April 16th 2009
Interview with Stephen Lloyd, Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Eastbourne
By Mark Hanson
The man who might be the next Member of Parliament for Eastbourne, Liberal Democrat Stephen Lloyd, has expressed concern on state surveillance and other related issues.
CCTV cameras have become a familiar sight in Eastbourne, and are accepted by many in the town as an important tool in fighting crime and anti-social behaviour. Yet Stephen Lloyd has joined a growing number of prominent people speaking out on the issue of civil liberties in the UK, and he believes it is becoming an issue for local people too.
“The cliché is, and it is very true, that we are the most filmed country in Europe, more data is held on the ordinary individual in the UK than any other country in Europe,” he said.
Roundly attacking Labour, he described the pitfalls of what has been called the “database state”. “I am naturally suspicious of too big a state, because even when it thinks it is on the side of the angels it begins to trample on people inadvertently. They would say you need all this DNA on the database because it helps us cut crime. They would say you need all these CCTV cameras because it helps us cut crime. Now the problem with that is, while yes it’s right to a certain extent, they are using a mallet to crack a nut and in the process, slowly but surely, the whole country, all the individual free citizens, are inadvertently finding that all their DNA details are all getting into a big computer, and that makes me nervous,” Mr. Lloyd said.
It has been reported that many of the Government’s databases in all probability break Human Rights and privacy laws.
Comparing the approaches of the three main parties, he affirmed the Liberal Democrats status as the most civil libertarian of the three, and conceded that Labour had often been mainly civil libertarian, yet he said, “There’s always been an aspect to the Labour Party, and socialism generally, that has a view that we need all this information so we can do the decent thing.” He added that there “is a danger that this government is becoming one of the most authoritarian governments this country has ever had, almost by accident. It makes me very nervous.”
Confessing that his approach to the databases and CCTV cameras was a hard one to fight politically, he commented that the other parties could portray him and the Liberal Democrats as being soft on crime. “The other parties [could] say, ‘You want to let the villain off’, when we don’t want to let the villain off, what we want to do is say ‘fundamentally you’re potentially damaging the country because you’re putting and storing more and more data on individuals who are completely innocent on a database.”
Mr. Lloyd also commented on the current furore over allegations of UK collusion in rendition and torture, pointing out that 3 years ago, when Charles Kennedy was leader of the Liberal Democrats, he was “talking about rendition Wednesday after Wednesday in the House [of Commons], saying ’something is going on here, the Government is up to something, we don’t like it, we believe torture is happening’”. Mr. Lloyd said both Labour and Conservative MPs mocked the LibDems at the time.
Describing the Tories as being “pretty autocratic”, he was scathing of the attempt by Conservatives to portray themselves as friends of civil liberties. “I have no truck with the Tories sticking up for civil liberties, because their whole history is authoritarian,” he said.
Stephen Lloyd has offered to help any local people who discover that they are held on one of the Government databases. You can email him at stephenlloydlibdem@hotmail.com
