1984 in 2009?
This week, I have mostly been re-reading George Orwell’s 1984. It’s been too long. Somehow, sixty years after it was published, this book is once more at the linguistic core of the zeitgeist. Words like doublethink, Big Brother, Thought Police are used by all political factions, indiscriminately and with tongues only half in cheeks. I was struck by the way that terms like ‘Orwellian Nightmare’ were flung around at Saturday’s Internet For Activists conference, at which I was speaking- flung around with a quiet, numinous resentment that I found deeply frightening.
1984 is claimed by both the left and the right, but by far the most urgent message of the book for the modern age is one of paranoia. 1984 is the definitive paranoid novel.
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The Davies Agenda (sic)
[Note: the latest Carnival on Modern Liberty is by Cabalamat]
David Davies MP has modelled himself as a staunch opponent of political correctness, but the truth is that he – like most people obsessed with the horrors of PC – is all for it really. He just has different political priorities, as his recent outburst shows.
Sadly, I suspect that Davies is rather more representative of his party than David Davis MP, as the fairly lamentable Tory showing at the Convention on Modern Liberty a fortnight ago made plain. Any party which has a Shadow Home Secretary who can utter the phrase “fewer rights and more wrongs” without cracking up can be fairly described as being “confused” (if one were feeling so generous).
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Tory authoritarian instincts come out
The BBC reports:
Conservative MP David Davies has called on abusive protests against serving military personnel to be outlawed. The Monmouth MP has tabled an amendment to a bill governing religious hatred that would extend protection to the Armed Forces. It would make it an offence to incite hatred against serving soldiers.
…
“What I’m suggesting is that British soldiers, who I think are our finest young men and women, the cream of society, should also be protected from that sort of gratuitous abuse they experienced last week,” he said.
Update: Iain Dale doesn’t understand the laws he’s criticising.
The ‘not in our name’ card
Peter Whittle, director of some obscure organisation called New Culture Forum writes on Conservative Home:
But I would ask the Baroness [Sayeeda Warsi], why were there no Muslim voices in that crowd angrily denouncing the protesters? Why did there appear to be virtually no Muslims amongst the crowds lining the pavement? Why is there no ‘Not in Our Name’ campaign by moderate Muslims? These are the questions to which we need answers.
This sort of bigoted drivel is still too prevalent in our media unfortunately. Maybe Peter Whittle could let us know the last time he went on a march against the BNP. If he hasn’t been, then one can only assume he sympathises with them. Going by that article I wouldn’t be too surprised either.
Update: No surprise the NCF is supported by this shower of neoconservatives. (via Tom Griffin). Ben joins in.
In defence of the Luton Islamist demo
Al Muhajiroun’s Luton demonstration and the Real IRA/Continuity IRA killings of the last week – although vastly differentiated in terms of degree -are based on broadly similar tactical considerations.
It is a law of politics that actions such as these are designed to provoke equal and opposite reactions.
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How liberal are the Conservatives?
With Shirley Williams speaking on liberalism and Labour in conversation with Michael Crick at last night’s Fabian event (previewed by Ed Wallis), and Stuart White setting out some challenges to the LibDems (though he also, rightly in my view, credits their strong overall record in this area).
So let’s complete the set.
Thanks to Evan Harris MP suggesting and coordinating the following letter to The Observer, published on Sunday, following the Convention on Modern Liberty, which senior Conservatives had been keen to use as an opportunity to project the party as “pro” civil liberties.
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Carnival on Modern Liberty
The latest Carnival on ML is hosted by Jonathan Calder at Liberal England. Next week’s Carnival will be at Amused Cynicism. You can submit nominations via this page.
It’s not easy being a protester
When it comes to protests like Leila Deen’s yesterday morning, it’s difficult to know where exactly to draw the line. Undoubtedly, having any liquid substance thrown over you is unpleasant, yet unless it’s something spectacularly nasty, such as the far more available urine rather than the “acid” mentioned by the likes of John Prescott, there really shouldn’t be any repercussions for such rare political statements, and Peter Mandelson doesn’t seem to want to take it any further.
