As widely predicted, the coalition government’s review of the previous government’s counter-terrorism legislation has not had the cojones to recommend the outright abolition of the intrinsically flawed régime of control orders. Even more disappointingly, nor has the Labour Opposition. The government proposes to remove some of the system’s more atrociously repressive features, putting in its place what amounts to “Control Orders Lite”. The LibDems, until they joined the coalition with the Tories, campaigned for the complete abolition of control orders. Now all three major parties have formally accepted an entirely bogus justification for the continuation of arbitrary restrictions, imposed by a government minister, not by any court, on suspects whom the security authorities don’t want to, or can’t, prosecute because the key evidence against them is too sensitive to be made public in open court or even to be disclosed to the suspect. This failure of nerve on the part of the Labour leadership falls sadly short of the promises made by Ed Miliband in two key speeches made since he was elected as leader. It doesn’t encourage optimism for a more robustly libertarian response to the Justice Secretary’s Green Paper on sentencing policy when that (mostly excellent) document is translated into draft legislation.
The reaction of the civil rights organisation Liberty to the control orders proposals is concise:
Crucially, the orders will still be initiated by the Home Secretary – and the regime will continue to run outside the criminal justice system of investigation, arrest, charge and conviction. Though the conditions of punishment may be improved, control orders lite are still punishment without trial and we will be campaigning against them. We hope you’ll stand with us, and show the Government that you’re not fooled by a rebrand. [Liberty, email of 26 January 2011; see Liberty press release.]
The Guardian editorial of 27 January commented that “the terms of these [control orders] restrictions are to be improved, and only a very small number of people may ever be subject to them, but the fact remains that control orders are not so much being scrapped as redecorated… Yvette Cooper, the new Labour shadow home secretary, would have done well to admit yesterday that the government is undoing some of the damage left by her colleagues.”
Lord McDonald, the (small l liberal) former Director of Public Prosecutions who ‘oversaw’ the Home Office review, highlights in a separate report another major defect in the control orders régime: the moment a suspect is placed under a control order it becomes far more difficult, sometimes impossible, to collect the necessary additional and useable evidence needed to charge and convict her[1] in an ordinary criminal court so that she can be put where a convicted terrorist obviously belongs – in prison:
[T]he State faces a clear dilemma when it confronts individuals believed to be involved in terrorism activity, but against whom there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. How are the public best protected in this situation? It is, on the evidence, precisely within this context that the Review is right to conclude that any replacement scheme for control orders should have as a primary aim to encourage and to facilitate the gathering of evidence, and to diminish any obstruction of justice, leading to prosecution and conviction. Current powers that fail this test should be amended so that they comply with it or, if their inability to comply is intrinsic to their nature, they should be abolished. It follows that powers created under any new scheme must also be judged against the criteria set by the Review itself: to what extent are they likely to facilitate the gathering of evidence, and to what extent are they directed towards preventing any obstruction of that process? It is, I think, only by following this quality mark that the Review’s conclusions can be true to the evidence it has gathered over the last few months, as well as to the twin goals of prosecution and public protection. [Emphasis added]
But the greatest and most glaring defect of control orders is that they involve a government minister, not a court, imposing restrictions on the liberty of an individual who has been neither charged with nor convicted of any offence, who is thus entitled to the presumption of innocence, who is effectively being punished – in some cases extremely harshly – purely on the unconfirmed suspicion of the security services and who may well in fact be entirely innocent: who in many cases has not been told all or any of the reasons for the punishment being visited on her and thus has no opportunity to challenge the basis for officialdom’s suspicions: who has no way of knowing when her liberty will be restored or even whether it will ever be restored: who faces the fear and odium of her friends and work colleagues and even of her own family, all naturally assuming that these restrictions won’t have been imposed on her without good reason and that she must indeed be a terrorist; who knows that even if the restrictions are lifted at some future date, and even though she will never have been charged, still less convicted of any crime, the cloud of fear and mistrust cast over her by her control order will never be lifted.
