Tag: New Labour

Surely this is satire? Charles Clarke on liberty and security…

A comment piece allegedly by the former UK Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has been posted on The Guardian newspaper’s site. I say ‘allegedly’ because it is hard to believe that a man in his position could write something to monumentally lacking in self-awareness or with less understanding of the issues he is discussing. He talks of a fourth Labour term (which is in itself increasingly a fantasy in which few, even in the Labour Party, believe) in which liberty and security are unified, “to consolidate the new constitutional relationships, establish consensus about the powers of the police and security services and address issues relating to identity”! He talks of CCTV and the DNA database as great advances, with no mention of the slamming of the operation of this database by the European Court of Human Rights and the massive climb-down by the government, or that fact that research commissioned by his own former Home Office Research Department shows that CCTV has little effect on crime. He claims that there is “an understandable public demand for more databases”; this will come as news to most people.He even claims that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) has been a success, ignoring the critical views of the regulators and the last Home Secretary’s promise to review legislation that has been used for all kinds of intrusive and inappropriate surveillance activities by local authorities.

Of course he is right that Labour deserves credit for establishing the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and for unifying the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Yet these were all things that were done (or planned) in Labour’s first term and there has been little to celebrate in terms of liberty and security in Labour’s two terms since then, when even the ICO emerged, under former commissioner Richard Thomas, as one of the most trenchant critics of Labour’s activities.

But then right near the end, he suddenly switches to an entirely different line arguing that “The government needs to establish a coherent data regime that places the individual at the centre, with the practical right to see the data held on them and correct it if necessary. They should also be able to see who made any changes to data that is stored (and when the changes were made), and to give permission for the sharing of any data which is held”. The second sentence however misses the point of what the first implies (which in itself suggests that the regime Labour has created is incoherent). A data regime which places the individual at the centre would start not from permissions for sharing, but by asking what data needs to be stored, why, how and by whom. It would be based not a presumption of permission to share but on a request for such sharing with full disclosure of the purposes – that is the meaning of ‘transparency’, a word he uses in the next sentence, but missing from all of this are the words ‘consent’ and ‘accountability’. They are rather too important to be absent by chance.

And of course there is no mention at all of the role Labour has played in the EU and in other international fora, in spreading illiberal security ideas across national borders. The acceptance by the UK of things like the Prum Treaty and the Stockholm program have received almost no comment from British politicians on any part of the political spectrum (except in a general context of anti-EU nationalism, which misses the important issues involved).

All in all, if this is real, which I still can hardly believe, this is an astonishingly brazen and aggressively arrogant piece. It says everything about why, in terms of liberty and security, Labour have already lost the argument and why the country will hand over power at the next election to a bunch of upper-class twits with no coherent policies – in others words, anyone in preference to a party that once claimed that ‘things can only get better’ but has long since stopped even pretending that this is the case…

Battle lines being drawn in UK surveillance debate

there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK…

securitystrategybannerThe UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the influential think-tank that was behind the New Labour project, has released a report on intelligence and national security that argues that privacy and human rights will have to take second place in the War on Terror. The report, National Security Strategy, Implications for the UK Intelligence Community, is written by former civil service security and intelligence coordinator, David Omand, is part of the IPPR’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, whose rather unimpressive launch event I attended last year.

The Guardian newspaper’s story on this is trying to build this up into an ‘end of privacy’ / ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ story and Omand certainly comes down firmly on the side of security over liberty. He recognises that his arguments are contrary to ours and go “against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society.” But he is not actually making a total ‘by any means necessary’ argument. Even the Guardian’s own report quotes his rather qualified statement that “in some respects [new intelligence methods] may have to be at the expense of some aspects of privacy rights.”

The report is simply not as strong or even as interesting as The Guardian‘s story suggests. Most of it is simply a description of how intelligence works (and not even a very comprehensive or insightful one at that). Much, as we predicted in our recent book (see My Publications), it tries to set the creation of ‘resilience’ as a key rationale for reducing civil liberties, as if resilience in itself was a good thing that needed no justification when in fact it is being used as a bland container for all sorts of questionable policies – from the use of torture and imprisonment without trial to the everyday use of intrusive high-tech surveillance. The references to the political controversies over surveillance are rather cursory and don’t really say much other than that people are worried and really they shouldn’t be. These are just the usual ‘trust us, we know what we are doing’ and ‘these are exceptional circumstances’ arguments that we have heard many times before, and they are as weak and old-fashioned coming from Omand as from anyone else.

It is worth noting that there appears to be a gathering of forces and a drawing of battle lines amongst the ‘big beasts’ of security policy in the UK. I reported yesterday on David Blunkett’s conversion to the cause of limiting surveillance society, and a few days ago, Stella Rimington, the former Head of the Security Service, MI5, condemned the current government’s approach to liberty and security in even stronger terms, arguing that the approach that Omand typifies would lead to ‘a police state’.

Surveillance has finally become an issue on which it is becoming less possible to be unengaged, apathetic or even neutral. That in itself is a good thing, however it does not guarantee a good outcome even if more major public figures suddenly discover their enthusiasm for liberty once they leave office. However, I hope this reflects a split which is growing within the current government too – normally when retired politicians and civil servants speak out, they are conscious of the way in which they speak on behalf of friends and colleagues who feel they cannot be so candid.