As so often, Simon Jenkins hits all the nails on their heads in his Sunday Times column today (11 June 06) about the "safety at all costs", risk-averse culture espoused by our New Labour ministers from the prime minister downwards, with the crude and loud support of the right-wing press (ironical that this piece should appear in the Sunday Times, of all the improbable organs).
Among the important points made by Jenkins is the by no means obvious, but obviously correct observation that
What has happened is that the government’s risk threshold has lowered, a risk not of physical danger but of political embarrassment. A terrorism death appears as a failure of state policy.
Time and again Tony Blair has justified some new abridgement of our civil liberties, or even a crass breach of the rule of law, by expressing the fear that he would be personally blamed if he had failed to take some action, any action, to reduce a risk to the public — risk of a violent crime, risk of a released prisoner re-offending, risk of a terrorist suspect who has committed no previous crime launching a terrorist attack, risk of Iraq using a hypothetical weapon of mass destruction against Britain — which might subsequently materialise. He is interested, not so much in averting the harm that these various contingencies would inflict on innocent victims (although no doubt he's happy to try to do that too), but rather in having a defence available, when some frightful outrage is committed, to the charge that because of his failure to "do something" at an earlier stage he may be blamed for the disaster. His mottos are: "It wasn't my fault, guv", and "safety first, last and in the middle". The sign on his desk reads: "Take whatever action you can, at whatever cost to our democracy, to minimise every risk, however small, that you might be blamed." The idea of proportionality — that any curtailment of a basic human right, however few people may be personally affected by it and however unsalubrious they might be, must be proportionate to the degree of risk to others thereby reduced, and to the extent of the reduction — seems wholly foreign to him. His (and Reid's and others') constant refrain about the need to change the 'balance between an individual's human rights and the public's right to security' reveals an inability to grasp this simple but fundamental point. Whether this is an intellectual or a moral failure, either way it's a failure, and a costly one for all of us.
Simon Jenkins's article should be compulsory reading for Mr Blair and all other ministers, shadow ministers, Home Office officials, editors of Murdoch newspapers and other trashy populist tabloids, radio and television interviewers, policemen and members of security 
and intelligence agencies, and prison governors; for participants in know-all talk shows, discussion programmes, funny programmes about current affairs, listeners' phone-ins, press reviews, Thought for the Day, and other forums recklessly provided for the pontifications of ignorant bigots and shallow recyclers of current political clichés; for the entire political commentariat; for Mr Freddie Forsyth and for whichever of the Hitchens brothers is the reactionary one. The only people, in fact, who don't really need to read it are sensible bloggers: but even they would be well advised to do so, if only to enjoy a characteristically lively piece of English prose in a great English tradition.
PS: I owe Sir Simon an apology for including his portrait in this post, after he has written about his dislike of it. My excuse is that I enjoy that slightly menacing smile: that famous smile on the face of the tiger….
It's hard for some of us Europeans to understand how it can be that an American prominent in public life who was for years regarded, with reason, as a leading supporter of the IRA can now be the Chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee. It's even harder to accept that he goes on CNN and the BBC to accuse the Europeans of having no experience or understanding of terrorism.
Congressman Pete King (Republican, New York), has been attacking the European Court of Justice's rejection of the US-EU agreement requiring airlines to supply to the US authorities, within 15 minutes of a plane taking off, 34 pieces of information on every passenger flying to the US, including who's flying, names, addresses and credit card information, how they paid, their health records, what they eat on the flight[1] — and where they're going after they enter the US:
Pete King, a US Congressman who chairs the homeland security committee of the House of Representatives, was outraged that Mr Moraes [member of the European Parliament] doubted the US's word that the data was dealt with responsibly.