In fact, if anything I’d further support the sliming of politicians, or the throwing of custard pies in some circumstances: a politician that can’t take the odd act of direct action is one that really ought to get over themselves. The power they wield, especially someone unelected like Mandelson, is out of all proportion to that of the humble protester; sometimes you have to take your cause to the next level. Deen might have came out of this looking slightly infantile, and her arguments are not as convincing as she might believe, but she succeeded in getting her own personal message across.
It would also be nice if some people could digest such events without restorting to straw men, as the noble Martin Kettle just had to. The greening of Mandelson proves that we don’t live in a police state, even though only those addicted to hyperbole have said we do. Sleepwalking towards one potentially, already in one no. Still, it seems to have been good timing for Kettle to say just that, as the Guardian today has an exclusive on… the police building databases on peaceful protesters.
How do we explain the populist case against civil liberties?
At the Convention last week, the magnificent array of speakers did their job of giving us some strong and pithy arguments against the encroachments on our shared civil liberties.
Memorable rhetoric is important, because the shifting of public opinion is not shifted by one speech by Philip Pullman, (however lyrical) but by a hundred thousand discussions in homes and offices, and more than a few more opinion columns and TV shows in the coming years.
But we did not hear how to address the possibility that specific crimes may be committed when some of the state’s major incursions into our liberty are rolled back. It is crucial that those of us who push for a tempering of databases and surveillance own these possibilities and embrace them.
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On liberty: laughter and forgetting
1) Traditional civil liberties have been eroded in recent years.
2) Amongst those concerned about the erosion of civil liberties are quite a few posh people.
3) Therefore, civil liberties are an issue only of concern to the elites and not ‘ordinary people’.
I would have thought the failure to apply elementary logical thinking in this formulation was pretty obvious – yet this is exactly this sort of argument I’m reading on what seems like a daily basis in the blogosphere.
Or it just feels like it. I’m getting a bit fed up with it, to be honest. Apart from anything else, it’s a little selective, isn’t it? The decidedly plummy tones of the New Atheists don’t seem to prompt the same dismissal. Only toffs are concerned about things like the extension in police powers and not ‘ordinary working class people’?
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Huhne clashes with Tories on ‘rights’
This extract from Chris Huhne’s speech at the CoML was excellent:
It is also essential in my view that we don’t abolish the Human Rights Act. Both Labour and Conservative politicians are now talking about how we need a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities and the Conservatives actually said they want to repeal the Human Rights Act.
Now we must remember why the Human Rights Act is so important as opposed to British rights. Because Eleanor Roosevelt was not foolish when she championed human rights in the 1948 universal declaration and the British lawyers involved in the drafting of the process were making a fundamental point. Any society at some point in the future can decide who its citizens are and who they are not. That is what happened in Nazi Germany – they defined the Jews as non-citizens outside the pale, no longer at the serving of human rights no longer deserving of German citizens rights. If we define [rights] as British that is the risk that we run again and we must not allow that to happen.
And let me make one final point, which is that if we want to achieve that consensus that I very much want to see, we have certainly to build a popular campaign that is absolutely crucial, but the end of that popular campaign to my mind should be an entrenchment of our civil liberties in a way that cannot be challenged in the way that it has been challenged in the last ten years in particular. I am thinking here of a written constitution. … That is the sort of entrenchment of civil liberties which we’ll never have in this country unless we too have a written constitution to guarantee that judges can oversee laws and can make sure that they do not contravene fundamental civil liberties.
Completely agree with all of that. [Update: text has been cleaned up]
Why did The Times remove Philip Pullman’s article?
The writer wishes to remain anonymous
On the eve of the CoML, writer Philip Pullman wrote an article for The Times newspaper. It was abruptly it was pulled from their website soon after and you can see this discussion on the CoML website asking why.
Then, I was passed an email sent by Mr Pullman himself worrying about what happened and wondering why it had been pulled.
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Exclusive: David Davis wants 28 days detention reduced to 4
Tory MP David Davis gave an excellent speech at the end of the Convention on Modern Liberty. Just read it when it goes online. I asked him afterwards to confirm a point he had made to me a few weeks earlier. He says he would ideally like to see the pre-charge detention period, which the government recently attempted to increase to 42 days, to be reduced to 4 days. Wow.
