The Ultimate Crime: Theft of Liberty
New laws undermine human and civil rights and legitimate the culture of secrecy in the United Kingdom.
The British, who believe they are unique in not needing a written constitution, are getting one anyway, thanks to a raft of new laws now passing through Parliament. Historically, constitutions are statements of citizen rights, usually written in blood, amid the smoke of a revolutionary barricade. Britain prides itself on its unrevolutionary character. It has suffered no invasions or civil wars for three centuries.
Britain also has no citizens: only subjects. And thanks to a legal and semantic detoxification of the body politic, such meagre rights as its subjects now enjoy are being reconstructed in an apparently piecemeal fashion. Words such as "terrorist" and "violence" are redefined to give them a convenient, catch-all quality. The phrase "freedom of information", by contrast, is redefined to mean less than the promise of the words. The State is extending its powers so as to control the opinions of its subjects by reading - and perhaps criminalising - the opinions expressed therein. What is happening amounts to a serious, concerted endeavour to control private thoughts as well as our public actions. The distinction between citizen and subject was never sharper.
The Luftwaffe no longer blitzes us. The Cold War is over. Maybe, for the foreseeable future, the Irish War is also on hold. Firearms - shotguns apart - have been removed from private hands. The UK has never been less threatened for a century or more. Yet it behaves as if its days are numbered. A private individual acting out his fearful fantasies in this fashion would be sent to a psychiatrist and treated to a little electroconvulsive therapy. Governments, unchecked by constitutional safeguards, create their own reality before which, the subject who wishes to stay out of trouble is expected to genuflect towards an institutionalised insanity.
A key item in the Blair Plan for Deconstruction of Civil Liberties is The Terrorism Bill. This criminalises anyone whose protest - for example, against the unaccountable, faceless powers of a multinational corporation - might damage or threaten property. The word "terrorist" is now so vaguely defined that it might be anyone whom the police or courts choose to call a terrorist. The mere threat to use direct action as a form of protest, regardless of the surrounding circumstances, is to be outlawed. Terrorism is essentially a political act. So suspect religious groups are now declared to be political to fit the new definition. So are workers involved in industrial disputes.
The second rank of new criminals under this law will be those who fail to report their suspicions about anyone allegedly involved in the new terrorism. Historians of the Third Reich might just find common ground here, between societies that expect family members to inform on one another in the interests of State security. Attacks on property are now categorized, along with assaults on the person, as "violence" (rather than the existing definition, "criminal damage".)
Journalists are in the front line of the new repression: the bill makes it a crime to collect information likely to be of use to a terrorist (such as my own book and many others describing the Irish conflict). Clause 18 proposes a five-year sentence for anyone failing to report information received professionally, that may relate to a terrorist act. Also criminalised is a cameraman's refusal to hand over film of demonstrators or the reporter's failure to act as a legman for the State by revealing sources and notes. By such means, the information society becomes the informers' society.
Like Dante's Inferno, the new law invents a third circle of hell where the new terrorists are to be discovered and demonised. Those are the people who support, by word or deed, an armed struggle inside or outside the UK. Even to speak at a meeting, while knowingly sharing a platform with the spokesman of a banned organisation, might result in a prison sentence of ten years. The government also reserves the right to proscribe any organisation it chooses to identify as part of the redefined culture of "terrorism."
The British have had a foretaste of this proposal. Last year, friends of the brutalised culture of Tibet were denied the right to wave Tibetan flags in London during the state visit of China's President Ziang. The official policy, cooked up in the Foreign Office, was "isolate and contain" to suppress legitimate protest....Then, someone lost the Minutes of meetings between FCO and the Metropolitan Police.
In the corporate state, corporations - along with foreign gerontocracies - also need protection. Luke Anderson, campaigning against GM foods, perceives the new law as a means whereby "the government is creating a private security service for transnational corporations." Animal Rights activists predict that they will be among the first groups scheduled for redefinition. Their spokesman noted recently:
"You only have to look at the way the stalking laws were used. The Protection from Harrassment Bill was designed to protect women from being stalked. The very first people to be prosecuted were animal rights activists."
Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) notes:
"The anti-terrorism laws have led to some of the worst human rights abuses in this country over the last 25 years, contributed to miscarriages of justice and have led to the unnecessary detention of thousands of innocent people, mainly Irish. Only a tiny percentage of those detained have ever been charged and almost without exception they could have been detained under ordinary criminal laws. Such draconian anti-terrorist laws should be abolished and not extended."
The Terrorism Bill is but one of four measures which together, in the view of the UK's Society of Editors, "will erode current safeguards, extend state powers, outlaw legitimate journalistic investigation and bolster State secrecy." The others are:
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill sanctifying State invasion of all private e-mail and telephone information including encrypted material. Why is this draconian power required at this point in history? Partly at least, "in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom." Who determines that ? An obvious contributor must be the private corporation that enjoys government favour, whose specialists are to be found in the Ministry of Defence and Department of Trade doubling as civil servants.
Should the spooks wish to trawl through a company's computers, then they may target an individual employee and require him to act as their surrogate while barring him from tellling the boss about his betrayal of trust. To claim that a password accessing encrypted data has been forgotten will be no excuse for non-compliance. The State - like some reconstituted Star Chamber - will flourish coercion as an aid to such memory loss, including two years' imprisonment. We do not yet know what might happen to someone receiving unsolicited, encrypted material which he himself cannot decode because he has no key: a new crime of unomniscience, perhaps ?
