One observes with a deep feeling of fatigue the launch of yet another attempt by government to introduce identity cards (now given the Orwellian pseudonym of Entitlement Cards, presumably because those unable to produce a card will lose all their entitlements to public and social services). The antibodies are already reassuringly stirred up. Watch this space!
We went to the ceremony at City University for the award of an honorary degree to a living legend, Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post and of imperishable Watergate fame: he was the editor who supported and encouraged Woodward and Bernstein in their investigation, resisting intense pressures to call them off, and in so doing brought down a President. In his encomium the university’s Vice-Chancellor recalled that Bradlee had been portrayed in the film All the President’s Men by Jason Robards. Bradlee’s performance in his acceptance speech, and in the subsequent panel discussion of media freedom (chaired by the ever loquacious James Naughtie), suggested that he should have been allowed to play himself in the film: tough, funny, wise, honest, relaxed. "Ah, did you once see Bradlee plain?", as Browning might have asked. Yes, we did.
The government’s attempt to use secondary legislation (subject to the approval of parliament) to enable 24 categories of public body, including local authorities and the Food Standards Agency, to have access to our email and web-surfing records, has had to be suspended in the face of a gale of opposition from the liberal left to the libertarian right. Ministers protest indignantly that in fact the draft Order in question merely sought to introduce valuable safeguards against the abuse of powers which the public authorities concerned already possess. And they have a point. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 ("RIPA"), which completed its passage through parliament and received the Royal Assent in July 2000, does indeed include long lists of persons and authorities authorised to snoop on our communications, electronic and other, to be given the key to enable them to decipher ciphered communications, and to keep a watchful eye on our other activities, including (for example) snooping powers for the Ministry of Defence, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, the Department of Health, the Home Office, the Department of Social Security, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Intervention Board for Agricultural Produce and—here it is— the Food Standards Agency. The Post Office is there, too. The Minister also has sweeping powers to add to the various lists by making an Order, although this must be approved by both Houses of Parliament. (You can see some of the more alarming extracts from the Act by clicking here.) Admittedly the government got its way with the enactment of RIPA only after several abortive attempts, riding on the back of public concerns about crime and terrorism, although much of RIPA has nothing to do with either crime or terrorism: for example, the circumstances in which various kinds of surreptitious snooping may be authorised generally include something on these lines:
- in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom;
- in the interests of public safety;
- for the purpose of protecting public health;
- for the purpose of assessing or collecting any tax, duty, levy or other imposition, contribution or charge payable to a government department; or
- for any purpose not falling within [the other items in the list] … which is specified for the purposes of this subsection by an order made by the Secretary of State.
Like the recent Order which caused such a blizzard of protest, RIPA was defended by ministers as introducing safeguards for and controls over various kinds of snooping already taking place and needing to be properly regulated. The fact that RIPA was approved by either House of Parliament is worrying enough: the suggestion that the practices which it authorises have been going on since long before RIPA is positively chilling. The condemnation of the recent Order is perfectly justified on the merits, but ministers have a case when they say, in effect, that it’s a bit late!
"China executed 64 people convicted of drug crimes to mark the UN anti-drug day, the state media said yesterday."—Guardian, 27 June 2002. Not exactly what the UN had in mind in naming Anti-Drug Day, presumably. Still, it shows that they were anxious to observe it.
