Gone Native?

I know you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but fine words butter no parsnips…

I’ve always admired Shami Chakrabarti, but it can’t just be me who’s noticed how soft the Liberty director seems to have become towards the Metropolitan police and other anti-terror types recently.

Although she’s never been a firebrand,

Chakrabarti takes pride in having converted Liberty from a “Labour front” into a respected, politically independent organisation that is equally critical of government and opposition. She is now also a governor of both the British Film Institute and the London School of Economics.

Recently she’s become positively emollient, honey and fine words, and lots of the best butter too.

Take this morning’s discussion on the Today programme with a senior Metropolitan Police officer and Blue Peter’s Olympic torch carrier Konnie Huq about yesterday’s anti-China demonstrations for example; Chakrabarti positively glowed with effusive praise for the Met and the wonderful job they do.

Although she did bring up the general point that the police’s job yesterday was to ensure public safety generally, not play security detail for the Chinese government, Chakrabarti seemed unwilling to even discuss larger issues about the police’s direct silencing of dissent at the protests, though she had much to say for the Met’s skill at ‘facilitating demonstrations’. Yes, the Met are successful, at least in the sense of coralling crowds of us plebs safely:

12.30pm Bloomsbury Square

Thousands of protesters are corraled into a “protest area” penned by security fences. One woman says she is told to place her banners in plastic bags after police judged them to be inflammatory. The torch and its security staff retrace their steps and climb on to a bus to be driven 200 metres to get past protesters, before re-emerging in front of crowds waving Chinese flags.

Safety is being increasingly defined in political terms by officers on the ground. Yesterday police ordered pro-Tibet protestors to remove anti-China t-shirts; arbitrarily labelled groups of people as ‘protestors’ or ‘celebrants’ and restricted them accordingly; and allowed a team of China’s security goons to physically intimidate and bully protestors, participants and runners alike, even to the point of skirmishing with Met officers themselves.

Chakrabarti was asked by the presenter whether banning t-shirts and banners like this was acceptable. Surely the director of an organisation dedicated to upholding civil liberties and the right to dissent would start from the premise that it wasn’t?

But no – instead she said that it depended on the T-shirt and its tendency to incite violence – in effect agreeing that yes, the silencing of dissent by police officers is acceptable.

The people who make the judgement whether a slogan or image on a t-shirt has a tendency to incite violence – which certainly seems like a political decision to me – are the police, and it’s fine and dandy with Liberty now for if the Met police the slogans on T-shirts according to their personal political perceptions. Shami just said so.

As I said earlier I was already wondering whether Chakrabarti (who was formerly a Home Office lawyer) had finally succumbed to the lure of the media spotlight – always a danger for young, photogenic female lobbyists – and the discreet charm of cosy Establishmentism. Has she finally reverted to Westminster type?

I was and still am prepared to be convinced otherwise, despite her acceptance of a CBE, but one sentence of hers this morning tends to demolish any lingering hope I might have had of her ever truly standing up to the police or government.

When the director of the nation’s foremost civil liberties pressure group pointedly refers to senior policemen in public as “My colleague” they’ve definitely gone native.

Much as I admire her let’s face it, despite seemingly being everywhere in the media and picking up a gong and honorary doctorates galore, Chakrabarti hasn’t had an enormous amount of actual success in opposing New Labour’s draconian laws, or against rendition or torture or the repeal of habeas corpus, has she?

Yes, she’s telegenic and articulate; yes, she’s scarily clever and very committed; and yes, she’s very nice and a role model for other young women. But the fact that she is so popular with the public and Establishment alike should tell us something; that, rather than a campaigning non-partisan political pressure group, Liberty is in danger of becoming the Shami Show.

A civil liberties pressure group should be a thorn in the side of the Establishment, not a cosy colleague: courtesy is one thing, capitulation is another. Civil liberties are about more than the cult of personality. Maybe it’s time for a change.