Of course history catches up. Now the papers are full of stories of lost personal details, and we see everything from bank account details to soldiers’ lives put at risk. We see stories of so-called security cameras used to spy on young women, or on a more mundane level used to maximize council revenues rather than minimize personal risks.
We can be sure that there will be much more to come. The government has begun to make a habit of trying to short circuit legal process, by curbing jury trials, cutting back the powers of magistrates courts, and replacing some court appearances with summary justice in the form of fines and cautions. The effect will make the figures for clear up of crime look good, but it will achieve the interesting double of under-punishing the guilty whilst risking destroying an innocent person’s life with a miscarriage of justice. This, and some of the other effects of the erosion of our freedoms and protection under the law, will take years to surface in the public mind. But surface it will, and when it does the British people will not be impressed.
The other assault on our freedoms comes from a complex nexus of actions whose aim, paradoxically, is to improve our rights. The growth of a rights culture, with an inflation of what fundamental rights really are, in conjunction with well-intentioned but flawed approaches like some of the decisions of the Strasbourg Court and some of the British courts under the Human Rights Act, has led to a peculiar dilution of British freedoms and a signal failure to defend some of those freedoms when they came under serious threat.
The irony here is that the vested interests that defend these flawed institutions are often those that fight a sterling battle in defence of our freedoms in other contexts. The argument is therefore harder to make, but no less important for all that.
Dominic Raab has been at the middle of the battle to defend our freedoms from these many different threats, and also brings an understanding of the international dimension to the table. He is uniquely placed to analyse the problems and propose thoughtful solutions in this book. His first-class forensic analysis is likely to provoke some strong responses, but the cause of freedom is never defended without some discomfort.
Rt Hon. David Davis MP, November 2008
A visitor to Britain arriving on International Human Rights Day might be bemused to read the following newspaper headline: ‘The liberties stripped from the weak today could be lost to us all tomorrow’. He will be positively perplexed if he compares it to another just a few weeks earlier: ‘Human rights is merely a sweetener for rapists, murderers and violent criminals’.
This is not an isolated example of the conflicting views on ‘human rights’ in Britain today.
On the one hand, we now regularly hear that the government is seizing the ancient birthright of Britons, tearing up freedoms nurtured since the thirteenth century and ushering in a dark new chapter in British history. Over the last twelve years, the police have clamped down on freedom of speech, restricted public demonstrations and stifled peaceful protests – using an array of new powers bestowed by a blizzard of legislation, hastily enacted by Parliament on the flimsy pretext of national security. Wave upon wave of antiterrorism measures have been introduced by an increasingly authoritarian government, including proposals to extend police detention without charge that even the former head of MI5 describes as draconian. Wide new surveillance powers allow half a million private conversations between British citizens to be bugged each year by snooping spooks, including hundreds of local authorities.
Meanwhile, our traditional pillars of justice are also crumbling under the immense strain of law enforcement short cuts taken in the name of fighting crime. Basic safeguards put in place to protect the innocent have been wrenched from our justice system by politicians desperate for tabloid headlines: the presumption of innocence reversed, the burden of proof watered down, our courts sidelined and the right to trial by jury subject to sustained, and ongoing, assault.
The creeping powers of the state at every level – from the intelligence agencies through to quangos and councils – are creating a surveillance society, with neighbourhood spies even checking our rubbish and following innocent children home from school to confirm that they qualify for the local catchment area. The Home Office’s imminent national identity register will store masses of sensitive personal details, for each and every British citizen, on a vulnerable central government database. Careless and unaccountable civil servants will then liberally share our private information around the disparate, sprawling and utterly unreliable arms of government – as likely to lose or abuse as protect our personal data.
To cap it all, Britain, the cradle of liberal democracy, now has the unsavoury honour of topping a dubious array of international league tables – including boasting the largest DNA database and the most CCTV cameras in the world.
On the other hand, our visitor may draw little sense of public order or security, as might be expected from a government with such a heavy-handed reputation. On a daily basis, we read about the steady stream of human rights rulings undermining law enforcement, criminal justice and national security. Common sense turned on its head – warped by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and magnified by Labour’s feckless Human Rights Act – allows human rights to be wielded to protect and compensate serious criminals rather than their victims. Police now invoke the human rights of fugitive killers, to protect their privacy rather than alert the law-abiding public. The Prison Service compensates drug-addicted prisoners for the hardship of going clean, and gives jailed criminals access to fertility treatment. Airline hijackers successfully claim their ‘rights’ to fend off deportation, illegal immigrants sue the immigration service for holding them in detention and bogus asylum seekers claim access to state benefits. Children show off their novel rights like new toys, challenging authority at every level – including police officers in the street, teachers in the classroom and even their parents at home.
Add in, for good measure, the reams of new government regulation that have spawned a health and safety culture – preventing the police from rescuing a child drowning in a pond, but prosecuting them for mistakes made during the heat of a counter-terrorism operation – and the prevailing sense of confusion is complete.
The conventional explanation is that these are two mutually hostile positions, set amidst a polarized debate that pits a liberal elite against a populist press. But what if, far from antagonistic, there is a kernel of truth, and some measure of substance, to support both sides in this debate?
The British idea of liberty, developed over eight hundred years, is now caught between conflicting tides, cast adrift from its natural moorings. It has been both corroded and conflated. It has been corroded by the government’s direct assault on our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence and freedom from arbitrary police detention. British liberty was hard won over centuries – millions died in the struggle, revolts and wars that secured and then defended those freedoms. Yet, since 1997, in a vain effort to prove itself tough on crime and counter-terrorism, historically weak flanks for the Labour Party, the government has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences. As the power of the state has grown, so has the scope for its abuse, whether by police officers operating under ever-increasing pressure, invisible civil servants concealed within grey bureaucracies or over-zealous council officials relishing their windfall of extended authority over local residents. These incremental extensions in the reach and authority of government, and the mounting abuse of power by its agents and officials, have led to a tectonic shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen. As our liberal democracy becomes less liberal, the government is inflicting lasting damage on the very bedrock of what it means to be British – undermining the fundamental freedoms we enjoy as citizens, our sense of fair play as a society and the checks and