Chris Street comments are in bright green;
highlights in yellow blockquotes.
Liberty and the state: A 'my-rights' culture must not overshadow the needs of those most urgently deserving of the protection of the state
Monday was Human Rights day and all this week the Guardian comment pages and Comment is free online have carried articles about Labour's human rights record. Some stories burn into the memory, such as Natasha Walter writing about 13-year-old Meltem Avcil, the Turkish Kurdish girl snatched from her school after living in the UK for six years, to be locked up as a failed asylum seeker.
Jack Straw, the justice secretary, wrote a robust defence of the party's record, rightly proud of some civil liberties gains. Labour's Human Rights Act is under constant attack from the right, who threaten to repeal it. The Freedom of Information Act shifted the terms of engagement between citizen and state. Ending Section 28 was a milestone: no future government will dare pass homophobic laws. Anti-discrimination laws were tightened, Westminster power was devolved, police are independently investigated - all these are welcome freedoms.
Henry Porter, doyen defender of the individual against Big Brother state, retaliated with a list of Labour's infractions of personal liberties. This, too, makes convincing reading: start with locking up suspects without trial for 28 days - let alone extending it to 42 days, when even the director of public prosecutions sees no reason why. Porter lists ending the right to silence in court and permitting bailiffs to break into homes. He adds Labour's mad restrictions on the right to protest, with spectacular own-goal anti-terror laws that had Walter Wolfgang ejected from the Labour conference and Maya Anne Evans arrested for reading out the names of those killed in Iraq.
But Porter's list is contentious. For instance, anti-discrimination laws on grounds of disability, religion and sexual orientation appear both in Straw's list of freedoms and in Porter's list of infringements. As both list the new laws against discrimination on grounds of disability, religion or sexual orientation, here is the clash of the right to free speech with the right not to be abused. From here on, we plunge into thickets of conflict, between individual rights and the duties of the state to all. One citizen's protection easily becomes another citizen's infringement.
What really matters? There are blurred lines between security for all and freedom for each, with only a shifting balance of probabilities. My argument with Jack Straw is against the number of despotic gestures made purely to appease public opinion. First 28 days, now 42 days' detention without trial is incomprehensible when viewed through the lens of recent history. The Northern Ireland conflict killed 3,524 people: the IRA almost succeeded in assassinating the prime minister and the entire British cabinet, and did kill MPs and a member of the royal family. So is the threat worse now? Fifty-two were killed by Islamist terror in the London attacks of July 2005, and worse may be to come. But have we lost that sang-froid we used to boast of, now abandoning civil liberties for what may be no greater threat?
On the other side, my argument with Henry Porter concerns his paranoia about the state and the disproportion of his indignation over things of minor importance. Given the sheer volume of human suffering and social injustice all around us, he encourages undue obsession with CCTV, the DNA database, ID cards, the children's database, or indeed the silly anti-protest laws that make rather happy (Turner prize-winning) martyrs out of mild protesters.
On the worst estates, CCTV helps clear out drug dealers. DNA data uncovers wrongful convictions. The children's database could prevent Victoria Climbié horrors, tracking children at risk when they are moved. The main danger of ID cards is that they will be an expensive failure (see Ben Goldacre's devastating Bad Science column on biometrics).
The Porter view has become fashionable because it allows the middle classes to pretend to be victims, too. But it is decadence for mainly privileged people to obsess over imaginary Big Brother attacks on themselves, when others all around them are suffering badly from neglect by the state - or sometimes from real aggression by government. Indignation is precious, not to be squandered on illusory threats, but saved for real injustices.
Let's list some of the worst things that happen people in Britain - things rather worse than being filmed by a CCTV camera no one will bother to check unless you are mugged. Worst is the twilight life of maybe a million illegal immigrants exploited in unregulated jobs or enslaved in the sex trade. Failed asylum seekers who can't return are deliberately starved with nothing but a £35 voucher to be cashed in one shop, with no change, never mind the price of a bus fare. Meltem Avcil is just one girl caught in periodic sweeps, which at the present rate of removal would take 25 years and £4.5bn to clear the backlog. For real suffering, the treatment of these migrants beats all else - and it's time for a controlled amnesty after, say, four years. But here is a clash between the citizens' right to control the borders that define their citizenship versus the human rights of the helpless and destitute living here anyway.
How do you rank the liberties of other extreme sufferers? The frail and lonely are badly neglected with ever less care as councils tighten their criteria. Young children all alone caring for sick parents have their childhood and their future destroyed. Prison suicides, and now prisoners shamefully locked in for 23 hours a day. Abused children suffer silently in direct proportion to social workers' overburdened caseloads. Thousands dying slowly in agony are denied by parliament the right to go at a time of their choosing. Evidence recently from the Sutton Trust report yet again shows that birth is destiny: poor children stand virtually no chance of escaping poor lives. Meanwhile, exhausted families of disabled children and adolescents struggle to get even the most basic help. Add here all those whose acute suffering can only be alleviated by a kindlier, more generous state. For them a better funded "nanny state" is the solution, not the threat.
But the Porter view turns the state into public enemy number one. That is the traditional rightwing view, but many on the left are buying into this creed of individualism against the collective. The left can't resist also being victims: oh, to be arrested for a cause! Labour has played into their hands with cavalier curtailments of civil liberties for illusory political gains. But the left should beware the old rightwing wolf dressed in civil liberties sheep's clothing that pursues individual freedoms for the powerful at the expense of collective freedoms for all.
This is the same mindset that sees taxes as an infringement of liberty and an Englishmen's property as his inalienable untaxed castle to hand down, untaxed, to his children. It is the mindset in which the right to choose "personalised" services trumps everyone else's fair chance for best schools and hospitals. Liberty and equality will always rub along together awkwardly. But social democrats should guard against the individualistic my-rights culture of our times that simply ignores the rights of those whose needs are most urgent, in favour of often relatively frivolous paranoia about an overmighty state.
For more blogs in the Liberty and the state series, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment