The Clipboard: On the road to a totalitarian state

From an article¹:

This proposal - together with a sustained attack on juries, a blunted Freedom of Information Bill, the proposed abolition of appeals for some asylum seekers and even the removal of their right to judicial review - is a dangerous milestone on the road to a totalitarian state. New Labour, which promoted human rights so vigorously in Opposition, has shown itself willing to cast aside those proud principles now it is in power. (link)

Civil libertarians in Britain have a lot to worry about too, it seems.

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Complete text of the article, On the road to a totalitarian state, by Anthony Scrivener

The big news of the week has been the Prime Minister's denial that he was becoming more royal and trying to muscle in on the funeral of the Queen Mother. It was not as if he was demanding his own cassock or the right to nominate relatives for decent accommodation at the Royal Palace at a bargain rent. It was all about where he should greet the coffin. I am sure that this earth-shattering issue justifies the time and expense in producing a 29-page dossier which should make an excellent Christmas present.
This concentration on a matter of such utter triviality demonstrates how out of touch with reality the administration and some parts of the media have become. There are in fact some earth-shattering constitutional issues around, about which the Government has issued no dossier at all.

While the debate goes on as to where the Prime Minister should stand at royal funerals, Big Brother is being quietly ushered in, not by the dreaded Conservative Party responsible for a whole raft of other illiberal measures including the Investigation of Communications Act 1985, but by New Labour, the self-styled party of human rights. Snooping is to become official. Soon we shall all be able to sleep easier in our beds in the knowledge that seven Government departments, including Transport, Work and Pensions and Health, all local authorities, the Postal Services Commissions, the Office of Fair Trading, the Environmental Agency, the Financial Services Authority, the Health and Safety Executive, to name just a few, as well as the police, will be able to demand communication data on any one of us from telephone companies, internet service providers and postal officers.

All of these public bodies and many more will be able to obtain, simply on demand and without a court order, details of any phone call we have made or received, the source and destination of any of our emails, the identity of all websites visited and - best of all - all mobile phone location data which will reveal our whereabouts at any given time within a few hundred metres.

We shall have attained a unique position in the free world - not a police state but a state whose citizens are constantly monitored by public officials without any control by the courts. Before leaders of councils begin to laugh with glee at the possibility of digging up the dirt on the journalist who gives them such a hard time, or perhaps their political opponents, they should bear in mind that the Town Hall Big Brother will know where they were on that Saturday night, too. If you want just to have the privacy you enjoy now, then it is back to the carrier pigeon although, no doubt, New Labour will allow public officials to shoot them down humanely. No wonder John Wadham at Liberty has said 'it is practically every public servant who will be able to play the game'.

The Government was forced into enacting legislation covering such covert investigations as phone tapping under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights. There was no right to privacy under the common law, but in 1984 that court declared that phone tapping was a breach of Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention because the law was not sufficiently clear 'to provide an adequate indication as to the circumstances in which and the conditions on which public authorities are empowered' to obtain evidence by covert means. At the time there was only a Home Office circular governing such matters and the Convention was not part of our law.

By 1996 some fragmentary statutory provisions had been stitched together but in that year in a case involving phone tapping, Lord Nolan said 'the lack of a statutory system regulating the use of surveillance devices by the police seems astonishing'.

The crisis came when in 1998 we adopted the European Convention and Article 8 became part of our law. A clear statutory scheme was necessary for covert surveillance and along came the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. We were told this Act would be a bastion for freedom and that access to communications data would be confined to anti-terrorist investigations. All of this was pie in the sky. Next Tuesday, Parliament will debate a draft order to be made under this Act which will establish public officials as national monitors. The argument is that democracy is under attack so we should suspend democracy to protect it. After all the Americans, by their canny use of a declaration of war, not against a country but against a group, have managed to dodge the rule of law.

If China announced the introduction of such measures in Hong Kong we would be marching on their embassy with banners. Here, we have forgotten the principles on which freedom has been built and we shall do nothing. We shall concentrate instead on where the Prime Minister should stand in relation to a royal coffin. Those concerned with individual freedom will have to rely in Parliament on the Lib Dems and a handful of old Labour.

This proposal - together with a sustained attack on juries, a blunted Freedom of Information Bill, the proposed abolition of appeals for some asylum seekers and even the removal of their right to judicial review - is a dangerous milestone on the road to a totalitarian state. New Labour, which promoted human rights so vigorously in Opposition, has shown itself willing to cast aside those proud principles now it is in power. It is a particularly remarkable change for two members of the Government - Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, both former senior officials of Liberty.

reference=http://www.observer.co.uk/libertywatch/story/0,1373,738605,00.html