We may well be surprised that in the light of this massive indictment the control order régime has not been either struck down by the courts as manifestly in breach of the individual’s fundamental human rights in common law, nor formally declared incompatible with the Human Rights Act. The judges of Britain’s highest court have however determined that while a person may not lawfully be deprived of her liberty on the mere suspicion of the executive without being charged or tried, her liberty may lawfully be restricted so long as the restriction is the minimum required for public security and the suspicion of the executive is not unreasonable – a spectacularly lower criterion than the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial. On just such a fine distinction between the deprivation and the restriction of liberty an individual’s whole future life, work, reputation and happiness may hinge. This is simply intolerable.
Overall the home office’s review is overwhelmingly positive. It proposes to correct a goodly number of the illiberal excesses perpetrated by New Labour, and New Generation Labour as represented by Yvette Cooper was right to welcome and support most of it. Even on control orders the review does remove the worst and most objectionable restrictions that can be imposed and to that limited extent it is also to be welcomed. But all the injustices inherent in the punishment of an individual on the mere suspicion of the government remain in the government’s new régime of Control Orders Lite, and these can be remedied only by abolishing the whole corrupt system. Abolition is what the home office and the coalition should have promised, and abolition is what a reformed Labour opposition committed to the restoration of justice and liberty should demand. Shame on them both for their cowardly failure of nerve!
Brian
[1] I have adopted the convenient and fashionable convention whereby ‘she’ and ‘her’ are to be read as referring to ‘she or he’ and ‘her or him’.
I am fast coming round to Ed Balls, now Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer, finally pitted in one-to-one combat against the mad axeman and economic illiterate, George Osborne. The Tories and their little echo LibDems, loyally reflected back by the media, are accurately reciting Balls’s assets, but mostly shaky about his supposed defects.
The plus side is self-evident: Balls the political heavy hitter, variously described as the bruiser, the attack dog and the rottweiler; the highly qualified economist with a quarter-century of experience at the national economic coal-face; the ferocious self-confidence that probably comes from his brave personal triumph over a wretched childhood challenged by cruel mockery of his surname and stammer; and not least the husband of an equally literate, equally intelligent and equally politically savvy (not to mention more attractive) wife.
The Tories and much of the obedient media have rushed to crow over Balls’s alleged vulnerabilities, especially his close identification as Gordon Brown’s right-hand man with the record of Labour’s 13 years of “economic mismanagement” leading to the “mess we have inherited”. This, though, may come back to haunt the Tories and prove to be a source of considerable strength for Balls. Labour is currently badly wounded by the Tory and LibDem lie, constantly repeated to the point where it’s in danger of becoming part of the received wisdom, according to which the financial and economic crisis beginning in 2008 was caused by reckless over-spending by the Labour government under Blair and, especially, Brown, requiring borrowing on an unprecedented scale and a monumental deficit; and thereupon aggravated by the failure of Brown and Balls to admit that the deficit represents the nation’s overwhelming and most urgent problem, whose solution justifies heroic pain and sacrifice on the part of the entire citizenry (especially, as we’re now finding, the poorest and most vulnerable).
Additional counts in the Tory-LibDem indictment are Labour’s failure to regulate the banks more rigorously — Balls is vilified as prime architect of Labour’s inadequate regulatory system — and the refusal, first by Brown and now by the Eds Miliband and Balls, to spell out what would be Labour’s alternative plan for cutting the deficit: Labour, it’s said, condemns the coalition’s cuts but won’t say what cuts a Labour government would make. The Tory-LibDem accusation is, further, that Balls and Miliband are at odds over economic policy, Balls having earlier condemned as unachievable Alistair Darling’s project, endorsed post-election by Miliband and Alan Johnson, for halving the deficit in four years. And, finally, the coalition partners point to Balls’s elevation to the shadow chancellor job as posing a mortal threat to Miliband’s leadership, given Balls’s remorseless and allegedly unscrupulous ambition.