"I know how committed the department is to security, to privacy," he said. "For him to say not to trust… I don't know why, I mean, Michael Chertoff (the Homeland Security Secretary) is a former federal judge, a former federal prosecutor and a man of impeccable integrity…
"What we have to do is try to find a way to resolve this. But ultimately if we don't get what information we need, we will have to take what action we think is necessary." The Times, 30 May 2006
Representative King has explained, in recent CNN and BBC interviews, that the Europeans can't understand the need for this information to be handed over because Europeans have no experience of terrorism in their own countries and no understanding of the security needs of the US following 9/11. Mr King is also audibly concerned about the al-Qaeda threat from Canada (try to take this seriously, please):
"I think it's a disproportionate number of al-Qaeda in Canada because of their very liberal immigration laws,'' Peter King, a Republican Congressman from New York and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN on June 3. (Bloomberg report)
According to the Congressman's own website,
Rep. King is Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and also serves on the International Relations Committee. Congressman King has also been a leader in the ongoing effort to have more Homeland Security funding based on threat analysis and is a strong supporter of the war against international terrorism, both at home and abroad.
Congressman King has good reason to know all about terrorism. For years he was a leading supporter of Noraid, the American organisation that raised money and, according to the British and Irish governments, provided arms for the IRA, which he vociferously supported. Rod Liddle, in the Guardian on 12 February 2003, after reading that Mr King had been assailing the French as chronic appeasers over Iraq, wrote:
And then, rather disconcertingly, it suddenly occurred to me that this was the same Pete King who has spent the past 15 years similarly eviscerating the British, or the "Bruddush", for "centuries of oppression" inflicted upon the Irish people. Pete could always be relied upon to say a few words in support of Martin Galvin's evil Noraid organisation, or to wade into some delicate and confusing conundrum of Northern Ireland politics with his size 12 cowboy boots, ready to give succour to the IRA for the sake of securing a few more votes from his Irish and faux-Irish constituents. He always did so with a mixture of brio and crass ignorance. It is the same Pete King, isn't it?
It's worth considering Congressman King's record of activity and comment over Northern Ireland. Ed Molony, in the New York Sun of 22 June 2005, wrote:
Since the late 1970s, a Long Island congressman, Peter King, has been aligned with one of the most violent terrorist groups in recent European history, defying critics in his own Republican Party and elsewhere, and yet managing to prosper. Now, however, Mr. King and the Irish Republican Army appear to have come to a parting of the ways.
After years spent stoutly defending the IRA and its often bloody methods, Mr. King recently called on the group to disband and bring the seemingly endless Irish peace process to a final and successful conclusion. Frustrated with continued IRA criminality, Mr. King is now in an unaccustomed position: His stance on the IRA is tougher than that of either the British or Irish governments, although it is in lockstep with White House advisers…
Once a vocal and frequent House champion for the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, and its leader, Gerry Adams, the 60-year-old, Queens-born Mr. King has said nothing about either on the House floor in years. The politician once called the IRA "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland," he was banned from the BBC by British censors for his pro-IRA views, and he refused to denounce the IRA when one of its mortar bombs killed nine Northern Irish police officers. But Mr. King is now one of America's most outspoken foes of terrorism.
Six weeks after September 11, 2001, he told WABC radio that the military should use tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan if it was believed that Islamic terrorists would deploy chemical weapons on American soil. … In 1980, Mr. D'Amato, then the senator-elect, fulfilled a campaign pledge and went to Belfast on a fact-finding trip, taking Messrs. King and Dillon with him. It was the start of Mr. King's long entanglement with the IRA, and he took to it with the zeal of a convert.
[Following a visit to Ireland in 1980] [h]e forged links with leaders of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Ireland, and in America he hooked up with Irish Northern Aid, known as Noraid, a New York based group that the American, British, and Irish governments often accused of funneling guns and money to the IRA. At a time when the IRA's murder of Lord Mountbatten and its fierce bombing campaign in Britain and Ireland persuaded most American politicians to shun IRA-support groups, Mr. King displayed no such inhibitions. He spoke regularly at Noraid protests and became close to the group's publicity director, the Bronx lawyer Martin Galvin, a figure reviled by the British.
Mr. King's support for the IRA was unequivocal. In 1982, for instance, he told a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County: "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry."
In the years after the [IRA and INLA prisoners'] hunger strike, Noraid was a major player in New York's Irish-American politics. That was most evident in the yearly election of grand marshal of the St. Patrick's Day parade, when Noraid sympathizers were chosen each year. In 1985, the group threw its weight behind Mr. King. When he won and led the procession in top hat and tails, before an estimated 2 million spectators, the Irish government boycotted the parade. Efforts to persuade Cardinal O'Connor and the city's political establishment to follow suit failed.
