A brief period of celebration

Thursday May 13, 2010

A new dawn has broken, writes Chris Snowdon. Gordon Brown has left Downing Street as he entered it (unelected), the World Cup is just around the corner, and if rumours are to be believed, we may soon be able to turn off the central heating.

It’s not quite the same, though, is it? The national mood doesn’t compare to the summer of 1997 when Tony Blair was still a saint and Princess Diana was still a sinner. These are interesting, rather than optimistic, times. Still, while the election may have been an unpopularity contest, the sight of Dave ‘n’ Nick ushering in a new era was less nauseating that it might have been, and before we get the knives out for the dynamic duo, let’s allow ourselves a brief period to celebrate the things that are now not going to happen in the next five years.

A glance at the Con-Dem agreement offers a stark reminder of how many freedoms have been lost since 1997, and of how many more were under threat from a fourth Labour term. The ID card scheme and its attendant national database will now be scrapped. School children will not be finger-printed without parental consent. Jury trial will be protected. CCTV will be regulated. The right to protest will be restored. Safeguards will be put in place to stop the misuse of anti-terrorist laws. Police will no longer be able to keep the DNA records of innocent people in perpetuity.

Excellent

This is all excellent news. Dave ‘n’ Nick’s intention to roll back the big brother state is stated loud and clear. Their attitude towards the nanny state, however, is more ambiguous. A Great Repeal Bill is on the cards, but which laws will be overturned remains to be seen. Drinkers and smokers, like fox-hunters, might find themselves at the back of a very long line. The Lib Dems were the first party to advocate a smoking ban in pubs and are more likely to ease up on marijuana than on tobacco. For their part, the Tories are even more inclined towards the Daily Mail’s stance on ‘booze Britain’ than were Labour.

Every post-war government has responded to financial crises by bumping up the duty on alcohol, tobacco and petrol. Tax on at least two of these products is already so high that further rises threaten to push their customers beyond breaking point, but Dave ‘n’ Nick may feel the screw can be turned a little further yet.

One easy saving would be to cut off the flow of cash towards the countless charities, pressure groups and glorified quangos that are the engine of the nanny state. Action on Smoking and Health, Consensus Action on Salt and Health, Alcohol Concern et al. are as far from ‘frontline services’ as it is possible to get. It would be interesting to see how long these lobby groups could stagger on for without state funding.

Promised

Minimum pricing for alcohol – the pet project of the temperance movement – was ruled out even by Gordon Brown and is unlikely to feature on the Con-Dem’s agenda (if only because it would almost certainly breach EU law). The tobacco display ban – one of ASH’s sillier ideas – is also up in the air, with the Tories having promised to abolish it. Since there is no evidence that such a ban would have any impact on smokers beyond mild irritation, the Lib Dems won’t see it as sufficiently important to risk ruining the honeymoon over.

On the other hand, Dave ‘n’ Nick may, like Gordon Brown, find that fresh prohibitions in the name of public health are eye-catching and inexpensive ways of diverting attention away from more serious problems. It is simply too early to say whether their commitment to civil liberties will translate into support for social liberties.

As for Labour, they can console themselves with the knowledge that at the next election they will be the only show in town for those wanting to cast an anti-government vote. With Alan Johnson ruling himself out of the leadership race, their last opportunity to appeal to middle England may have faded and a lurch to the left cannot be far away.

Mirth

It need not, however, be a lurch to the authoritarian left. Roy Hattersley caused mirth in the blogosphere recently when he called for Labour to become “a genuine libertarian party again”. For those of us born after 1970, a libertarian Labour party sounds oxymoronic, but others are old enough to remember the likes of Roy Jenkins who said in the 1960s:

“Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side too of experiments and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom.”

As they regroup, Labour strategists might reflect that bullying the public over their lifestyles turned out not to be the vote-winner the pressure groups assured them it would be. Of course, it would be wrong to pretend that civil liberties played a major role in the election, but while we may not have voted for liberty on May 6th, there is half a chance, if Dave ‘n’ Nick ignore the shriller voices around them, that we might get it anyway.

Christopher Snowdon’s new book ‘The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything’ is published on Monday 17th May

See also Chris’s blog Velvet Glove Iron Fist