Last night's Cif/Observer debate laid bare the government's failure to convince a vocal proportion of Britons that their freedom is not under threat
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- guardian.co.uk,
- Friday July 4, 2008
No one likes to be called a paranoid fantasist. Certainly not the packed house at the Observer/Comment is free debate in Westminster yesterday, most of whom had come to hear David Davis and the Observer's Henry Porter (declared a "national treasure" by one of the audience) take the fight for civil liberties to Haltemprice and Howden, Westminster and quite possibly beyond. A vote established that most thought liberty in Britain was in peril. Denis MacShane MP and David Aaronovitch, formerly of this parish, attempted to persuade them that Big Brother was not, in fact, watching them – at least, not without very good reason.
It was an occasionally bad-tempered debate that laid bare the government's failure to convince a vocal proportion of Britons that 42 days' detention and the "surveillance society" – ID cards, CCTV and prying council employees – are contributing to the greater safety and wellbeing of society. MacShane and Aaronovitch, who share a basic faith in the government's trustworthiness and good sense, were pitted against two men afraid of its reach and what it might one day do with the data it accumulates. Why, Porter wanted to know, would Aaronovitch trust a government that had misled him over Iraq's WMD? The Times columnist replied that in the course of the Hutton and Butler inquiries he had realised why it had been deceived – and the very existence of those inquiries was evidence of a culture of openness in British government. "I don't buy the proposition that the state is always the enemy." Take the Equal Pay Act. By putting our trust in government – by volunteering our DNA, for example – we could avoid the kind of persecution of minorities that is taking place in Italy, where police are fingerprinting Roma.
"I do care about civil liberties," he added, "and I conceive it as a civil liberty not to have to use a lift that someone craps in every day" – which was why the residents of the building concerned were so keen to have CCTV installed. MacShane cited the case of his recently mugged 13-year-old son, whose attackers were captured on camera and will shortly appear in court.
Porter disagreed: "We're often mocked for worrying about CCTV, but we're building this apparatus, this vast network of surveillance. In ten years' time, the pressure to use this to control people will be enormous."
Davis's hardline reputation and his support for capital punishment - "The liberty not to be hanged by the neck until you're dead is a liberty," said MacShane – did not go unchallenged. Davis had voted for 28 days' detention, the Labour MP pointed out. Why was 28 days acceptable but 29 days an infringement of civil liberties? Because that was how long the police had told him they needed, Davis replied. "The problem with 42 days is we keep innocent people for longer than we do guilty ones," because those with clear evidence against them were charged first. That, he said, did nothing to encourage "moderate Muslims" to help counterterrorism operations.
The fact that the whole topic appeared to bore Aaronovitch did not endear him to the audience. "We have reached the point almost of paranoia about civil liberties ... It is, in my opinion, a paranoid fantasy," he said. The barely disguised hint that they were hanging out with the little Englanders and the green ink faction did not please the majority of those present. "You're not all being watched," he concluded, exasperated. But people who think they are being watched do not like to be told they are imagining it: and when the motion was voted on for a second time, barely a handful had changed their minds.
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