THE 9/11 AUTHORITARIANS, AND THE DEMONS OF TERROR
Simon Jenkins writes a homerun column:
I MUST RETRACT a prejudice. The three strongest bulwarks against the abuse of state power in Britain at present are three institutions I most often deride: the law, the Liberal Democrats and the House of Lords. Thank God, this Christmas, for them all.Be sure to read Jenkins’ entire essay.Nobly do they share an initial with liberty. How depressing the past month would have been without them.
The decisions of the law lords and of the defence QC, Ian Macdonald, to stand up for habeas corpus and fair trial at Belmarsh prison have reinvigorated Magna Carta. The opposition of the Liberal Democrats to identity cards has been a beacon in a bleak Parliament. The House of Lords, an increasingly bold restraint on executive arrogance, now stands alone on both issues against the Government, with just months to go before an election. All strength to their arms.
Charles Clarke, the new Home Secretary, produced not one good reason on Monday for Britons to be compelled to hold an identity card linked to a nationally accessible data register. He said that the cards would be no more intrusive than birth registration. Yet he pleaded that they would help banks, benefit offices, tourists, fraud investigators and video rental firms, not to mention untold “wider benefits”, to justify the cost of the massive investment. He was unable to explain how a card meant to stamp out identity fraud will not be vulnerable to such fraud, nor how it would fight terrorism when most terrorists (so we are told) make no use of false identity. One MP after another stood up to parrot that “9/11 changes everything”. Like Reds under the bed, this slogan has become a catch-all for any restriction on civil freedom. Mr Clarke should offer Osama bin Laden asylum and his own desk in the Home Office, such an aid is this man to his department’s advancement. Bin Laden has even driven the hapless Tory spokesman, David Davis, into a humiliating U-turn, followed by half his MPs who were told that they dare not be outflanked by Labour in matters of repressive extravagance. Eighty Tories defied their two-line whip, yet only ten of these bothered to turn up to vote against the cards. So much for “principled opposition”.
Three hundred and eighty-five MPs voted for national identity cards, after a debate in which the argument went overwhelmingly against them. They cannot have believed in what they were doing and simply voted at their party’s call. It was left to the Liberal Democrats to confront the new “9/11 authoritarians”. Mark Oaten asked how the cards would forestall any known terrorist outrage, and got no answer. Simon Hughes asked how a card that need not be carried on the person could help the police during a manhunt. Critics demanded to know what real benefits would accrue from a register more intrusive than in any Western democracy. All they were told was that “the police say they want it”. What the paranoid State wants it must apparently get. When a politician has abandoned the goddess of reason, he soon takes comfort in the demons of terror.
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Meanwhile, the lawyers have raised their own challenge to the “9/11 changes everything” ethos. The law lords’ judgment on the Belmarsh imprisonments was devastating, as was the contempt shown towards it by Tony Blair and Mr Clarke. Why, I wonder, did they bother to sign the European Convention on Human Rights? By a majority of eight to one, the Lords concluded that the Government had failed to make a case for the imprisonments. This conclusion was reinforced at the weekend when Mr Macdonald, QC, resigned from the defence team at Belmarsh, calling the arrangements under which he worked “an intolerable distortion of the rule of law” and “completely contrary to our fundamental notions of justice”.
The crucial Belmarsh ruling came from Lord Hoffmann. He questioned not just the basis of the imprisonments but also the nature of the threat to which they were the answer. To him, a minister citing “secret information about a threat to Britain” cannot justify infringing civil liberty unless that threat is palpably overwhelming, as in war. Now it is not. Bin Laden is not so powerful as to threaten the life of the nation, as did Napoleon or Hitler or possibly the Soviet Union. The most that modern terrorists might pull off is a Madrid-style killing, a threat needing the most assiduous policing but not a threat to the stability or continuity of the State.
The Belmarsh inmates are not weapons of mass destruction any more than was Saddam Hussein. Mr Blair’s claim on Monday that they could not be brought to trial because to do so “could endanger Britain” is absurd. A threat to Britons is not a threat to Britain. Nor should such scaremongering become the standard justification for continuing indefinitely with the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act. As Lord Hoffmann said, the menace to Britain’s collective liberty comes “not from terrorism but from laws such as these”.
It is indeed remarkable how profoundly Blair’s government is Bush’s ally in the “War on Terror,” in every awful, anti-liberty sense of the term. And I fully expect that a strong push for identity cards will occur in the United States in the next year or two. The arguments will be exactly the same as those offered in support of such an atrocity in Britain, so we may consider this an unutterably depressing preview of coming attractions.
I have made this point numerous times before, but it bears repeating. As Lord Hoffmann’s statement correctly conveys, we are gravely mistaken to focus all our energies on external terrorist enemies when the most serious fundamental and long-term threat to the continuation of liberty, both in Britain and the United States, lies in the increasingly repressive government measures allegedly being employed to fight those enemies. If we finally destroy liberty from within, it will make no difference at all how serious any other threat might have been.
And that is the most crucial fact of contemporary political life to keep in mind for the New Year.
