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The Assault on Liberty
Dominic Raab
What Went Wrong with Rights
For Erika
Table of Contents
PART I WHERE DID RIGHTS COME FROM?
3 Short-circuiting the Justice System
PART III THE WRONG KIND OF RIGHT
7 The Next Chapter of British Liberty
Liberty matters. That statement may seem self-evident, but the freedom under the law that we have historically enjoyed in Britain is more fundamental to the entire nature of our society than many realize.
Freedom is a pervasive virtue, and it has a material impact on many aspects of our national history. Freedom of speech has encouraged freedom of thought, and that is the bedrock of our extraordinary creativity over the centuries – whether it is in literature, or science, or political philosophy for that matter. In conjunction with the freedom of action available to British citizens, buttressed by property rights, it engendered the industrial revolution and made us one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.
As a rich and powerful nation, our political ideas – foremost amongst them freedom under the law – have been disproportionately disseminated around the world. Those countries that embraced those ideas – from America to Australia to India – are amongst the most successful and civilized nations both today and in the future.
So it is a particular tragedy that we in Britain are slowly abandoning the very characteristics that have made us and others so successful and civilized. It is also ironic that we are doing so often in response to a threat from people that have no respect for those values – who despise tolerance, liberty, and diversity.
The last decade has witnessed an accelerating erosion of liberty on many fronts, all carefully documented in this timely book. The attack on the fundamental liberties, such as habeas corpus, is at the front of the public mind because of the pitched parliamentary battles on ninety days and more recently forty-two days detention without charge.
But these assaults are only the most visible part of the attack. Equally pernicious are the massive intrusions on our privacy with the growth of the huge government databases and the identity card register, the pernicious growth of a surveillance state with cameras seemingly on every corner, the creation of a ‘suspect society’ with the recording of the DNA of a vast number of innocent people, all in conjunction with the undermining of the institutional structures that have historically protected us from excessive state power, most notably jury trials.
Each and every one of these actions has a sensible idea at the core, but one which has been massively overused to the point where it ceases to be a challenge to the guilty and becomes a threat to the innocent.
Why does this happen? What has happened in government to create this soft tyranny in Britain?
Is it that our New Labour masters have decided to covertly put in place the pieces of a dictator state? Hardly, although one or two of their Home Secretaries may have had unhealthy instincts in that direction. Most British politicians are broadly altruistic, and would be horrified to be seen to be the instruments of such action.
No, the problem is more systemic than that, and as a result this is a book that should be read as a cautionary warning by would-be ministers of any political colour, and by those who want to keep an eye on them, be they elector or commentator.
The first of the culprits is the concept of the ‘continuous campaign’. This idea, imported from Bill Clinton’s America, is that political parties should not stop campaigning once they are elected, but should carry on as though they are still in mid election whilst they are in government. Although this sounds mundane, it is at odds with the real behaviour of most British governments down the decades. Most of them just thought about the campaign in the last year before an election, and up until then just ran the country in the interests of the electorate.
The danger of the continuous campaign is that it encourages ministers to use the apparatus of the state to promote the cause of one party or even one minister. The first effect of this is to make everything much more short term. Favourable headlines take the place of favourable outcomes as primary objectives to be achieved. This trend is reinforced by the twenty-four-hour media’s hunger for news.
Add this to a set of policy problems that are relatively intractable, such as Islamist terrorism, or persistent rising crime, and the tendency is to go for more and more tough and dramatic sounding headlines – and therefore for ever more draconian policies. This tendency is reinforced when politicians sell a simplistic analysis of the problem to a worried public. It is reinforced even more when the politicians overdramatize the risks.
So we end up with vast numbers of security cameras that are largely useless for crime prevention or detection, and for which there are precious