Thursday, 26 February 2009

Recession is not an excuse to declare war on our freedoms

In this climate, an authoritarian state that stamps on liberties is asking for disaster, writes Mary Riddell.

 

Chelsea Marina stands in ruins. Cars lie overturned as bonfires of books, paintings and educational toys smoulder in deserted streets. This imagined wasteland is the backdrop to J G Ballard's novel Millennium People, in which affluent professionals rise up in revolution.

Suddenly, the revolt of those whom Ballard called "society's keel and anchor" doesn't seem so fanciful. The head of the Metropolitan police's public order branch predicts a "summer of rage", warning that middle-class fury at the economic crisis could erupt on to the streets.

Banks, this senior figure says, could be "viable targets", as could the G20 meeting. Well, maybe. This sounds more like a covert plea for extra officers than a likely scenario of doom. Greek riots notwithstanding, I doubt whether we shall see the Chelsea dinner party set incinerating the citadels of capitalism with their Nigella kitchen blowtorches.

Similar past predictions have fizzled out. The hunting ban, for example, failed to turn discomfited accountants into the Che Guevaras of the Shires. But even if we are not heading for dystopia, something strange is happening to law and order. According to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, legislators have foolishly pursued tough terror laws when we should be locking up City fraudsters instead.

This suggestion was floated on the day that Binyam Mohamed was flown back to Britain from Guantánamo Bay. Mr Mohamed, who faces no terror charges, will find the UK much changed. How curious, he may think, that his adopted country suddenly considers its greatest enemies are hedge fund managers caught heli-skiing on other people's money. Sir Ken's sensible, if wishful, suggestion also had a wider point: that the "liberty-sapping addictions" of the Home Office are a useless way to tackle terror. Indeed, they may promote not only jihadism but insurgency of all kinds. Already, the unease engendered by a collapsing economy risks being fuelled by political paranoia. Secrecy and suppression are enmeshed with the unrest seeping on to the streets.

As the former Whitehall security chief, Sir David Omand, implies, the security services will soon be privy to our every detail, from our dwindling savings to our taste in shower gel. Most galling is the imbalance of data-sharing, under which ministers know everything about us while we know little about them. True, we may discover an MP's outlay on Philippe Starck lemon-squeezers, or whether he or she (legitimately, of course) declares a top bunk in a youth hostel as a primary residence.

On the other hand, we can't know what was in the Iraq war Cabinet minutes, because Jack Straw has defied two rulings that they should be released. That veto is as rash as it is disgraceful. Not only does it suggest an illiberal government - an impression borne out by the Justice Secretary's Coroners and Justice Bill, which promotes secret military inquests and, in Clause 152, a sweeping sanction for data swapping – it also gives the appearance of a government with shameful secrets to hide. A similar impression was created in the case of the Guantánamo returnee. To the dismay of two judges, the Foreign Secretary declined to publish the intelligence dossier that secured the release of Mr Mohamed, who claims he was tortured with the complicity of M15 officers.

David Miliband is privately appalled at being branded by the media as the Minister for Torture. He has a fair point, since he pressed for Mr Mohamed's return and urged that his defence counsel have access to the disputed dossier. It is possible, or even likely, that Mr Miliband would like the material disclosed, but he has stuck to the line that the Americans must decide. Downing Street and the Foreign Office cannot yet decipher just how open Barack Obama is prepared to be, and neither wants to be wrong-footed.

Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, has a more clear-cut decision to make: whether there should be a criminal investigation into Mr Mohamed's alleged torture. Despite mulling this over since October, she has so far failed to say whether or not MI5 officers have a possible case to answer. Any further foot-dragging would fuel furious suspicions of a cover-up, but for the ambivalence inspired by Mr Mohamed. To some he is a maligned hero who survived adversity with courage; others see him as a dubious potential sponger on a state of which he is not a citizen. Neither caricature is relevant. Whether he was tortured with razor blades (as he says), or less savagely (as some close to the Foreign Office believe), human rights are universal and – in the case of torture – absolute. Any state that fails to excavate the whole truth is also more likely to strip citizens of their privacy and basic freedoms.

Britain is in an invidious place. The war on terror may be over, in name at least, but its apparatus of draconian laws bears down on everyone from the terror suspect placed, with no explanation, under a control order to the pensioner putting a wheelie bin out on the wrong day.

That legacy of the Bush/Blair crusade is colliding with the fallout of the battle against financial collapse. Depression and repression are old bedfellows. The economic disaster of the 1930s cemented the power of Nazism in Germany, underpinned the Vichy regime in France and lured Britons into organised fascism. While economic blight is manna to the BNP, the prospect of a far-Right surge is – for now – hardly more plausible than the idea of middle-class insurgents suicide bombing the Ambridge Christmas pantomime.

Even so, the mood is getting ugly. You can see it in the anger of Post Office protests, wildcat strikes and the battle cry of British jobs for British workers. In this febrile climate, an authoritarian state that stamps on citizens' liberties is asking for disaster.

When Gordon Brown meets Barack Obama on Tuesday, he should move beyond the G20 agenda and agree a strategy for open government that is prepared to admit to the errors of the past, however damning. The Brown administration now urgently needs to strike a balance between necessary information-sharing and kick-your-door-in snoopery.

We cannot, in human or financial terms, afford ID cards and the assorted panoply of a surveillance state whose likely costs, according to the Convention on Modern Liberty, equal £33 billion, or the price of keeping our Armed Forces on active service abroad. In the reductive world of economic crisis, priceless values are being cast to the wind by both main parties. The shadow home secretary has made clear that civil liberties will be secondary to getting even tougher on youth crime.

No law of economics decrees that oppressive countries get richer faster. Yet already recession ushers in an age of presumed guilt. With war declared on bankers, terror suspects and children, we may soon see the green belt concreted over for Titan prisons, leaving only a rump of angry citizens to breathe the tainted air of British freedom.