To the despair of many of us in and in support of the Labour Party, Labour has so far failed to make any significant dent in this Tory-LibDem indictment. Yet almost all of it depends on a shameless misrepresentation of the facts, and a total failure to understand (or more likely a refusal honestly to acknowledge):
- the complex global factors underlying the banking crisis, the evolution of banking crisis into a crisis of national economies, leading to world-wide recession,
- the successful rescue effort (largely inspired by Brown and Balls) that prevented recession degenerating into global slump,
- the implications of the rescue for the national accounts, government borrowing and the deficit, and
- the measures initiated in their final weeks in office by Brown and Balls to stimulate demand, minimise the rise in unemployment, and head for renewed growth as an essential element in the eventual reduction of the deficit.
It ignores the human reality that unemployment and prolongation of recession are a greater threat to the nation’s well-being than the deficit, and that reducing, not increasing, unemployment and stimulating, not dampening, demand in the economy are indeed essential tools for repairing the deficit, minimising (but not entirely escaping) the need for damaging and premature cuts in government expenditure and equally deflationary increases in those taxes which most affect the level of demand in the economy, such as VAT.
Then, finally, the Tory-LibDem case against Labour in general and Ed Balls in particular has the bare-faced effrontery to suggest that on all these counts Labour in office was at fault while the Conservative and Liberal democratic parties in opposition knew better all along. In fact, far from attacking the Labour government for reckless over-spending up to 2008, the Tories promised to maintain Labour’s expenditure levels; far from pointing to Labour’s regulatory system as insufficiently rigorous, the Tories echoed their banker friends’ and funders’ shrill demand for greater deregulation; far from supporting Labour’s successful initiatives, replicated around the world, to rescue the banking system and then to prevent recession degenerating into slump, the Tories denounced them as spendthrift, without ever suggesting what they would have done instead; and far from endorsing Labour’s prompt measures to restore growth by minimising unemployment and stimulating demand, measures which were already beginning to bear fruit in the first months after the coalition took office, the Tories and their obedient LibDem partners have enthusiastically reversed every one of them, imposing cuts that can only aggravate already high unemployment and tax increases that can only tend to suppress demand, thus putting at serious risk the nascent but still weak signs of gradual recovery.
Joyce McMillan, the formidable political columnist and theatre critic of The Scotsman, has put it sharply and succinctly:
The first lie – now being energetically promoted by David Cameron and his ministers – is that the whole fiasco was the fault of Labour politicians, and of failed government regulation. There is, of course, a grain of truth in this; the banks, for the last two decades, have not been properly regulated at all. To suggest that this is exclusively the fault of politicians, though, is to go into a weird kind of denial about the extent to which all politicians, and their cash-hungry political parties, are now subject to the colossal power and influence of the new plutocracy, and dependent on their approval. If the banks had wanted better regulation at any time during Tony Blair’s premiership, they could have had it on request. But they wanted ever more deregulation, as did their supporters in the Conservative Party, and that is what they got; nor would they have hesitated to make mincemeat, using every means at their disposal, of any politician or party who failed, at the time, to go along with their wishes.
It’s hard to think of any front-rank politician better qualified by forensic skills, economic expertise, and practical experience at the centre of power, to expose these monumental Tory-LibDem lies than Ed Balls. The lies must be comprehensively exposed and the fundamental dishonesty, the breath-taking opportunism, of the liars brought home to the electorate, if Labour is ever to regain the respect for economic competence that it had earned and deserved during more than a decade in office and which is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for winning any future election. A remorseless counter-attack is long overdue, and Ed Balls is self-evidently the man to lead it.
We have all had our reservations (or worse) about the uglier aspects of the behaviour in both No. 11 and No. 10 Downing Street of Gordon Brown and his team, of which Ed Balls was the most prominent leader and Ed Miliband a junior member. The downside of Balls’s energy, confidence and aggressiveness is that they can quickly lapse into bullying. Ambition, while a natural attribute of a hugely talented politician, can be grossly destructive when it degenerates into obsession and bitter resentment, as we saw throughout Gordon Brown’s long years as chancellor. If Ed Miliband is ever to become prime minister, faced with the need to choose his chancellor of the exchequer, he will need to think hard and long before risking the appointment to the next most powerful position of a possible rival and potentially an apparently congenital control freak. But a shadow chancellor, in opposition to a reactionary and mendacious government, is a different matter. Ed Balls is formidably well equipped for this role. Welcome aboard, Ed jnr: go for it!
