"We're a party not a regiment", or so said David Davis on the Today Show this morning, defending his unlikely crusade to become the libertarian teddy-bear of the centre-centre, when he had just heard Kelvin MacKenzie make his even more unlikely-sounding "threat" to stand against him because Boss Murdoch had told him to and as he admitted, he doesn't understand libertarian arguments. Which is no suprise to anyone who has read any of Boss Murdoch's papers in the last twenty years, or seen Mr MuckKenzie on the telly. Freedom is not high on their agenda, other than freedom for bosses to hire and fire who they want, which they are all for. And freedom for middle-aged white men in cars to drive at any speed they want and park wherever they want, which they quite like as well.
OK, it may not be wonderful, but its interesting. Davis will win of course, and presumably no other serious party will stand against him. At least the Liberals won't and I hope we won't. The Labour Party in Parliament hasn't really got anything much left to lose on this, it makes no real difference to them, as long as they aren't stupid enough to put up a candidate against Davis. And there is no ethical requirement on anybody, not even the Labour Party, to deliberately walk down the dark alley that the man who mugged you just ran into.
But I'm not sure this is aimed at the Labour Party at all. It looks increasingly like an attempt to bounce the rest of the Tory leadership into a promise to repeal the 42-day rule, and maybe ID cards as well. Which of course they don't want to because they will want to keep most of the new laws, perhaps after cosmetic changes to hide the fact that they are giggling all the way to the polling booth watching a Labour government get steadily more and more unpopular by implementing the Tories policies for them. Recent Labour strategy in Parliament has been a win-win for the Conservatives. The Tories - never the natural party of libertarians whatever they try to tell us in opposition - can get ID cards and all the authoritarian bullshit they want without being blamed for either the policies or the political carve-ups needed to get them through Parliament.
Maybe Davis tried to get the party toffs to promise to repeal 42 days or ID cards and they refused. Maybe he thought they had promised and the men in grey suits subtly reminded him that they hadn't. Maybe he claimed they had and they refused to support him. Maybe he was trying to bounce them into it all along. Maybe he just fell out with them. Maybe he had one row too many with Mr Cameron. Maybe he's been in the Tory party long enough to know that every time a Prime Minister presumptive walks out of the front door of Central Office to talk to the Queen, Liberty is escorted out of the tradesmen's entrance with her personal effects in a plastic carrier bag (her sisters Equality and Fraternity were never welcome in the first place). Maybe he heard the rumour that he would never be allowed to be Home Secretary - and maybe it isn't Cameron who would block him. Maybe he still wants to be Prime Minister himself. Maybe he did a deal with the Liberals and intends to come back as a Cleggie. I have no real idea, but they all sound plausible and this is a rant not a reasoned argument so I write them all down.
So this is really directed against Cameron, or more likely against those blue-rinses in the Tory party who will be breaking Cameron's thumbs the moment he gets a sniff of power in order to get him to abandon whatever he may have promised that seems to have the slightest liberal whiff or green tinge. So more power to Davis's elbow. Even if he can't bring off a coup for Libertarianism within his own party, maybe the whole thing can shame a few more Labour backbenchers into voting against the Beast.
If so than Davis's example needs only persuade five Labour MPs to vote with their conscience rather than their whip and the Bill could still fall. If the House of Lord's defeats the Bill (which they almost certainly will if for no other reason than to spill egg on the Home Secretary's blouse) then maybe the government will try the Parliament Act. And that would be a constitutional issue rather than one of legislation so there would be different arguments to be had, and MPs who wanted to change their votes could claim that they weren't changing their minds and they were still "loyal" to the government. It only needs five to change their minds anf come over to the pale side of the Force. Or the government could simply let it die on the run-up to the next General Election. The Bill can be beaten yet.