After the years of IRA atrocities endured by Irish and British people while Mr Pete King was actively supporting their activities and helping to raise funds for them, not to mention the terrorist attacks by the Red Brigade in Germany and the Basque separatists
in Spain, and more recently Islamic extremist outrages in a raft of European countries including Britain and Spain, Mr King's reflections on Europeans' lack of experience of terrorism are just a little bit hard to take. And to make a man with a record like that Chair[man] of the the House of Representatives' principal committee on security and the battle against terrorism surely defies belief.
Someone very well known to me, a survivor of the London blitz in World War II and of many IRA atrocities, who heard Congressman Pete on both CNN and the BBC belittling the Europeans for their lack of experience or understanding of terrorism compared with the Americans, was moved to write a deservedly scathing letter to Mr King. You can read it here. If she receives a reply (which seems to me unlikely in the extreme, but you never know), I shall be glad to publish it here with equal prominence.
[1] Up-date, 11 June 06: I am told (in a private message from an invariably reliable source) that in fact the obligation to tell the CIA about the dietary preferences of air passengers bound for the US was dropped from the Agreement at the last moment, obviously a significant concession to our freedoms.
Further up-date, 5 July 06: Half-concealed among the comments below is a link to a website, http://www.kingwatch.blogspot.com/ , which monitors the Congressman's activities and how they are viewed in the media and by ordinary, er, folk.
The Labour Party has adopted with enthusiasm the proposition that if it can't any longer finance its activities by getting 'loans' from wealthy donors without needing to declare them, it can make up the deficit by getting itself (and the other parties) a compulsory subsidy from the taxpayer. The idea is substantially to increase the (currently fairly modest) contribution to political parties from public funds. At present a party in office gets very little state funding, since it can draw on many of the resources of government not available to opposition parties; Labour seems bent on dispensing with this pesky distinction by adding a large public subvention to the advantages it already enjoys through being in office.
This seems to me a thoroughly bad idea. Polls suggest that most voters (and especially taxpayers) would object to their taxes being used to prop up political parties most of which they don't support and which have become so out of touch and tune with their own supporters that they can't raise the money they need from subscriptions and genuine donations. As the Sunday Times editorial today comments, sensibly for once:
After this newspaper exposed the scandal over loans for peerages, which is still the subject of a police investigation reaching into the very heart of Downing Street, a little humility, even contrition, might have been expected from the Labour party. Far from it. Instead it sees the furore as an opportunity to make the taxpayer fork out for political parties. … Polling for this newspaper has shown that two-thirds are opposed outright to any extension of state funding for political parties, and that fewer than a fifth are in favour. … Voters do not want more state funding because they do not trust political parties. They also believe that political parties should in part be judged on how successful they are at raising their own funds. We need an end to cash for peerages and dodgy deals with the unions. But we need most of all honesty and transparency, not state handouts for parties that do not deserve them.
The Sunday Times also seems to advocate preventing the Labour Party from receiving funding from trade unions affiliated to it, which would be extremely prejudicial if the Conservatives remained free to accept donations from companies and rich individuals in the private sector. But that's a different issue.
Meanwhile the Labour Party has launched a 'consultation' with its members and supporters about what advice the party should submit to the Hayden Phillips Review set up by the government in the wake of the 'cash for peerages' scandal to consider future arrangements for funding political parties. The 'consultation document ' (pdf) on which comments are invited seems to me a pretty rum kind of consultation, since it appears to take it for granted that there is to be a significant increase in the funding of political parties from public funds, and confines itself to asking for comments on the various issues that this raises.