Brian
Dear Aussie friends,
We want you to know how distressing J and I have found the news and images of Queensland in these last days and weeks. As far as we know none of our old Australian friends is still living in Queensland, although one dear couple, our former neighbours in Canberra, now live up by the coast in northern NSW and we’ve been worried by reports that the floods might have been crossing the state border. But the medium-term consequences will, we suppose, eventually hit all Australians, assuming that the fearsome costs of reconstruction will have to be shared equitably around all the Australian states, and anyway there can’t be many Australians outside Qld who don’t have friends and relatives there somewhere and who won’t be anxious for them; some indeed mourning.
It seems to us especially hard that a country as well organised as Australia, and a people as sturdily resourceful and independent to the point of bloody-mindedness as you Australians, should be struck down and damaged so terribly by a force of nature against which no advance precautions or ingenuity could have had any appreciable effect. Many potential victims have clearly been saved by the courage and resourcefulness of rescuers but others have suffered dreadful fates with friends and relatives powerless to do anything for them, a horrendous thing.
We watched with great admiration a press conference the other evening (well, it was evening here in London) by Anna Bligh, the Queensland Premier, whose courage and determination convinced me without any need to Google her that she must be a descendent of him of the Bounty and State House, Sydney (she is). I thought she was marvellous and her tribute to her fellow-Queenslanders brought tears to the eyes, as did the moving moment when for a few seconds she was choked with emotion and couldn’t go on. I don’t know how she’s regarded as a party politician and for all I know she’s a hard-bitten female version of old Bjelke-Petersen, but that evening, confronting a disaster of such epic proportions, she came across as a Churchill, to this red-eyed Pom anyway. If Ms Gillard (from Wales?) does half as well as valiant Anna, she’ll be all right. That, at any rate, is how it seems from far, far away.
Of course as we have watched the maps on television showing the areas of worst flooding we have been constantly reminded of so many visits in the past to Queensland: especially perhaps the long two- or three-day drives across a continent for Christmas holidays in Tugun, not a great beauty spot but with a fantastic beach and such good eating and drinking in easy reach. I used to sit and soak in the sun in the whirlpool (spa) on the roof of the block of holiday apartments where we stayed, watching the aircraft taking off from and coming in to land at the little airport at Coolangatta just down the coast, right on the state border. (That apartment block has been developed into a much more sophisticated amenity since our day, but the roof-top spa is still there!) On the last leg of the journey to Tugun we used to stop off at a Sizzler and eat a sumptuous meal (in 2006 all the Australian branches of Sizzler were closed when rat poison was found in their salads, but we didn’t know that at the time). We used to drive along the coast past Palm Beach and Mermaid Beach to Surfer’s Paradise, stopping off here and there for a swim and glorious sea-food lunches and suppers: all wonderfully vulgar and brassy and not for the fastidious. From Tugun we used to drive inland into the hills and valleys, exploring. We adored it all.
A couple of times we went up to Noosa Heads, which we loved, and once to Cairns, which we didn’t, much. We did an official visit to Bundaberg, were shown over the big sugar mill and rum distillery (of course), and had dinner with the mill manager and his family at their home (he and his wife told us sorrowfully of the terrible table manners of the Americans: they had had a young American exchange student to stay with them and she had horrified them by cutting up her food before eating anything, laying her knife on the edge of the plate and only then eating the chopped-up remains with her fork. Worse, she had been distressed and angry when politely corrected by her hosts). They complained also of the uncomprehending remoteness of their far-away government and it took us a few moments to realise that they meant the one in Brisbane – federal Canberra could have been on another planet.
