Sound the alarm bells – liberty under threat!

Brown closing the gap between his paranoia and the police state

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. – Ludwig von Mises.

Britain is not a police state but a nation with police state tendencies. In any democracy the dictates of freedom wrestle with those of security. Britons are a liberal people who want to be safe. Do they also want to live in a condition of perpetual paranoia?

In his five months of power, Gordon Brown has shown himself a tentative, uncertain leader, reluctant to confront admirals, bankers, property developers, American presidents, and now his own security apparatus. This final weakness is the most dangerous.

So opens Simon Jenkins’ article in The Sunday Times dissecting the paranoid tendency of Gordon Brown with his controlling mentality and Labour’s determination to strip us of more of our hard earned freedoms and liberties whilst capitulating to the motives of the terrorist that he thinks he’s protecting us from.

The explosion of a deadly bomb is always possible in an open society enjoying freedom of movement. It does not “threaten the nation” or destabilise its freedoms unless government so decides, in Brown’s case by altering the social, legal and physical infrastructure of the nation. Ministers seem unaware of this distinction. In capitulating to the terrorism industry they capitulate to the terrorist.

Therein lies the crux of the debate, by removing so many of our liberties in the name of security, by gathering more and more private information from us whenever we decide to travel, either within or without the British Isles, by recording even more images of us as we go about our daily business, or by locking more and more of our citizens away without charge, or by creating more and more civil service jobs in counter terrorism, or creating bigger and bigger computerised databases holding terrabytes of information about us, does it necessarily make the nation a safer place?

I contend that it does not, and a few others recognise the danger signs this weekend. Whatever security measures are put in place, one needs to remember that the “terror threat” that we supposedly face is a little different from that posed by the Provos in the 1970s and 80s who were much concerned about getting back to Armagh. Today’s Bin Laden inspired chapatti flour and bleach gatherers are more concerned with instant death and a swift transport to “paradise”. They care not a jot if they commit suicide on a bus, a train, a plane, or a public toilet, just so long as there are other innocents around them . Replanning and redesigning the physical aspects of our public places will have minimal effect against such zealots. Yet this government of ours still perceives the risks to be greater than being killed on one of Britain’s motorways, where 3,000 a year are losing their lives.

The raison d’etre of terror is to cow and bully, to force a change of attitude and a remodelling of one’s way of life, to put it simply, to make us live in fear. With Brown’s attempts to change the social, judicial, political, and physical in Britain they appear to be winning the battle! However, others are prepared to man the barricades in the fight to maintain the traditional British way of life and the liberties that we have preserved through a civil war, two terrible world wars, the cold war, and the troubles of Northern Ireland. As this government prepares to legislate even further I argue it is they who we should be afraid of, rather than the terrorists. Jenkins concludes:

One remarkable consequence has been to end the customary response at Westminster, that “national security” justifies anything proposed by government. That line is no longer bought without question by the media, peers, Labour backbenchers (other than the most cringing) and even the Tory party.

Indeed Brown has pulled off a remarkable coup in unearthing a libertarian conscience within modern Conservatism. David Davis, the Tory home affairs spokesman, usually a walking-talking police state, admits he can find “no evidence whatsoever” of the need for 56 days’ detention. For once the Tories are on the side of liberty’s angels. They must stay there if the government’s fifth antiterrorism law in office is not to be followed by many more. The boundary is a fine one between a paranoid state and a police one.

The job of the security services is to propose to government what they think will make Britain as safe as the grave. The job of politicians is to put such proposals to the test of proportionality, value for money and civil liberty. It is now moot whether Britain’s politicians are up to that job.

Jenny McCartney writing in The Sunday Telegraph points more lucidly to the solution, after highlighting the controlling paranoia of Gordon Brown displayed this week against Lord West, she argues that for all the extra security we are actually no safer. She wearily points to the significance of better intelligence gathering in the fields of both elint (electronic intelligence) and more importantly humint (human intelligence), building a case for a change of government attitude and a reallocation of resources. We will indeed feel safer with a greater presence of police on our streets and a willingness within communities to give up information which will add to the safety and comfort of us all.