Instead of running to Aunty State for money that it can't raise from its members (because it can't attract enough people to join the party and pay subscriptions, nor motivate enough individuals to make even modest contributions), the Labour Party surely ought to advocate –
- Limiting the amount of expenditure allowed for election campaigning, nationally as well as by constituencies, and permanently, not just during an election campaign;
- Limiting the amount of any individual donation (whether a gift or a loan) by any individual or institution, such as a trade union or company — not 100 per cent enforceable, but exploitation of loopholes could be publicised;
- Banning extremely expensive forms of national campaigning, such as posters and perhaps party political television broadcasts;
- Giving company shareholders the opportunity to vote on any proposal by their company to make a donation of any size to any party, to match as near as possible the opt-out available to trade unionists from the political levy to the Labour Party;
- Making all donations and subscriptions much more transparent, with the information to be made public at the time, not months later in annual accounts;
- Concentrating the minds of all political party machines on the need to attract many more members by being seen both to engage them in genuine consultations on policies and issues, and also, even more importantly, to listen to what their activists, grass roots members, and other supporters say to them, thus encouraging a large number of people to make modest contributions instead of a very small number of people making huge ones (and thereby expecting to buy a definitive voice in policy-making).
Taken together these measures ought to minimise the inevitable injustice arising from the ability of the Tories to raise much more money than the Labour Party (or the LibDems) simply because the Tories have many more ultra-rich members and supporters. To allow the bulk of the funding to come from public funds rather than from members and supporters would tend to encourage even greater neglect of the relationship between the party leaders and their parties' grass roots supporters, causing further homogenisation of the main parties in their competition for the centre ground at the expense of their commitment to their natural core support, to the point where they become indistinguishable and thus deprive the eleectorate of any real choice. (It's argued that parties can win elections by slanting their appeal towards their own core supporters rather than towards the centre ground, at any rate in situations where elections are won or lost as much by turn-out as by the distribution of such votes as are actually cast. But experience suggests that in practice the temptation to try to capture the centre ground and to ignore one's own supporters is irresistible — one's own supporters have nowhere else to go and can thus be taken for granted, unless there's a financial incentive to cultivate and listen to them.)
Anyway, I have posted a comment in the consultation forum which, unsurprisingly, seems not to have been selected for publication there (or not yet, anyway). So in case the party censors suppress it, I reproduce it here:
There is absolutely no case for increasing the subsidy already paid to political parties out of public funds. Any increase will be seen by the majority of the electorate as a lazy (indeed, sleazy) device by the party machines to avoid the need for building a constructive relationship with individual party members and supporters (including the trade unions in the case of Labour), whose commitment to the party's principles and policies will motivate them to pay subscriptions and make donations sufficient to pay for the party's needs. The current "New" (!) Labour leadership has alienated, apparently deliberately, a high proportion of the party's membership, including numerous activists: if it needs more money, it should seek to re-establish a relationship with them by listening to them and taking some notice of what they are telling you, not by raiding the Exchequer for more money from the taxpayer.
Any increase in public funding, quite apart from enraging most of the population and further increasing people's disillusionment with politics, will raise a host of insoluble questions about the criteria for payments, the basis on which the new money should be distributed, the safeguards to ensure that it is properly spent, the arrangements for excluding 'extremist' parties without introducing an element of suppression of free political activity and outright political discrimination, the timing of payments, and ways to avoid giving whichever party is in government an even bigger advantage than it already has over opposition parties by the mere fact of being in office. There can be no satisfactory answer to any one of these questions because the measure proposed is itself inherently unsatisfactory, misconceived, unsaleable, discriminatory, lazy, greedy, unprincipled, and supported by a lot of waffly high-minded rhetoric which stinks of hypocrisy.
I first joined the Labour Party in 1955 and have supported it all my adult life. It saddens me to see my own party stooping to this sort of thing. Tell Sir H Phillips that we won't touch additional public funding with a barge-pole.
In fact, I reluctantly acknowledge that there is a case for some public funding as a way of avoiding the purchase of influence on policy with party leaders by rich donors. But I suggest that there are better and more generally acceptable ways of minimising that risk than using taxpayers' money in the teeth of the strong objections of the majority of those who provide the money through their taxes. Including me!
Brian
For some time now people writing comments on posts in this blog have been mortified to find that when they 'publish' them, they appear as a single paragraph with no line or paragraph breaks. I have had to edit in the paragraph and line breaks myself.
This website's designer, resident guru and presiding genius has spent long hours trying to locate and squash this tiresome bug. He has at last succeeded, and I hope that from now on commenters (commentators?) won't have this problem any more. If you do, please e-mail me to let me know (from the website Contact page).
Apologies for past frustrations. Carry on commenting!
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
1 June 06
