2009: bad year for civil liberties in Britain

Thursday December 31, 2009

Sadly the government has not lost its ambition to create a highly controlled and monitored society – but it’s not all bad news, writes Henry Porter

The brass neck quote of 2009 comes from Jack Straw, the justice minister and one of the architects of the new democratic authoritarianism in Britain.

On the eve of the Convention on Modern Liberty last February, he wrote, “I hope that in the final reckoning even some of our harshest critics will concede that this Labour government has done more than any before it to extend liberties and to constrain government.”

Of course, there is no such thing as a final reckoning because the struggle between government and individual liberty, waged from one generation to the next, is endless; but at year’s end we can produce annual accounts, which in 2009 have two main headlines and, unsurprisingly, contradict Jack’s mischievous little fib.

The first is that the government and enemies of liberty in the civil service have not lost their ambition to create a highly controlled and monitored society. They are pressing ahead with the National Identity Register and the ID card. The Independent Safeguarding Authority began vetting and barring millions of people who have glancing contact with minors and the vulnerable.

The surveillance of our streets and motorways increased without public scrutiny and debate; the gathering and retention of DNA from innocent people was unaffected by the European court of human rights judgment.

The plans to collect vast quantities of data from our communications and internet usage and from our movements across British borders remain unchanged, despite the vast hole in public finances and feints by ministers to give the impression they were responding to civil liberties concerns.

Full article: Guardian (31 December 2009)