We had a fabulous family holiday one year on Heron Island, with the best and most spectacular snorkelling in the world, and took in Gladstone and Yeppoon and Rockhampton before and afterwards. The island was almost wholly unspoiled in those days. Then there were so many good visits to Brisbane, often staying with our Consul-General in his lovely tropical-style suburban house, and visiting state ministers and parliamentarians and newspaper people and trade unionists and businessmen. Once, on a visit to Brisbane, I had a long talk over an excellent hotel breakfast with John Howard, who couldn’t have been more friendly and forthcoming or less pretentious, whatever one might think of his politics. I wonder if Wikileaks has laid hands on my subsequent reporting telegram. The modernisation and upgrading of Brisbane between our first stint in Australia (1973-77) and the second (1991-94) represented an extraordinary transformation. We wonder how much of that transformation has been washed away in just a matter of days.
It’s heartbreaking to think of what has been done in so short a time to, presumably, almost all these wonderful places which for so many years have been delivering such happiness to so many people. Remembering how quickly Darwin was rebuilt in more up-to-date condition after the devastation done by Tracy, we know that Australian can-do will get Queensland up off the floor faster and with less fuss than anyone else in the world could possibly do, and that Queensland Redux will be even more brilliant than the Queensland we used to love to visit. Nevertheless, what a fearsome task awaits them! How to know where to begin? Where will the money come from? Australia more than almost any other major economy has ridden largely unscathed through the global financial crisis, only for this to hit it. Fate is not mocked. Will there be an international Queensland Appeal? Or will the world look away on the pretext that Australia has the resources to rebuild unaided, and that what money can be squeezed from our own ship-wrecked economies is better spent helping the flood victims in Brazil and Sri Lanka, as if it was a zero sum game.
At any rate, this maudlin reminiscence is merely meant to tell you that Australia’s many, many friends among the Poms are watching in appalled sympathy, fingers crossed like plaits, in a few cases perhaps praying, the rest of us simply hoping that the nightmare won’t last too terribly long. What a shocking thing it’s been. We’re so sorry.
Love
B and J
London, UK, 15 Jan 2011
Update (19 Jan 2011): The inimitable Australian expatriate Germaine Greer, in a long article in the Guardian of 15 January 2011, commented on the flooding of her native land in markedly different terms and tone from those of our letter above, which we had sent before we read Dr Greer’s piece. Although many of Dr Greer’s points of both asserted fact and vigorous opinion contradicted some of what we had written in our letter to our Australian friends, on careful reflection we have not judged it necessary, for the purposes of this post, to make any changes at all in what we wrote, apart from the addition of some hyperlinks and minor explanatory material for the benefit of non-Australian readers. But we sincerely hope that Dr Greer will be rescued without further delay from the Queensland tree in which she seems to have taken refuge from the flood.
Brian
Like others on the liberal/Labour left, I’m saddened by indications that the Labour opposition is ready to reject the coalition’s plan to restore voting rights to most prisoners serving sentences of less than four years, arguing that the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on the subject will be adequately catered for by the minimalist alternative of giving voting rights only to those serving one-year sentences or less. This would be a sad betrayal of Labour’s new leader’s promise to restore Labour’s position as the champion of liberty against authoritarianism. There are plenty of good social and penal reasons for restoring their voting rights to everyone in prison, and encouraging them to exercise those rights; and there’s also the legal position and the question of rights. I have been authorised to quote here the opinion on the subject of the Australian international law expert, John Greenwell:
Let me offer a comment about prisoners’ voting rights.
In Australia, as you know, we have no Bill of Rights and so there is no constitutional right to vote: but the Australian Constitution does affect the matter indirectly by requiring senators or members to be ‘directly chosen by the people’. To be valid, legislation providing for electoral qualifications must accord with that. What also bears on the constitutional issue Is the fundamental premise that we are a representative democracy.
It was these latter considerations which led the High Court in 2007 to strike down a ‘Howard’ Electoral Act amendment which would have deprived all convicted persons serving a term of imprisonment for any offence and for whatever period, of their right to vote. ['Howard' here refers to Australia's former right-wing prime minister John Howard, not to the UK's equally right-wing former Conservative party leader Michael Howard.]
