Last week I was about to post a piece here expressing concern about the breach of faith involved in the arrest in Nigeria of Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, to be tried for war crimes. Before I had time to write anything, Professor Tom Lodge of the University of Limerick thoughtfully wrote it for me, in a letter in The Guardian published on 6 April 2006:
Am I alone in feeling a little uneasy about Charles Taylor’s arrest and indictment for war crimes (Report, April 4)?
To be sure, there can be few people to have ever been tried for more serious offences. But that is not the point. Taylor abdicated office in return for promises that he would be allowed a protected exile. If he had not been given this, he would quite likely still be in power. Allowing him immunity seemed a pragmatic solution. Against its own inclinations the Nigerian government has now been persuaded to withdraw its protection.
If there were no more tyrants this might be viewed as desirable – perhaps cruel dictators do not deserve to be treated with good faith. But harsh rulers remain in authority in Africa and elsewhere, and it is less likely now that they will believe any guarantees that might be offered in future to induce them to give up power.
Tom Lodge
Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Limerick
So the answer to Professor Lodge’s opening question is: No, you are not alone in feeling uneasy about the way this has been done. Breaking promises, even if they have been made to war criminals, is almost always counter-productive; it destroys the credibility and perceived 
trustworthiness of those who made the original promise, and thus the ability of future such promises to achieve the desired result. Anyway, it’s dishonest. The Nigerian President Obasanjo was absolutely right to be deeply reluctant to allow Taylor to be arrested in and removed from Nigeria; it’s just a pity that overwhelming international pressure virtually forced him to allow it to happen. Other comparable criminals such as Mengistu and Idi Amin, and lesser reprobates such as Ian Smith, Ojukwu and South Africa’s apartheid leaders, have been allowed to live out their lives either in exile or even in their own countries; Charles Taylor, wicked though he is, should have been allowed to do the same. That was the basis on which he left office; the bargain should have been respected. And let’s face it: the right solution to the problem of what to do about Saddam Hussein was to send him, too, into exile in whichever country would have him. Ditto Milosevic. Does anyone really feel completely happy with these international show trials whose outcomes are universally known in advance and which inescapably smell of victors’ justice?
Brian
For several weeks the House of Lords held out against the government’s miserable Bill to force anyone applying for a passport from late 2008 or early 2009 to have all their personal details entered on the new National Identity Database (NID) and to be issued with the ID card which will go with it. This week the Tory peers broke ranks with their LibDem and cross-bench allies and accepted what the government laughingly called a ‘compromise’: passport applicants will still have their information put on the NID, whether they like it or not, but under the ‘compromise’ they will be able to refuse to accept the accompanying ID card, until the cards too become compulsory for all in 2010. This was no compromise: it was a surrender by the Tories to yet another assault on our civil liberties, perhaps the worst case of control freakery yet. The option not to accept a card even when one’s details have gone onto the NID will be meaningless, especially as refuseniks will have to pay for a card even though not getting one. Anyway, the real issue has always been the grossly intrusive character of the database, not the comparatively harmless bit of plastic. Any old snooper or nark, if sufficiently ingenious in asserting need, will have access to our database information; we shall probably be unable in practice, despite reassuring undertakings to the contrary, to check whether the information on us is correct (which it’s most unlikely to be, on past form); every transaction involving access to the database will be permanently recorded, leaving each of us with an electronic paper-trail plotting our every movement and activity; and our ancient freedom to assume a different identity for our own protection or convenience (so long as we don’t use it for fraud or other illegal activity) will be gone for ever. Every one of us will be metaphorically hand-cuffed to a 24/7 CCTV camera transmitting every detail of our lives to Big Brother somewhere in Whitehall or Westminster. And Orwell thought he was writing satire!
It’s not, anyway, as if the government has ever been able to come up with a convincing explanation of what the database and the ID cards are expected to achieve that couldn’t be just as well (and much more cheaply) achieved by other means. Relatively little benefit fraud is based on false identity, and even if it was, serious fraudsters won’t take long to steal, otherwise acquire, or manufacture fake cards. Terrorists planning an attack will already have their cards, obtained perfectly legitimately, and their possession need not inconvenience their deadly plans in the smallest degree. Society’s congenital misfits and unfortunates will be the most likely to lose their cards, and will suffer disproportionate hardship and discrimination through not being able to produce them, thus criminalising yet more of the long suffering underclass. Witness protection, the search for peace and privacy by celebrities, a spot of adultery on a hotel week-end break, the use of maiden names by feminists and of pen-names by writers and of pseudonyms by the obsessively shy will all be made tiresomely difficult or impossible, with absolutely no countervailing benefit. Anonymity will become a pipe-dream. No-one who has committed even the most trivial offence, or been wrongly convicted of one, will ever see the stain on his record erased after having paid his debt to society: every inquisitive council bureaucrat, snooping racism inspector, petty government official, grasping tax collector, eye-brow-raising hotel receptionist, zealous copper and prying bank clerk will find a way to know about it. (The technology required to limit access on a need-to-know basis, as officially forecast, is most unlikely to be effective.) Knowledge is power, and an officious government will know much more about every one of us than it needs or ought to know. Gone will be any hope of the government minding its own business, and letting us mind ours while we get on with our lives. Orwell was overly pessimistic only in forecasting the arrival of the all-seeing totalitarian state in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. It has taken a little longer.
