Policing

You can have the blue one or the red one. Yellow is not an option.

I have to admit that I quite admired the Conservatives’ David Davis for his principled stand on the erosion of civil liberties; even if it was somewhat hypocritical, given his support for 28 day detention, at least he had the gumption to stand up, even if in the end the whole effort proved a damp squib. Davis tapped into an enormous wellspring of public unease and anger over the UK’s gradual transmogrification into a petty police state.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair’s laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. “What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming,” he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair’s Labour Party: “If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit – in some cases eradicate – habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up.”

The Tories, particularly the one-nation faction, had in Davis a prime opportunity to ride a wave of public support into power, if only they could have overcome their natural authoritarian flog ’em and jail ’em tendencies and their complicity with the prisons industry and the police. But of course they couldn’t and can’t and to think they ever would is fantasy. Tory policy is what it always is, in favour of the status quo, of increased police powers and of the protection of property before people.

This is made crystal clear in today’s announcement on police surveiilance from Dominic Grieve, Davis’ replacement as Shadow Foreign Secretary :

Police would be given greater powers to conduct surveillance operations on people suspected of crimes such as burglary and vehicle theft under plans the Conservative Party will announce today.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, will pledge to amend the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act so that police no longer need to secure authorisation to conduct surveillance on those suspected of non-terrorist offences.

The changes would mean that the police would automatically be able to:

· Use covert video or listening devices in premises or vehicles.

· Watch premises to identify or arrest suspects.

· Conduct visual surveillance of public locations.

· Patrol, in uniform or plain clothes.

· Use thermal imaging and X-ray technology.

· Conduct surveillance using visible CCTV cameras.

In his statement, Grieve will say it is time to amend the rules governing surveillance because they place a “disproportionate burden” on police trying to investigate non-terrorist crimes. A review by the Association of Chief Police Officers of the act, which is designed to ensure that the invasion into people’s privacy is in proportion to the crime, found that police often spend hours filling out forms for relatively minor surveillance operations. The review found that it takes an average of five hours to complete the forms for what is known as directed surveillance authorisation.

So just to get this straight: that nice Mr Cameron, so relaxed and liberal – hug a hoodie! – is proposing to allow the police to spy on anyone they like, whenever and however they like, on their own say-so, for any reason, no permission required. Even Blair didn’t try that.

Davis has clearly lost his internal campaign to make the Conservative party the party of civil liberties (at least for the purposes of winning elections) though there was never much doubt he would lose, despite so much popular support. The rump of the tory party is as pro-lawnorder and a firm fist as ever. Just read some of the comments on Conservative blogs, for example, to get the flavour of party opinion. If commenters had their way the police would be given the power to do anything they like to thwart those nasty crims and moslems – because of course those nice handsomne police officers would never use it against nice people like them. Nothing to hide nothing to fear, etc. etc. Curfews for chavs? Brilliant. Moslems to be electronically tagged? A little light torture? Ideal. More cameras, more tasers, more ASBOs, more jails – for ‘them’, not us.

Cameron knows this about his party and knows he must appease both them and the arms dealers, hedge funds and others with business interests in penal policy who support his party financially. It’s clear that to do so he plans to out-draconian one of the most draconian governments in British history.

If anyone ever expected anything else from the Tories, then they’re fools who should read some recent history. Google ‘Orgreave Colliery’ or ‘Poll Tax riot‘ or ‘Battle of The Beanfield‘ or ‘Criminal Justice Act 1994‘. and see the kind of people the Conservatives were and still are:

MI5 ran an agent to monitor the activities of Dave Nellist, the Labour MP and supporter of the far left Militant group in the 1980s. It asked the West Midlands police special branch to find an agent to infiltrate the Labour party in Coventry and cultivate Mr Nellist, then MP for the city’s south east constituency.

The police special branch also ran a spy in the inner circle of the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill. Given the close relationship between the special branch and MI5, there is no doubt the spy’s information was passed to MI5.

The agent, codenamed Silver Fox, provided valuable information about the tactics of the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers and helped to break the 1984-85 miners’ strike, according to former special branch officers.

The disclosures are made in the second programme in BBC2’s True Spies series, to be broadcast on Sunday. It also includes an interview with David Hart, a millionaire who was Margaret Thatcher’s unofficial adviser. He says he employed former SAS soldiers to protect the families of working miners during the strike.

You’d think Labour would remember those days. You’d think they’d remember when Labour party members and trade unionists were routinely spied upon, followed, falsely accused and even blacklisted from certain professions and jobs. From Labour’s own Employment Relations Bill in 1999:

The blacklisting of trade union activists was a major issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The activities of the Economic League came in for a good deal of criticism. The League provided member companies with a system for checking potential recruits “to see whether they are known to the League as active members or supporters of one of the revolutionary groups of the far Right or far Left”.It was alleged that the League maintained a card index of names obtained from sources such as press articles about demonstrations or industrial action. Many of these people would have been active trade
unionists.

But no, New Labour buried their memories with their principles. That’s what’s always enraged me most about New Labour’s wrong-headed and profoundly illiberal promulgation of so many badly drafted, illogical and tyrannical laws – that not one minister has ever realised that what they were doing was handing the weapons to the opposition to use against them.

The profound stupidity of this policy, if we can dignify such a collection of cowardly panic measures as coherent policy, proves their complete unfitness to govern, even leaving aside Iraq, PFI and all the rest. What party gives its political enemies the tools to repress it?

The voter is in an impossible position. Choose Cameron, you get greedy, unpleasant baby Thatchers armed with added technology and expanded police powers. Imagine Orgreave with tasers. Choose Brown or whoever succeeds him, get the same, allied to breathtakingly callous incompetence. Choose the Lib Dems, get – what exactly? No-one knows. What would Clegg do? Who is he? What does he stand for? Again, no one knows. You can go look it up but you’ll be no wiser. What earthly bloody use is Clegg or his party?

Oh well, when Cameron and the Tories implement the hated ID card scheme (and they will, once in power, they won’t be able to resist it and besides too much money’s already been spent) then we can find out Clegg’s political views from that.