And Davis is right - the argument IS worth having in public. Even if Boss Murdoch's Soaraway Scum and the not-very-British BNP are the only bastards willing to speak up for the authoritarian side. Not just on 42 days but on all the rest of the repressive laws. The Independent's website (warning its one of those crap websites full of clever scripts and useless graphics that have shoved my computers CPU usage up to 77%) lists "examples of the areas which concerned him":
- The national ID cards project, which will see every person aged over 16 be required to register "biometrics" such as fingerprints, plus other personal information, from 2012;
- Massive expansion of CCTV, so that there is now "a camera for every 14 citizens" - an issue powerfully raised by the Information Commissioner in 2006, who said the UK had "sleep-walked into a surveillance society";
- The National DNA Database, which contains samples from a million innocent people never charged with a crime, including tens of thousands of children;
- "Short cuts" for the justice system which Mr Davis said made it "neither firm nor fair" - thought to be a reference to Labour initiatives such as on-the-spot fines and early release from prison schemes;
- An "assault on jury trial" - namely the Labour Government's measures to allow cases to be heard by a judge without a jury in complex fraud cases and where there is a risk of jury-nobbling;
- The "crackdown on peaceful protest" - a reference to the ban on unauthorised protest in and around Parliament Square introduced in 2005, and currently under review by the Home Office, which has seen protesters arrested for reading a list of the Iraq war dead and eating a cake with "Peace" written in icing;
- "So-called hate laws" which have "stifled legitimate debate".
He's clearly in the right on four out of seven of those issues, probably on one or two more, and arguably on the last one. This is probably going to be the first election in my lifetime which I hope a Tory will win. May it not happen too often. Hey, who knows, if Labour lose the next General election (and I can't think of anyone outside the Cabinet who says we won't) perhaps the best we can hope for is a hung Parliament and David Davis as Home Secretary with Charles Kennedy as his Prime Minister.
There have been fewer of these rants of mine recently because most of them were about politics and British electoral politics had got more and more boring over the last few years. But this is something unexpected. Its all been so repetitive recently. Basically the Labour government does something desperately authoritarian in its attempt to refight the last election but three (Prevention of Terrorism Act, ID cards, 42 days) , or else it kicks an own goal and brings in some measure which (even if it is arguably worth doing) hits its own supporters in the teeth such as cutting support for ELQ and part-time adult education, or suspension of 10% tax band (a bad idea in the first place) or caving-in over green taxes and sucking up to the road haulage bosses again and again (and watching them demand more and more each time like the whingeing little capitalists that they are), or trying to remove the right to strike from some group of public-sector workers or other (strikes are usually a bad idea in the public sector, but the State deciding who can and who can't strike is an even worse one). And even when they realise what a load of prats they are being they carry on regardless because they have been convinced that in order to win a party must be "united" and there must be "No U Turns" and that people want "Strong Leadership" so once the cabinet (or whoever is PM this week) have committed themselves to some policy or other then that policy has to be made law, no matter how outrageous it is, even if by the time it gets through Parliament it has been so watered-down as to be a dead letter - which looks as if it will be as true of this 42-day shit as it was of the Dangerous Dogs Act.
And then everybody moans about it, quite rightly. And then I say "but they are still better than the last lot" and point out that they are still presiding over what's basically a sensible set of reforms that are a lot letter than the Tories could be doing. And that all the worst stuff - invasion of Iraq, ID cards - would have been done by a Tory government anyway so there is no real option for a decent voter to do anything else but support Labour. But everyone's heard that again and again and again and its got repetitive and boring. At least this is different.
And the Bill can still be beaten. And it is worth beating. This law is not about locking up suspects. They can do that anyway. It is about locking up people WITHOUT HAVING TO TELL THEM WHY.
In fact, if these powers ever come into force and if they are ever used, they are almost certainly NOT going to be used to detain people reasonably suspected of being about to commit murder. They can be arrested and held on all sorts of other grounds, and there is no point in not telling them what they are suspected of because if they did it they will already know.
It would probably be used against people who aren't suspects, but who might have evidence about suspects who are still free. So that they can be held in solitary until they tell the cops what they want to know. And they won't be told why, and neither will their lawyers, so that they can't tip off the real suspects.
This is not a law about detaining enemies of the state. It is a law about persecuting their innocent friends.