And by the way: the Labour Party manifesto at last year’s General Election (.pdf) promised that ID cards would initially be voluntary. The abandonment of that pledge has been a main justification for the Lords’ resistance to the government’s Bill (now an Act) under which if you applied for a passport, your information automatically and compulsorily went on the database and you got an ID card as well as a passport. Ministers have had the brass neck to defend this betrayal of the manifesto by pointing out that no-one is forced to apply for a passport: that a passport is purely an optional extra, just as the ID card and the entry in the database will be. Technically true, of course: we could all avoid the need for a passport by remaining permanently on our wind-swept little island, and that way we could keep ourselves off the database right up to 2010 when inclusion becomes compulsory for everyone, with or without a passport. Now, under this brazenly mis-named compromise, we can actually decline to have an ID card even if we need a passport before 2010 — but the info will still go on the database, and we’ll pay for the card whether or not we accept it, so there’ll be no possible advantage, and some inconvenience, in refusing it. The harm will already have been done by then, with your life story, past and future, securely tucked away on the database. By such shameless casuistry is the integrity of the manifesto technically restored. What fools they take us for!
Brian
Part of the reason for widespread political apathy and the sense of disillusion with our democracy is the accurate perception that the executive (the government) has established such comprehensive control over the House of Commons, and the powers of the more independent House of Lords are so limited, that parliament no longer performs its vital role of holding an over-mighty government to account, resisting its more illiberal excesses, and removing the tattered fig-leaf from its naughty bits. Now, instead of seeking to correct some of these harmful defects, the prime minister wants to make his strangle-hold on the Palace of Westminster even tighter.
Caught with his hands in the till over the cash for peerages scandal, Tony Blair has reportedly undergone a sudden conversion on the road to Belmarsh over the introduction of an elected majority in the House of Lords, something reformers have been demanding for almost a century (since it was promised in the 1911 Parliament Act) and for which there is a clear majority in both Houses of Parliament, but which has hitherto been resisted by our soi-disant radical reformist prime minister on the grounds that the introduction of even a minority of elected members of the Upper House would give it such new democratic legitimacy that it would constitute a threat to the ‘primacy of the House of Commons’. According to media reports, however, Mr Blair’s solution to this imaginary threat is to impose yet more limitations on the already strictly limited powers of the second chamber, perhaps even depriving it of any legislative powers altogether. According to the Telegraph website:
Tony Blair is preparing the biggest assault on the powers of the House of Lords for more than 50 years after a series of bruising battles with peers over Labour reforms. The Government plans to change the law to prevent the Upper Chamber blocking legislation that has been passed by the Commons. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, said the powers of the Lords should be curtailed as part of a wider package of reforms that could include the creation of a mainly-elected Upper Chamber.
(Never mind that the 1997 Labour Manifesto, sacred text from the Age of Innocence, pledging House of Lords reform, promised in terms: "The legislative powers of the House of Lords will remain unaltered.")
But the primacy of the Commons doesn’t depend on the second chamber continuing to lack democratic legitimacy, either because of being unelected as at present, or because of being even more powerless as Mr Blair apparently intends. Commons primacy stems from its role as the forum in which governments are chosen and sustained or rejected, where almost all ministers sit and are held to account, and which has almost unlimited powers, compared with the heavily circumscribed powers of the Lords. Anyway, it isn’t really the primacy of the House of Commons that the prime minister is so anxious to preserve: it’s the control of the House of Commons by an over-mighty executive that he wants to go on enjoying, without the inconvenience of having to get his legislation through a much more independent-minded second chamber, especially if the conferring of elective legitimacy on that chamber makes it even more independent-minded and stroppy than it is already. There’s absolutely no case for further trimming the powers of the second chamber. Once the last hereditary and appointed Lord and Lady have been removed from it, please let us call it the Senate: and tell Mr Blair to keep his cotton-pickin’ fingers off its powers, rights and role. The health of our democracy is more important than the government’s convenience.
It’s sad, too, that the national debate on the question of Lords reform is so extraordinarily parochial. We are apparently too chauvinist and too convinced of our own superiority to have a serious look at what other comparable western democracies do about their bicameral legislatures, in almost every single case more democratic and effective than ours. We could usefully learn lessons, for example, from the US and Australian constitutions, and perhaps also the German (now that we have sleep-walked half-way into becoming a federation). We could make sure of a more independent Senate by electing its members in rotation for ten-year terms, using one of the many available systems of proportional representation, thus ensuring that no one party would have an overall majority in it, and limiting membership to one or two terms, thus emasculating the Party Whips at a stroke of the scimitar. We could introduce a regional element into Senate representation to offset the variations in the sizes of the regions and nations of the UK Federation. There’s no need or case for keeping those bishops, and the judges are on their overdue way out to a separate Supreme Court anyway. The existing powers and limitations will ensure that the Commons always have the last word, in the last resort, unless the electorate decides otherwise. All this could be the equivalent of Viagra for our flagging political system.
Before leaving this dog-eared old subject, I should perhaps declare an interest: I have already set out my own views on House of Lords reform so often and at such (typical) length that I feel entitled to be excused from repeating them in detail here yet again. All right, as I have said earlier here, if you really want to know what they are, you can read what I have written in a submission to the Select Committee on Public Administration; in another, earlier submission to the Lord Chancellor’s Department; in two letters published in The Times; and in at least two previous entries in Ephems, here and here. I am happy to stand by them all. Just let us keep a firm grip on basic principles and raise the flag of resistance to this latest folly of Mr Blair’s.
Brian
