid
inflaming the situation. They lacked the will, not the law.
Blair's new law will contribute nothing in the fight against
terrorism, but, crucially, it will limit what we can say. Should
I wish to make the case for Basque separatism, or celebrate the
90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, or explain some distant
liberation movement, I might expose myself to prosecution. One
man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist.
Blair says everyone knows what glorification is, but in a court,
the definition would quickly disintegrate. He says it sends a
signal to al-Qaeda and it is worth giving up this sliver of free
speech to do so. Is he deluded? No terrorist or lunatic imam is
going to take the slightest notice of this piffling but
dangerous law.
Lord Carlile, the government's respected independent reviewer of
terror laws, last week gave evidence to the Commons home affairs
committee which devastatingly underlined the threat we face from
radical imams; not enough had been done to track the history of
these men or monitor the spread of their influence in prisons,
mosques and colleges, he believed.
By all means focus the outrage of the state on them. The
security services and police have done a pretty good job in
tracking terrorist groups. They have missed some but they do
their best to defend us. But to compromise the freedoms of a
society which has no bill of rights and no written constitution
to protect it from the menace of future tyrants is irresponsible
in the extreme. Laws have a habit of lying around and when
Labour eventually loses an election, we must hope that the
incoming government draws up a list of laws to remove
immediately from the statute books.
We must also hope that opposition parties find the will to give
the British people an inviolable bill of rights. There is no
reason why the work on this should not begin now. A public
debate on the rights of Britons is long overdue and would serve
to underline the erosion that has taken place under New Labour.
Nothing would embarrass Tony Blair and Gordon Brown more than if
the Tories and Liberal Democrats started working together on
this.
Last week, Chris Huhne, a challenger for the Lib Dem leadership,
gave a speech on freedom to the think-tank, Demos. He made the
point that it is necessary to defend unpopular minorities -
those accused of terrorist crimes, those seeking asylum, those
seeking to avoid deportation - because we are all in a minority
at some stage and need the protection of the rule of law. 'All
of us could be wrongly accused of a crime,' he said. 'All of us
could express views which the government does not like. We all
of us sometimes do unpopular things or utter unpopular
thoughts.'
The point is well made. We are all connected in this business of
liberty and rights. When men are abused in Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib or Belmarsh, it is an offence to all who value democracy
the world over. When Lotfi Raissi is arrested and held without
trial in Belmarsh on suspicion of involvement in 9/11, then
released without apology to face a life and career in ruins, it
affects us all because that is the nature of the democratic
compact. As Churchill said when Britain was facing a far greater
threat from Nazi Germany, detention without trial is 'in the
highest degree odious'.
There have been few weeks more disastrous for the cause of
liberty in this country. Last Monday, the promised Labour
rebellion on ID cards failed to materialise, although ministers
freely concede that the ID card will not protect us from
terrorists and it must be plain that any determined fraudster
will be able to steal identity.
The Lords may offer some brief opposition, but it seems certain
that Britons will be compulsorily required to hold an identity
card and see 50 separate pieces of information, including
biometric details, entered on a national database to which many
arms of government, including MI5, will have access. The thought
is chilling.
People insist that we are not living in a police state but
perhaps that is rather a 20th-century notion. What we are
pioneering in Britain is a 21st-century version of the police
state - the controlled state.
I implore you to realise that the fight is on to save our
society from this nightmare, to put your fears into perspective
and to make every politician understand that this is something
the people will not tolerate. There has not been a more
important struggle in Britain in the past 50 years.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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