[BITList] Fwd: [From: Mike Feltham] Freedom is taking a battering under kneejerk New Labour

[Michael Feltham]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "guardian.co.uk" <noreply at guardian.co.uk>
Date: 10 December 2008 23:39:39 GMT
Subject: [From: Mike Feltham] Freedom is taking a battering under  
kneejerk New Labour

Mike Feltham spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you  
should see it.

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site,  
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/10/comment-clegg-liberties-freedom-labour

Freedom is taking a battering under kneejerk New Labour
Jack Straw's attack on the Human Rights Act is sly populism of the  
worst kind, and in keeping with his party's statist tradition
Nick Clegg
Wednesday December 10 2008
The Guardian


Today is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human  
Rights. The declaration rests on a simple, radical insight: human  
rights are indivisible and universal - or they are nothing at all. So  
Jack Straw's headline-grabbing declaration that Britain's Human Rights  
Act has become a "villain's charter", and must be "rebalanced", should  
be seen for what it is: a rejection of the simple notion that all of  
us, no matter how rich or poor, how powerful or weak, possess certain  
inalienable rights.

Of course, these rights do not entitle anyone to break the law. In a  
mealy-mouthed sop to the opponents of the Human Rights Act, Straw has  
declared that our human rights should be qualified by new  
"responsibilities" to obey the law and be loyal to the country. But no  
one has ever claimed that human rights should absolve anyone of their  
"responsibilities".

The justice secretary is picking a meaningless fight to generate a  
favourable headline, while conning opponents of the Human Rights Act  
into believing that he's saying something of greater significance. In  
short, it's sly populism of the worst kind.

Then again, government populism is all the rage these days. The new  
immigration minister claims that asylum seekers should be blamed for  
"untold human misery and division within our communities". Labour and  
Conservative politicians are locked, yet again, in a bidding war to  
sound the most unforgiving on immigration and welfare dependency.

What's happening? Why the sudden retread politics of the early Blair  
years - outflanking the right at all costs?

My guess is that this is the ugly side of recession politics. Steep  
recessions provoke deep fears among communities, who feel more  
insecure than ever. These fears readily topple into demands for  
protectionism, and a vilification of immigrants, foreigners, and of a  
remote legal system that often seems out of touch with the anguish of  
overstretched families and communities. No doubt Labour and  
Conservative party focus groups have picked this up.

I agree that politicians must "do something". If the political class  
is inert in the face of a wave of public anxiety, extremism and  
despair will surely follow. What people now need is more money through  
fair tax cuts, lower heating bills for struggling families, and better  
social housing for the thousands of people without a permanent roof   
over their heads. Money, heating and housing - these are the urgent  
needs of families in trouble.

However, doing something should not mean saying anything. Political  
leadership is about restraint as well as activism. It is just as much  
about denying the ugly side of prejudice, the visceral reflex to find  
someone to blame, as it is about taking new government measures.

In 1951 we were the first country to ratify the European Convention on  
Human Rights. British lawyers were leading authors of the convention.  
It was a natural expression of Britain's moral self-confidence in the  
postwar years, an assertion of the universal liberal values that had  
thwarted the threat of fascism and tyranny in Europe. Above all, it  
was a statement of the inalienable rights we all enjoy, to be free  
from unjustified state intrusion and abuse. A continent that had been  
drenched in the blood of militant collectivism had rediscovered the  
simple, liberal belief in the rights of individual citizens to a life  
unmolested by arbitrary government abuse.

This was, in many ways, the triumph of a particularly British view of  
the sovereignty of the individual. It is a tradition that New Labour's  
statism has always regarded with deep suspicion. That is why freedom  
in the UK has taken a battering under New Labour: 3,600 new criminal  
offences since 1997; overflowing prisons; peaceful protest and dissent  
criminalised; and the ever expanding apparatus of a vast new  
surveillance state. All this flows from an impulse that says  
individual freedoms can be circumscribed by the whim of the state, no  
questions asked.

The same impulse is leading this government to introduce a two-tier  
rights regime: ID cards for foreigners first; migrants exploited by  
unscrupulous employers as the government sits idly by; asylum seekers  
left hanging around for years by the incompetence of the Home Office,  
driven into the hidden economy when they could work and pay taxes to  
support themselves rather than depend on taxpayers for meagre  
handouts; Zimbabwean refugees holed up in overcrowded detention  
centres because the government retains the absurd pretence that they  
should eventually be deported to Mugabe's barbarism.

Expensive, stupid and inhumane. No wonder Britain's moral leadership  
in the world is so threadbare.

At a time of acute national economic crisis, kneejerk populism from  
the government will inflame a culture of blame and vilification,  
fragmenting communities exactly when people need to hang together.  
Diversity and tolerance are easy to defend in the good times. The real  
test for political leaders is whether they're prepared to defend them  
in bad times too.

? Nick Clegg is leader of the Liberal  Democrats cleggn at parliament.uk

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