He prefaced his point by saying that the Americans had a pre-charge detention period of 48 hours. This is because authorities are allowed to use intercept evidence. Davis said if authorities in the UK are allowed to use intercept evidence, there’s no reason why pre-charge detention should be more than four days. I’m impressed.
Supporting the Libdem Freedom Bill
While Labour continues to devise yet more illiberal policies and the Tories fail to convince that they will be an improvement, it is heartening to see that at least one of our major parties is making a firm and principled stand on the issue of civil liberties.
The Liberal Democrats have unveiled their “Freedom Bill” aimed at rolling back some of the restrictions on our freedoms imposed by Labour and the Tories in the last two decades.
It contains twenty proposals:
Carnival of Modern Liberty
Welcome to the sixth Carnival on Modern Liberty. We’re back at Liberal Conspiracy, in eager anticipation of the Convention on Modern Liberty which will be taking place today (as if you didn’t know…).
My thanks to Our Kingdom, Lib Dem Voice, Yorksher Gob and Wardman Wire for keeping it going over the past few weeks.
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How journalists can get back at PC Plod
In light of news that the public is no longer allowed to take pictures of the police, I’d like to point out a possible scenario which local reporters may have to go through in the future.
I say this as:
a) a crime reporter, who frequently comes into contact with coppers,
b) as a reporter in a city where there is a seriously big presence by both navy and army and
c) as a reporter of some years, who has heard everything in relation to the moral panic over paedophiles and terrorists…
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Convention sold out; but are Tories serious about liberties?
The Convention for Modern Liberty in London, this Saturday, is sold out! That’s 1000 tickets gone people – a massive achievement in itself. Clearly there is a huge hunger across the country to reclaim our civil liberties back.
If you haven’t got your London ticket or couldn’t make it down anyway, then there are other ways you can join in:
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Time to defend politics – not liberties
Try as I might, I can’t help feeling that this week’s Convention on Modern Liberty addresses far more of the symptoms that our liberal democracy exhibits than the actual diseases that it suffers from. I say this because I’d argue that the biggest threat to individual liberties is not the particular instances of illiberality in themselves by governments, as much as what the late Bernard Crick described as the populist mode of democracy that we are drifting into.
Here’s an example. I would argue that the Conservatives have – this week – promoted perhaps the most reactionary and dangerous set of proposals that any party with a realistic prospect of victory has ever announced in this country.
In their local government proposals, they have adopted the very worst excesses of populism. And by populist, I don’t mean any half-arsed Phillip Gould-type attempt-to-push-the-party-where-focus-groups-tell-them sort of populism.
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Event: Future at our fingertips?
Despite many viewing biometrics as an issue exclusively relating to ID cards and passports, the reality is that such data is already in use on a daily basis across Britain in a wide variety of settings from providing security in schools, nurseries and hospitals, to gaining access to computer systems, and monitoring turnstile entry to building sites.
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Our all-star lineup for the Convention
I’m pleased to announce that the LC/CIF lunchtime event at the Convention on Modern Liberty has an excellent line-up of panellists. Joining me will be:
Phil Booth – National coordinator for the No2ID campaign, Phil has been instrumental in building up the technology infrastructure for the campaign and building its profile online.
Heather Brooke – A journalist and writer living in London, Heather is author of ‘Your Right to Know’ a citizens’ guide to using the Freedom of Information Act and accessing official information. She runs a blog of the same name. Most recently, Heather won a High Court case against the House of Commons for the full disclosure of MPs’ second homes allowances.
Dr Ben Goldacre – The ‘Bad Science’ columnist for the Guardian, who runs a blog of the same name, needs little introduction.
I’m just trying to confirm one last panelist, hopefully from My Society. The event isn’t aimed merely at bloggers but campaigners and activists of all stripes who want to know more about how we can use technology to prise open Westminster and protect our civil liberties (or for other means, if you so wish).
Now, what questions would you ask these panelists? I’ll pick the best ones for the convention if you can’t attend.
Update: I’ve just heard they’ve sold over 1,200 tickets! Jesus.
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
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» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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