Britannia Radio

MPs fiddle while parliamentary democracy burns

• 
• • Henry Porter
  • The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2009
  • Article history

At the very least, you might expect Labour MPs to pay attention while they strip this country of its freedoms. But apparently we have gone beyond that stage. Of the eight or nine Labour members on the select committee discussing the Coroners and Justice Bill, three were using the opportunity to go through their correspondence.

The air was heavy with obscure points, but the room was comfortable and the light good, allowing Alun Michael, Russell Brown and Brian Iddon to put in an hour or two on the piles of letters and documents in front of them.

Only when the matter of secret inquests was raised and Conservative MP Henry Bellingham observed by way of a prologue that an issue of freedom was at stake did Michael and Brown look up. Bellingham said he had spent time out of parliament between the 1997 and 2001 elections and that he was shocked when he returned to see what Labour was doing to constitutional rights and civil liberties.

"The government," he said quite mildly, considering the circumstances, "is trampling on the rights of the individual and has turned this into a less free country."

Cue Michael and Brown with a noise first heard in the rock shelters of the Upper Paleolithic. It is the jeer of the strong for the weak. But Bellingham is not weak and he went on to say that the proposed secret inquests would certainly be subject to the legislative creep that had seen terror laws used to freeze the assets of stricken Icelandic banks.

The very idea of secret inquests caused widespread dismay, he said. It was a fundamental attack on transparency; secrecy would be used to protect the state from embarrassment and blame in cases where members of the armed service had been killed or people had died in custody.

Another muted jeer followed. I was reminded of Derek Hatton's Trotskyist takeover of Liverpool City Council in the Eighties and of Squealer and his underling pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm. The government has become so used to its power that Labour MPs do not even acknowledge the issues of transparency and rights.

They sit back and mock these appeals from our history, from the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world that happens just now to find itself at a low ebb, while the civil servants, in this case from Jack Straw's Justice Department, look on with smugness as each clause in this appalling bill is discussed and slips through more or less unscathed.

And where were the media in this era of 24-hour news coverage? Well, it was just me and Simon Carr from the Independent on the press benches - a fleeting visit like the one we made three years ago to the committee stage of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which, if it had not been dropped, would have allowed ministers to make laws without even consulting parliament.

This bill is a shocker. Do not be deceived by Jack's title. It is a supermarket trolley full of bits of legislation that the government and the civil service want passed. As well as introducing the opportunity for a minister to decree that an inquest should be held in secret to protect the state, or its relations with foreign powers, it removes exemption for "discussion or criticism" in the new offence of inciting hatred on grounds of sexual orientation; it makes changes to legal aid; reforms bail in murder cases; extends the law of child pornography to include non-photographic images; and facilitates the sharing of personal data by all government departments.

The strategy is clear. Secret inquests will draw the fire on the bill and then - conveniently - there will be no time to debate the huge issue of uncontrolled sharing of personal information between government departments and agencies. As the Lords report on surveillance society stated two weeks ago: "The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy."

That sentence might suggest that we are in something of crisis, yet parliament has reacted by taking another holiday - a 10-day break to celebrate St Valentine's Day perhaps, or Our Lady of Lourdes, or for Michael, Brown and Iddon to catch up on their correspondence. Nobody will be surprised when it is announced that there isn't enough time to debate properly the data sharing measures because Harriet Harman has also scheduled 17 days for the Easter recess and 10 days for Whitsun.

This compulsive holidaying must seem extraordinary to a worried public and it underlines two things. First, that government regards parliament as less and less essential to running the country and the business of chivvying the public and filling our lives with petty new laws. Second, that MPs have become more remote from the public.

That no prosecutions are going to follow the revelations that Labour members of the House of Lords were prepared to make amendments to laws for cash, that the Home Secretary can get away with fiddling her expenses on her second home frankly bewilders people who live in the normal world of punishment and accountability.

A member of the public suspected of such behaviour would have been arrested, photographed, fingerprinted and had their DNA taken, then almost certainly charged with fraud. But the Home Secretary is allowed to make a weasel-worded statement about not breaking the rules and return to the dismantling of our free society.

As well as failing to see their own flaws, politicians are remarkably keen to criticise outside institutions and society. The current rhetorical conceit of the Tories says that Britain is a "broken society". There are many things wrong with our society, but it is not broken. And Labour's contempt for the public seems to be even sharper; you have only to spend time with a Labour MP before they begin to muse on the reform of the House of Lords. It rarely seems to occur to both parties that the one institution that is really ripe for radical reform is the Commons. Never have I felt this more acutely than watching the Coroners and Justice Bill in committee and Alun Michael glance from his papers to smirk at the word "transparency" uttered by Henry Bellingham.