But the Court did not rule that conviction and imprisonment for an offence could never in any circumstances constitute grounds for depriving a prisoner of his/her right to vote.
It rejected the ‘blanket’ denial of voting rights in the legislation; that is the absence on its face of any rational linkage between offences for which imprisonment had been imposed and denial to the offender of his/her civic right of voting. There may however be a “serious offending” [which represents] such form of civic irresponsiblity that it is appropriate for Parliament to accompany the offender’s physical separation from society with a denial of the right to participate in the law-making process.” Thus there must be some rational connection between the offences, the term of imprisonment imposed and the maximum penalty, on the one hand, and the withdrawal of the right to vote on the other.
Accordingly, and upon these grounds, the Court in the 2007 case which I have referred to expressly upheld the validity of previous legislation which required a term of imprisonment of three years or more for voting rights to be lost.
Before commenting on this, I should mention UK and Canadian decisions. These involve of course the European Human Rights Convention and Charter of Human Rights.
It appears that before 2005 UK legislation disenfranchised all convicted prisoners. The European Court of Human Rights held this automatic ban on all convicted prisoners to be arbitrary and in violation of Article 3 of Protocol 1 of the Convention. But the application of the Convention voting right is not unqualified: it is qualified by the ‘proportionality principle’: ie “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and emocratic society”. This qualification to the application of the right will only permit its minimum impairment. In the UK case of Hirst the European Court of Human Rights held by a majority that although deprivation of the right to vote of those “who had breached the basic rules of society to have a say in what the rules should be during the duration of their imprisonment” was legitimate, the UK law before the Court was too arbitrary to be justified and breached the principle of proportionality.
In 1993, in Canada, the Supreme Court held on similar grounds and by similar reasoning that a blanket ban on prisoners regardless of the length of sentence violated the Charter. The Canadian Act was subsequently amended in the light of this so as to deny the right of voting to inmates serving two years or more. But the Supreme Court, dividing 5 to 4, again held the legislation violated the Charter.
Thus the reasoning in all three jurisdictions is similar and denial of voting rights on the ground of imprisonment is not absolutely prohibited.
I think it unlikely even in the case of the Convention countries or Canada prisoners would ever be vested with an absolute right to vote by virtue of the Convention, Charter or, in Australia, by constitutional interpretation.
Nevertheless, the ‘right to vote guarantee’ in Europe and Canada mandates a less restrictive regime than the constitution in Australia. This is because the only way in which the guarantee is qualified in Convention countries is by virtue of the proportionality principle, and the proportionality principle is subject to a ‘minimum impairment’ of the right’ limitation. That is, proportionality allows qualification of the voting right guarantee but only to the minimum necessary. This is not of course applicable to Australia.
I do not know what has happened regarding the issue in the UK since 2005. The government foreshadowed public consultation after the Hirst decision. The outcome remains unclear.
There is one further general comment on the law I would add which is important in explaining the Australian position and, I suspect, that of the UK — and that is the long history of voting restrictions on convicted persons. It seemed to have become linked with the grounds for disqualifying members of parliament who have committed an offence. At all events, the point is evident in the following passage in the High Court judgement:
“Given the 19th century colonial istory, the development in the 1890′s of the drafts of the constitution, the common assumptions at the time, and the use of the length of sentence as a criteron of culpability, it cannot be said … such a system is necessarily inconsistent, incompatible or disproportionate in the relevant sense …. [etc].”
Generally, I am very much opposed to the notion of subjecting rights to the performance of responsibilities.
‘Responsibilities’ are very comprehensively imposed upon us by the criminal law — and not just the criminal law but also the civil law which defines the ‘responsibilities’ we owe to our neighbours. Rights have been separately identified and given force by the law because they are needed to protect the individual from power — the power of the state.