Talking of unjust and prolonged detention, the press reported on 20 June yet another case of a man who had been convicted of murder, received the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, recommended by the Parole Board for release as being no longer dangerous, but kept in prison because of the Home Secretary (Jack Straw at the time) overruling the Parole Board's finding. (Myra Hindley is another victim of the cowardice of successive Home Secretaries, unwilling to brave the tabloids' wrath by choosing justice above popularity.) It took a decision of the European Court of Human Rights to disqualify the Home Secretary from counteracting the Parole Board's decision. There are several reasons for querying whether the original conviction was safe and whether the man's defence (that he was defending himself against a racial attack) was adequately presented at his trial. He served 15 years in prison, nearly two of them after the Parole Board's finding that he could safely be released. Still, he was lucky that he had a Parole Board willing to propose his release despite his continuing refusal to "admit his guilt". Another man, Robert Brown, has been in jail for 25 years for allegedly murdering a woman in Manchester in 1977. His conviction relied mainly on his confession, allegedly made under police pressure and later retracted. As Marcel Berlins wrote in the Guardian (18 June), "He could have been released many years ago, but he can't or won't get parole because he continues to assert his innocence." Frank Johnson, 66, has just been released after 26 years in jail, his conviction having been quashed as unsafe by the Court of Appeal. His solicitor commented: "Mr Johnson could have been out years ago had he acknowledged guilt… He has consistently said that he would do no such thing. If his conviction had not been quashed today, one could imagine that he might have remained in prison for the rest of his life." This repulsive principle—that unless you confess your guilt, you can't get parole, even if you're innocent—has a strong smell of Catch 22 about it, and an even stronger whiff of Kafka. It has repeatedly been condemned as patently monstrous, yet it has still not been abolished. No doubt one day the European Court of Human Rights will strike it down since, as shamingly often happens, we can't be trusted to do it ourselves. (For another example, see the Ephem for 21 January 2002 on Stephen Downing.)
The new Mental Health Bill is a real winner, isn’t it?—powers to lock up indefinitely anyone who a couple of "experts" and a tribunal reckon may do someone harm in the future! Reminiscent of those KGB "psychiatrists". An avowed purpose of the new Bill is to permit the detention and compulsory "treatment" of those classes of the mentally sick, i.e. those who used to be described as ‘psychopaths’ (although there remain serious doubts whether the term is meaningful), who can’t be detained under the existing legislation because many psychiatric experts don’t believe that their condition is treatable, in the sense of being cured or even simply stabilised to prevent further deterioration. The Bill doesn’t actually use the term ‘psychopath’, and it makes it a condition of detention that the mental condition in question must be capable of being treated, so either it’s now believed that ‘psychopaths’ can be treated after all—in which case they can be sectioned under the existing Mental Health Act; or they can’t be treated, in which case they can’t be detained under the new Bill, either. If the underlying intention of the Bill is to allow ‘psychopaths’—who have committed no offence but have been identified as potentially dangerous to others or themselves in the future—to be ‘treated’ only in the limited sense that they could be so heavily and permanently sedated that they would no longer be dangerous, there’ll be no justification for locking them up in psychiatric or other hospitals where they would be blocking beds that could better be occupied by patients who are treatable in the proper medical sense of the word; and they will have committed no crime or offence, so there’ll be no justification for "punishing" them, e.g. in a prison. So where will they be put? Who will guard them? By what possible right will they be deprived of freedom to live where they like, to drink and eat what they like, to watch what they like on television, or even at the cinema or theatre—assuming that their sedation is not so heavy as to rule out any such conscious activity altogether? How will they be compensated by the state for the loss of earnings caused by their incarceration? The whole thing would be nonsensical if it weren’t so sinister. It will be interesting to see how our elected masters manage to square it with the Human Rights Act and Convention, too: the notes accompanying the Bill assure us that it’s fully compatible. The fact is, surely, that psychiatrists and psychologists, however experienced, are no more able to predict the future behaviour of universally wayward humans, whether mentally sick or not, than anyone else: i.e. not at all. And once faced with a proposal to detain someone as a possible future risk to others, it will be a bold expert who declines to do so, considering the opprobrium that will be heaped on him or her if the person in question subsequently commits a murder or some other violent crime. Signing the detention order and arranging sedation as compulsory treatment will always be the only risk-free course. This could put thousands of perfectly innocent people at risk of indefinite detention. True, the existing Act poses the same risk to some degree, but it’s much reduced by the requirement to show that the mental condition can (and needs to and will) be ‘treated’ in the full medical sense.