Clearly such invasion of privacy is toxic for all confidentiality, including - if it is thought necessary to detect crime, prevent disorder, preserve public order etc, etc - health records, journalistic records and much else. It is to be hoped that the Roman Catholics have not yet introduced the computer to the Confessional. To give the new law operational teeth MI5 and its computer experts in the Government Technical Assistance Centre are working on a new electronic surveillance system costing £25 millions.
Caspar Bowden, director of a specialist think-tank - the Foundation for Information Policy Research - concludes:
"With this facility the government can track every website a person visits without a warrant. The RIP Bill will create an environment in which all computer users are potentially criminalised and all Internet Service Providers are required to become surveillance centres. The Bill may destroy any hope of the UK's becoming a leader in e-commerce."
Then there is the Freedom of Information Bill. This is an infamous misnomer which almost certainly reduces further the constricted rights the British now have to check the abuses of government. Knowledge that is ring-fenced beyond disclosure includes information about public hazards such as the causes of rail disasters; police investigations and - by extension - malpractice. Another significant exclusion is "commercially confidential" information held by government, if "in the reasonable opinion of a qualified person...it would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs."
The FoI Bill leaves untouched Official Secrets legislation, which denies any defence of public interest or prior publication.
Finally, there is the Local Government Bill, which moves public debate about issues affecting the everyday life of thousands of people behind closed doors, from open committees into "cabinet" discussions from which dark conclave only decisions will be handed down about children's education, social services and housing some indeterminate time after the event. Joe Public will not be permitted to know what is to be discussed, or when and where the "cabinet" might meet.
What are the sources of this new culture of secrecy in Britain? The War is one source; or rather, the paranoia about Ireland which rules the Ministry of Defence these days. As one of its experts revealed in an internal memorandum just before the election of Blair's government: "While current military surveillance is protected within current law ...particular care must be taken to ensure that the proposed legislation which will eventually replace EPA [Emergency Powers Act] and PTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] should safeguard military surveillance rights." Blair's new constitution is just such an instrument.
Harrassment of investigative journalists
In 1998, the Ministry of Defence Police raided my home for revealing this and other items of information and I was prosecuted for an alleged breach of the Official Secrets Act. The charge dropped after twelve months of harrassment. My deduction at the time I wrote the words was that the MoD believed that the long war in Ireland was set to continue, even as three governments placed their faith in peace talks. This was not entirely correct. With the enthusiastic support of the New Labour government, Whitehall was preparing to act as if the war was ongoing, in drafting new legislation. It is a picquant irony that Tony Blair, publicly dedicated to peace, privately prepared for war against the civil liberties of the people who elected him.
A key instrument through which this process is co-ordinated has only recently been identified, thanks to the Sunday Times Insight team. The newspaper's unchallenged disclosure suggests that the Joint Intelligence Committee - reformed during the Thatcher years to make it an instrument of the Prime Minister - has spawned a second group, a sub-committee whose vocation it is to identify and punish whistleblowers and their sources. The new sub-committee includes representatives of the main intelligence agencies (MI5, Secret Intelligence Service; GCHQ, Defence Intelligence Secretariat, Home Office and Foreign Office). From targeting terrorists, the intelligence committee has moved on to target non-political criminals including drug barons and paedophiles. Coming round the legislative corner, in the opposite direction, the government's lawyers are preparing to widen the definition of "terrorist" far beyond its original meaning. Caught in the middle are journalists and authors who do not wish to act as government spies.
The Harrassment List is growing steadily. It includes David Hencke, investigative reporter of The Guardian; Toby Harnden, of The Daily Telegraph and Liam Clarke of The Sunday Times. Other writers, or their publishers, have quietly capitulated to Whitehall's censorship of their work before publication when approached by the MoD.
The outcome of this pincer attack on freedom of expression is a looming conflict between the broadsheet press, regardless of traditional affiliations, and the government. Like all paranoidal nightmares, the threat that began as fantasy is being goaded into reality by a process of creating enemies unnecessarily. As The Sunday Times noted recently:
"Nothing so unites a divided press as much as a witch hunt against journalists whose only crime is to tell people what the people have a right to know."
Watch this space. The war should be going full blast by the time of the next UK general election in two years' time. By then, as things stand, the first journalist will be in prison, identified by Amnesty and others as Blair's first political detainee. I hope it is not I.
If a collision is to be averted then it will be thanks to the civilising influence of Europe upon Britain's brutish habits. In October, the Human Rights Act - embodying the European Convention - should become part of the UK's legal fabric. In effect, this will be an alternative constitution to the one now being constructed in such haste by the Blair government. As the highest British court, the House of Lords, noted in a terrorist case judgement last November: "It is now plain that the incorporation of the convention into our domestic law will subject the entire legal system to a fundamental process of review and, where necessary, reform by the judiciary."
The Terrorism Bill, for example, repudiates the legal presumption that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. The European Convention upholds the presumption of innocence. These are incompatible criteria, adopted almost simultaneously.
In those circumstances, the Blair reforms are incomprehensible.
[Tony Geraghty, veteran journalist and military author, was arrested during a pre-dawn raid on his home by six Ministry of Defence Police officers on 3 December 1998 as a result of his book, THE IRISH WAR . He was the first writer to be charged with a breach of Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act 1989. On conviction he would have served two years in prison. After twelve months, the Attorney General dropped the case. Geraghty's alleged source Nigel Wylde, a hero of the Ulster conflict, has just been committed for trial at the Old Bailey].