An independent régime of responsiblities will have the effect — if not the design — of allowing the executive to be satisfied that a ‘responsibilty’ has been complied with before some executve discretion or power is exercised in favour of a person to which he or she would otherwise have been entitled. The ‘responsibilities’ are unlikely to be specific legal duties, because that would overlap with the criminal law. Such a régime is likely to fall hardest upon minorities who are more likely to have to satisfy the executive of compliance with some generally expressed responsibility. [It would, in effect be the reverse of what we have here in Australia, which is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights but has not enacted it into its domestic law. Nevertheless, the High Court has held that the rights in the Covenant must be taken into account in the exercise of any executive power.]
The position is to some extent different where the ‘responsibility’ is an identified criminal offence and the disabling consequence of a conviction is general and relevant, e.g. driving under the influence and licence to drive, etc.
In the case of prisoners’ voting rights it may be justifiable to disqualify an offender convicted of treason from engaging in the law-making process; but the problem is that only history and the difficulty of finding any other criterion justifies length of the prison term imposed as the test for denying the vote. After all, three years would cover persons imprisoned for non-intentional offences such as manslaughter.
JG
6 January 2011
_____________________________
John Greenwell is a retired former legal adviser to the Australian government, specialising in international law. His comments on other legal issues have been quoted in earlier posts and articles on this website, including notably at http://www.barder.com/politics/liberty/siac.
At the end of 2010 the admirable Caroline Lucas, Green Party leader and sole Green MP, had a letter in the Guardian lambasting Labour for inconsistency: the former Labour government had introduced university tuition fees but now Ed Miliband was opposing them; Labour had introduced semi-privatisation of parts of the National Health service but now Labour in opposition was denouncing the Tory-led government’s plans for handing the whole thing over to private providers; and so forth. “Across the board, Labour simply cannot oppose coalition plans without laying themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy.” Much as I admire Ms Lucas, I thought this was a deeply unhelpful line of attack: there should be rejoicing over a sinner that repenteth, not accusations that the former sinner is a hypocrite for renouncing her former sins. On New Year’s Day the Guardian published my first (but I hope not my last) letter of 2011, an only slightly truncated version of the text I had submitted:
Like many other Labour supporters I’m a devoted admirer of Caroline Lucas, but her letter (Dilemma at the heart of Labour’s opposition, letters, December 31) does nothing to help Labour to use its time in opposition to shed the incubus of New Labour’s past aberrations, in order to re-emerge as a party committed once again to civil rights, fairness and equality, and the rule of law — including funding higher education out of progressive taxation. Ed Miliband showed in his first speech as leader a reassuring awareness of the need for a fresh start, if Labour is again to become an electable party of the liberal centre left. If Ms Lucas insists on undermining his efforts, as her letter seems designed to do, the only remaining left-liberal alternative to the coalition will be a minority one-person Green Government led by and solely comprising Caroline Lucas, admittedly an attractive proposition but one which even she will hardly regard as viable. It’s in the Greens’ as well as in Labour’s and the country’s interests to help Labour to disengage from the negative elements in New Labour’s record and start again with a clean sheet based on Labour’s core values, not to screw down the Blairite shackles even more tightly. Happy new year, Caroline!
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In a recent post on my own blog I criticised our prime minister and a tabloid for using as a stick with which to beat the Human Rights Act (HRA) a case in which the immigration authorities’ inability to deport an Iraqi Kurd, years after he had failed to stop after running over and killing a little girl, had actually resulted from a failure of the UK prosecuting authorities and the police to charge him with an appropriately serious offence, and not from any restrictions imposed by the HRA. The same post has been republished on the admirable website Labour List. In both forums it has prompted a number of exceptionally interesting comments, some of them passionate, some almost incoherent, some based on legal expertise and factual knowledge. Yet the whole tone of the comments on the one blog has been, as usual, completely different from that of the comments on the other. I wonder why this should be — and also why a post on this particular (mainly rather technical) issue should arouse such vehement reactions? Whatever the explanation, it seems to me a good example of the immense virtue of the interactivity of blogs: only on the Web can those who object to an article, or passionately support it, give vent to their arguments and emotions — provided that the blog-master is reasonably tolerant about what she allows to be said on her website and what she’s driven to delete. (I use “she” and “her” as convenient and non-sexist shorthand for “he or she” and “his or her”, in accordance with the best recent practice.)
