Britannia Radio

Freedom is taking a battering under kneejerk New Labour

Jack Straw's attack on the Human Rights Act is sly populism of the worst
kind, and in keeping with his party's statist tradition

o Nick Clegg
o The Guardian, Wednesday December 10 2008

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. The declaration rests on a simple, radical insight: human rights
are indivisible and universal - or they are nothing at all. So Jack
Straw's headline-grabbing declaration that Britain's Human Rights Act
has become a "villain's charter", and must be "rebalanced" , should be
seen for what it is: a rejection of the simple notion that all of us, no
matter how rich or poor, how powerful or weak, possess certain
inalienable rights.

Of course, these rights do not entitle anyone to break the law. In a
mealy-mouthed sop to the opponents of the Human Rights Act, Straw has
declared that our human rights should be qualified by new
"responsibilities" to obey the law and be loyal to the country. But no
one has ever claimed that human rights should absolve anyone of their
"responsibilities" .

The justice secretary is picking a meaningless fight to generate a
favourable headline, while conning opponents of the Human Rights Act
into believing that he's saying something of greater significance. In
short, it's sly populism of the worst kind.

Then again, government populism is all the rage these days. The new
immigration minister claims that asylum seekers should be blamed for
"untold human misery and division within our communities" . Labour and
Conservative politicians are locked, yet again, in a bidding war to
sound the most unforgiving on immigration and welfare dependency.

What's happening? Why the sudden retread politics of the early Blair
years - outflanking the right at all costs?

My guess is that this is the ugly side of recession politics. Steep
recessions provoke deep fears among communities, who feel more insecure
than ever. These fears readily topple into demands for protectionism,
and a vilification of immigrants, foreigners, and of a remote legal
system that often seems out of touch with the anguish of overstretched
families and communities. No doubt Labour and Conservative party focus
groups have picked this up.

I agree that politicians must "do something". If the political class is
inert in the face of a wave of public anxiety, extremism and despair
will surely follow. What people now need is more money through fair tax
cuts, lower heating bills for struggling families, and better social
housing for the thousands of people without a permanent roof over their
heads. Money, heating and housing - these are the urgent needs of
families in trouble.

However, doing something should not mean saying anything. Political
leadership is about restraint as well as activism. It is just as much
about denying the ugly side of prejudice, the visceral reflex to find
someone to blame, as it is about taking new government measures.

In 1951 we were the first country to ratify the European Convention on
Human Rights. British lawyers were leading authors of the convention. It
was a natural expression of Britain's moral self-confidence in the
postwar years, an assertion of the universal liberal values that had
thwarted the threat of fascism and tyranny in Europe. Above all, it was
a statement of the inalienable rights we all enjoy, to be free from
unjustified state intrusion and abuse. A continent that had been
drenched in the blood of militant collectivism had rediscovered the
simple, liberal belief in the rights of individual citizens to a life
unmolested by arbitrary government abuse.

This was, in many ways, the triumph of a particularly British view of
the sovereignty of the individual. It is a tradition that New Labour's
statism has always regarded with deep suspicion. That is why freedom in
the UK has taken a battering under New Labour: 3,600 new criminal
offences since 1997; overflowing prisons; peaceful protest and dissent
criminalised; and the ever expanding apparatus of a vast new
surveillance state. All this flows from an impulse that says individual
freedoms can be circumscribed by the whim of the state, no questions
asked.

The same impulse is leading this government to introduce a two-tier
rights regime: ID cards for foreigners first; migrants exploited by
unscrupulous employers as the government sits idly by; asylum seekers
left hanging around for years by the incompetence of the Home Office,
driven into the hidden economy when they could work and pay taxes to
support themselves rather than depend on taxpayers for meagre handouts;
Zimbabwean refugees holed up in overcrowded detention centres because
the government retains the absurd pretence that they should eventually
be deported to Mugabe's barbarism.

Expensive, stupid and inhumane. No wonder Britain's moral leadership in
the world is so threadbare.

At a time of acute national economic crisis, kneejerk populism from the
government will inflame a culture of blame and vilification, fragmenting
communities exactly when people need to hang together. Diversity and
tolerance are easy to defend in the good times. The real test for
political leaders is whether they're prepared to defend them in bad
times too.

• Nick Clegg is leader of the Liberal Democrats cleggn@parliament. uk

http://www.guardian .co.uk/commentis free/2008/ dec/10/comment- clegg-
liberties-freedom- labour
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