Britannia Radio

March 2, 2009

Taking liberties with British values

Daily Mail, 2 March 2009

Suddenly, a new political consensus appears to have emerged for the chattering classes.

At the weekend, lawyers, celebrities, writers, politicians and lobbyists took part in a series of meetings across Britain, organised by the umbrella group Convention on Modern Liberty, to discuss their fears about the erosion of Britain’s historic rights and freedoms by the ’surveillance society’.

The convention brought together such stalwart Lefties as the human rights lawyer Baroness Kennedy with the former Tory home affairs spokesman David Davis — who resigned his post specifically to devote himself to campaigning on the civil liberties issue.

Even the former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who is regarded as a security hawk through his strong backing for a national identity card scheme and tough anti-terror laws, warned of the danger of a ‘Big Brother’ state through data-sharing between public bodies.

Like all bandwagons, however, this one needs a beady eye cast over it, not least because of its occasional note of hysteria.

Its claim that Britain is turning into a police state is clearly over the top (and reveals no small ignorance of what terrors a true police state inflicts). Its alarmism over closed-circuit TV and DNA profiling pays scant regard to their usefulness in catching criminals.

And there’s more than a whiff of an underlying agenda to paint Britain as worse than the tyrannies and rogue states that threaten its interests, with a corresponding anxiety to downplay the terrorism threat against this country.

Nevertheless, we should, indeed, be concerned about some of the ways in which freedom is being compromised. Some local councils are making wholly inappropriate use of anti-terrorist legislation to snoop on citizens, while other public bodies — such as the Charity Commission, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the BBC — are able to make deeply questionable use of further surveillance powers.

There will soon be compulsory CCTV cameras tracking people as they shop in supermarkets for a bottle of wine, and pubs are being told they will only get a licence if they agree to train their security cameras on their customers.

The Coroners and Justice Bill will allow inquests involving matters of national security to be held in secret if ministers so decide. And the Home Office is planning a new ‘Intercept Modernisation Programme’ which will store details of every phone call, email and internet visit — a proposal condemned by Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, as ‘a step too far for the British way of life’.

These are very real concerns. But despite them, the campaigners’ argument is skewed. They claim that fear of terrorism has curtailed freedom.

But this ignores the role played by the civil liberties lobby in bringing about this state of affairs in the first place. For many of those now howling about the erosion of our ancient principles are the very same people who were behind the introduction of human rights law.

It may be thought a curious irony that the Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998 to tackle precisely the concerns expressed last weekend of a slide into tyranny — and yet liberty has been seriously eroded in the past decade.

In fact, this isn’t curious at all. Although the campaigners would sooner cut off their hands than admit it, the one has followed directly from the other. The idea that human rights law expands freedom was always a serious mistake. It has the opposite effect.

One of the main reasons the State has resorted to gathering intelligence within Britain on such an alarming scale is the collapse of the ability to control our borders. And that was brought about by the systematic refusal by the courts, on human rights grounds, to keep out or deport a range of undesirable

The reason this country never had the identity card system common to so many European states was the fact that it used to have robust border controls. Once those barriers came down, the only way to protect the country’s security became internal surveillance.

Of course, this runs wholly contrary to the historic principles of English liberty. But that is the inevitable outcome of human rights law — which has ridden roughshod over those principles — because many of those now campaigning against the erosion of liberty also claim that ‘universal’ human rights principles trump Britain’s own.

Under that law, judges have been handed the power to balance rights against each other. And time and again, they have come down in favour of the rights of terror suspects, illegal immigrants and common criminals against the rights of indigenous, law-abiding people. So it’s a bit rich for the liberty campaigners to claim that fear of terrorism has eroded human rights.

And it’s even more hard to take when such campaigners claim they are passionate about defending the English common law. This is, indeed, the bastion of our liberties by holding that people are free to act unless the law expressly prohibits them from doing so.

But the human rights law these campaigners foisted upon us has taken a judicial axe to that principle by making judges the arbiters of our freedoms.

In doing so, they deliberately transferred power from Parliament to the courts. And the inevitable consequence of that has been that MPs lost power to the judges. This weakening of Parliament has enabled the Labour Government to use Parliamentary procedure to short-circuit debate and force through legislation without proper scrutiny.

A more robust Parliament would have prevented the Government passing those laws which threaten our fundamental freedoms. But over the past few years, Westminster has had the stuffing knocked out of it by a series of measures, including human rights law, whose purpose was to destroy this country’s constitutional settlement and powers of democratic self-government.

Devolution took away Parliament’s power to decide many laws for Scotland and Wales. Above all, EU membership — whose impact upon Britain has greatly increased during the past decade — has taken away more and more powers of self-rule and made Parliament increasingly irrelevant.

Most of today’s liberty campaigners are also supporters of this constitutional revolution. That’s because the dominant creed in such progressive circles is the belief that the historic values of this nation should be superseded by international laws and institutions — which will apparently usher in the utopia of the brotherhood of man.

In fact, this is profoundly anti-democratic and anti-freedom because it upholds the rights of some preferred groups against others. As such, it is responsible for the real curtailment of our liberties through anti-discrimination laws and codes against ‘hate speech’, hijacking freedom by deciding who is or is not entitled to have it.

Accordingly, such liberty campaigners have been notably silent over, for example, the banning from Britain of the Dutch MP and anti-Islamism campaigner Geert Wilders. They have been silent over the erosion of the rights of men accused of rape to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. They were silent when a Christian was forced off an adoption panel because she opposed gay adoption.

Such selectivity undermines their claim to be the true defenders of liberty.

Some of the concerns they are now raising are valid. This country’s bedrock principles of freedom and democracy are, indeed, being eroded. But the campaigners should look in the mirror if they want to know who is to blame.