Matthew D’Ancona also writing in The Telegraph is inherently wrong in his assertion that an extension to the 28 day limit is the right thing to do, despite illustrating the short comings of the Home Secretary, he quotes Philip Bobbitt:

“We should stockpile laws for [a catastrophic] eventuality, just as we stockpile vaccines.”

what a ridiculous suggestion! Piling up laws simply piles up the amount of criminals, and each new law removes another facet of the individual’s liberty. Yet by the end of his article he sounds confused and wondering about the certainty of losing liberty:

On present form, Mr Brown is risking humiliation. His initially sound strategy – to consult, to acknowledge dissent, to seek consensus, but then to act decisively – has collapsed in confusion. Which minister to believe and at what hour of the day? Why should the public accept what is undoubtedly a prospective curtailment of a core liberty if the Government itself seems so uncertain? There is a moment at which open-mindedness begins to look dangerously like diffidence, incompetence and indecision (does anyone remember John Major?). On this policy, that moment has now been reached – with potentially perilous consequences.

Jason Lewis in The Mail on Sunday sounds another alarm bell over the gathering of information from travellers within the UK in the same manner as that gathered from international passengers.

The Home Office last night confirmed the measures would be introduced next year using a so-called “statutory instrument” signed off by Home Secretary-Jacqui Smith, without the need for a full debate in the Commons. The Government said the move will enforce powers included in the Police and Justice Act 2006 which allows officers to monitor all “flights and voyages” starting in the UK.

Tony Bunyan, of civil liberties organisation Statewatch, said: “The Government is using the fear of terrorism to build up an apparatus of far-ranging social control that allows them to build up a complete picture of our lives.”

Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs select committee, which is carrying out an inquiry into the “Surveillance Society”, last night said he would raise the issue with Ministers next week.

He said: “This is a civil liberties issue. It needs to be debated fully by Parliament.”

Just another example of the insidious and creeping theft of private information, privacy, and depersonalisation of the individual by a government which claims to use information in the battle against terror. They continue to be blind to the fact that they altering the very way in which we lead our lives in a vacuous and humiliating yielding of the moral argument against Osama Bin Laden’s lieutenants.

Finally may I recommend Peter Hitchens’ writings in The Daily Mail adding to the voices of concern and utter outrage at the machinations of Brown’s bunker, we are he states:

Spied on, interrogated, searched, forced to disrobe and grovel by officious oafs so that we can travel abroad, we meekly submit to our own enslavement.

Resist, and they can lock you up without charge for weeks, much as in Burma or the other countries we pretend to disapprove of.

Will you put up with it? You shouldn’t. Mr Brown, even more than the grinning Blair creature, is the most effective supporter of terrorism in the free world.

He does exactly what Osama Bin Laden and the rest of them want him to do. If we really were fighting a war, we would be fighting it for our liberty.

Yet this ‘war’ involves abolishing the freedoms it has taken a thousand years of patient, heroic struggle to create and defend.

The paranoia in bunkered down Brown’s government extends to the control and command of ministers and colleagues as even Foreign Secretary David Miliband found out to his cost last week, if I were to write to the beleaguered South Shields MP asking imploring him to defend the British way of life and to argue and vote against the creeping intrusions into my private life and the erosions of my personal liberties, do you think he would dare to stand up to Broon? No, I doubt it too, there is far too much at stake for him to take such a drastic course, yet one hopes that some politicians may find the backbone and high principles to oppose emphatically the possibility of a police state in Britain.

That, in a nutshell, is the constant danger of capitulating to terror in the manner of the over legislating control freak paranoid Prime minister.

A final question – just what do you think this government’s methods are doing to moderate attitudes within the Islamic communities of Great Britain?