12th May 2010
A New Government, A New Opportunity for Civil Liberties
Mark Hanson
Today David Cameron is putting together a Cabinet and creating the most fundamental change to British politics for many, many years.
The coalition Government made up of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats is an astounding break from the tribalism that British politics is used to, and only time will tell if this new form of politics can succeed in a deeply partisan political culture that the UK has been used to.
The coalition, however, brings with it some great news concerning civil liberty.
Both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives campaigned with manifesto commitments to undo many of the great erosions of basic freedoms in the UK. These erosions didn’t start with Labour, but with the Conservatives, but Labour, under Blair and then Brown, pursued an almost ruthless obsession with taking control away from people and into the hands of the State.
Because the erosion began with Thatcher, however, it would have been a delicate time should the Conservatives have won the election outright. It would have required a good amount of campaigning in order to hold the Tories to their manifesto commitments in the civil liberty arena.
The bringing in of the Liberal Democrats, who virtually live and breathe civil liberties, allays many of the fears that the Conservatives would not keep their promises. There is also another angle to this: the Liberal Democrats, despite their usual favouring of civil freedoms, were proposing a further erosion of religious freedom, preferring instead to focus efforts on equality and diversity in moral, religious and sexual orientation policies, which would have seriously undermined religious groups’ ability to keep both true to their religious teaching and on the right side of the law. The Tories, with an in-built commitment to upholding traditional values, bring with them a concern not just for civil liberty, but also religious freedom.
There remains, though, a grave need to campaign, raise awareness, and hold both Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs to the commitments of their manifestos and the coalition agreement document. There will be a strong temptation on the government to put civil liberties on the back-burner. In part this is understandable. The immediate dangers to the UK come from the volatile economic situation, and if this is not corrected, Britain cannot consider herself immune to the immense problems such as Greece is experiencing. There is also the very difficult task that Cameron, with Clegg, faces to convince both those in their own parties, and the wider electorate, that this “new era of politics” can succeed.
Yet we cannot remain silent on civil liberties. The restoration of freedoms is urgent, precisely because of the grave situation in economics, environment and social cohesion. The dangers of unforeseen political extremism have not gone away. A charismatic, revolutionary and reactionary movement cannot be ruled out, and with the state of civil liberties as it is in this country, there would be a hard fight to protest against such extremism.
The key policies that the coalition government have agreed are these:
* Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
* Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
* Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
* Adopt the Scottish approach to stopping retention of innocent people’s DNA on the DNA database.
* Defend trial by jury.
* Restore rights to non-violent protest.
* A review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
* Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
* Further regulation of CCTV.
* Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
* A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
* End the detention of children for immigration purposes.
These are very important aims, and it is worth noting these and pressing the Government to act to implement these proposals.