* * * * *
A titanic struggle has been going on over the future of control orders — those euphemisms for preventive detention under virtual house arrest for people who have never been charged with, still less convicted of, any offence, and so are entitled to the presumption of innocence, all on the mere suspicion by the security agencies of some connection with terrorism. The LibDems, to their great credit, have always opposed these wretched totalitarian measures and Nick Clegg has reportedly threatened to make it a deal-breaker for continued participation in the coalition government if control orders aren’t scrapped. The respected organisation Liberty has campaigned vigorously for abolition, strongly supported apparently by the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, and the Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve, both Tories. The political commentators have been reporting that a decision to abandon control orders was imminent, the price of keeping the LibDems on board. But now the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who has been heavily leaned on by the intelligence and security agencies and the police, has weighed in for their retention, supported by Lord Carlile, the former government reviewer of terrorism laws (who has always tended to support the status quo after having had access to all the files on the suspects), Sir Malcolm (“at this moment in time”) Rifkind, and the rest of the usual gang who like to terrorise us with threats of bombs going off all over the country if New Labour’s vast array of illiberal security measures is reduced by the smallest enlightened reform. Lord Carlile gave the game away by reminding his fellow LibDems that they would be blamed if control orders were abolished and a terrorist outrage occurred soon afterwards (never mind the claims of liberal principle, protect yourself against any accusation of being soft on terrorism just in case something bad happens and you get the blame). Now the Guardian reports that control orders will probably stay, with some softening of their sharp edges as a leaky life raft for Nick Clegg. One despairs.
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Vote ‘No’ in the referendum on AV! One of several reasons for opposing AV is elegantly explained in a letter in the London Review of Books of 2 December 2010 from one Bill Myers of Leicester, to whom I would gladly send a bottle of cheap Cava if I knew which Bill Myers he was:
Whatever Ross McKibbin may say, opponents of AV are not ‘cave dwellers’ (LRB, 18 November). AV maximises the votes of extremist candidates, since anyone voting for them knows their second preference votes will still count, while the second preference votes of the last candidate to be eliminated have no impact on the result, though as many as 40 per cent of the votes may be affected. In constituencies where the Labour and Lib Dem candidates are the leading contenders, for example, only the second preferences of Conservative, UKIP and BNP supporters will matter. It is possible, however, that if their own candidate is defeated, Labour voters would prefer to be represented by an ‘honest-to-God’ Tory than a ‘pragmatic’ Lib Dem. The second preference votes of the last candidate to be eliminated should take precedence over those of the least successful candidates. Under the standard counting procedure, AV is demonstrably less democratic than first past the post.
Right on, Bill.
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We’re reeling from a disaster-ridden evening in which J cooked our first ever goose, for a festive supper with her sister and her partner. A tub of hot goose fat got accidentally spilled on the tiled floor of the kitchen, which still, after being swabbed repeatedly with assorted chemical cleaners, closely resembles an ice rink. J thinks that some of the clothes she was wearing may eventually become wearable again after repeated buffeting in the washing machine; the rest she has thrown away. My efforts at ‘carving’ this huge creature had me trying to tear its limbs off with my bare but goose-fat-covered hands, straight out of a feeble and unfunny sitcom. The derisory quantity of dark brown meat that I eventually managed to hack off it were indistinguishable from over-done lamb, reminiscent of some third-rate Greek restaurant. Luckily J had done all the usual trimmings, which were fine, and plenty of red and white liquid went gratefully down four hatches. All pure Feydeau. Could anyone find a use for a tub of goose fat, by any chance? Not the one that went to lubricate the kitchen floor, of course. Uh-oh: J warns me that there’s only one tub left and that it’s reserved for me to fry my eggs and bacon in. Offer regretfully withdrawn.
Brian
