Last week the prime minister gave a ringing endorsement of the centrality of civil liberties to our society and culture. Down the generations there had been a steady accretion of rights guaranteed to the inhabitants of these islands, with Mr Brown referring inter alia to Milton, Churchill, George Orwell and Voltaire. And he undertook to bring forward legislation to entrench crucial rights in British law, with even the hint of a possibility of a written constitution. Libertarians everywhere were heartened: as A.C. Grayling puts it in today's Guardian, the positive aspects of the speech "merit a constructive response from those of us who have been clamorous in print about the pressures civil liberties are under".
But perhaps we should look more closely at Brown's words. For one thing, his list of heroes is an odd one: was the Churchill who mobilised troops in response to the 1910 miners' strike at Tonypandy a consistent civil libertarian, or was the Orwell who provided the MI6-funded Information Research Department with a list of "crypto-communists"; while Voltaire is conveniently foreign and Milton conveniently long ago. Where are Wilkes, the Chartists, the Suffragettes? Where indeed are the countless trade unionists who over the last two centuries have established what rights working people have in their workplaces? Where is Brian Haw?
And then of course there is the practice. When, following 9/11, the United States seized the opportunity of a crime against its laws - heinous in the extreme but still a crime - to tear up its own civil liberties in the name of an ill-defined and all-enabling "war on terror", the government in Britain to which Brown belonged colluded with and mimicked the Americans at every opportunity. Brown himself never called for the closure of Guantรกnamo Bay or demurred at the most extreme proposals, including that of 90-day detention without charge, just as on the domestic front he had accepted the Straw-Blunkett-Clarke-Reid regime at the Home Office as it attempted in all but name to tear up the rights of asylum seekers to civilized life and liberty while present in the UK.
And sure enough, we do not have to go far into Brown's speech to see the threatening authoritarianism at its core. What, for example, are we to make of: "By insisting that liberty is and remains at the centre of our constitution, we rightly raise the bar we have to meet when it comes to measures to protect the security of individuals and communities against the terrorist threat"?
The answer comes all too quickly. Readers will be familiar with the numerous cases of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British forces (see for example this blog, "Closing of ranks leaves a rank smell", 22nd March 2007). Today it is reported that in Iraq the British ministry of defence is claiming the right to keep a British citizen (Mr Hilal al-Jedda) imprisoned indefinitely without charge, on the grounds that UN security council resolution 1546 permits "internment where necessary for imperative reasons of security in Iraq". No matter that the provision in question is a phrase in a letter from Colin Powell annexed to a resolution passed in 2004, no matter that the resolution also recognises "the commitment of all forces promoting the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq to act in accordance with international law, including obligations under international humanitarian law".
Mr al-Jedda's case is going to the House of Lords. If Brown was a serious civil libertarian, there would be no need. He would merely acknowledge the manifest affront to the liberties he apparently holds so dear of incarcerating a British citizen for three years without the right to defend himself.
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