Civil Liberties in the UK

As a teenager in the process of establishing social and political consciousness I was swept away by John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and questions of "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual".

Witnessing the erosion of civil liberties first hand in London over the past 10 years is only slightly less startling than the appetite for public acceptance that accompanies it.

In June, 2006 Steven Jago was arrested for carrying a placard without permission bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act". Police seized Jago's photocopies of Henry Porter's expose in pop culture magazine Vanity Fair on the erosion of civil liberties in Britain and termed it "politically motivated material".

Porter's story is a fascinating piece of journalism featuring thunderous email exchanges with Tony Blair on questions of liberty. In this contradictory land of the Magna Carta and Superman CCTV Porter's quote from Labour peer Baroness Kennedy resonates: "What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state".

In a continuing political spin culture of "war on terror" respect for civil liberties has taken a battering. In a 2007 survey of British Social Attitudes by the National Centre for Social Research, 80% of citizens support detention without charge for more than a week, 25% back police holding suspects for up to a week without letting them see a lawyer, and seven in 10 support compulsory identity cards for adults. In December, 2005 a peace campaigner was arrested for reading out names of soldiers killed in Iraq within half a mile of Westminster.

In the storm and rush to contain through legislation and law, liberty has found an unlikely ally in the form of UK director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald : "It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes."

London is a city and scene of contrast, on one hand priding itself on a steely business-as-usual response to the transport bombings and on the other accepting glaring changes in the relationship of society and the individual without compliant.

Macdonald reflects: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'."

Labels: culture, liberty, london, sociology

Chris Brauer Media Project [BLOG]

Wednesday, January 24, 2007