Rupert Read (Norwich, The Green Party): The powers that be at Our Kingdom are welcoming the way Davis has called this highly-unusual byelection. I can understand that; I can understand the desire to applaud and welcome what he has done and what he is making possible. I said as much myself, in my earlier post on this on OK.
But I think what we also need to be very clear about is that no way is David Davis any kind of poster boy for civil liberties. Much of what he believes in and much of his record is extremely antithetical to what many on OK take for granted. I fear that this fact has not fully emerged in most of what has been written on OK about this byelection campaign.
Well, it is about to emerge – here, and far beyond. Because there is one political Party which has decided to fight David Davis, primarily on this set of issues. The Green Party has just decided that it will field a candidate against Davis. It is time for real civil libertarians now to stand up and be counted.
Here are some key reasons why readers should consider backing the Green Party against the Tory Party in this unique byelection where we are now the main challengers to Davis:
1) Davis's stance is arbitrary and not radical enough: why draw the line at 28 days? 28 days is already way more than most civilised societies allow. True habeas corpus requires that we role back the number to about 3-7 – which are the numbers normal around the rest of Europe (see on this the Green Party’s Jean Lambert MEP).
(4) This ought to be an argument about freedom in a true, broad sense of that word. True freedom
is not mere libertarian anarchy; true
freedom is enabled and enabling. People are freer when they are free from fear of old age or ill-health; people are freer when they are well-educated.
(2) Davis and the
Conservatives are poor on various other key civil liberties issues, think of all the laws passed
against dissent in the 80s and 90s; as well as gay rights (on section 28 Davis has taken the homophobic line), capital
punishment (Davis is for it, the Green Party against), etc
(3) One needs to go beyond
mere 'formal' liberties in this debate. Anyone is 'free' to own a newspaper -- the press is
'free' -- provided that you are extremely
rich... ; anyone is 'free' to sue for libel -- provided that they are extremely rich... Take the topical example
of the planning system which I wrote about recently on my blog. The rich and powerful can get their way all too often,
and then ordinary people lose out. Developers have automatic rights of appeal;
ordinary people effectively do not unless they have enough money to go to the
High Court. To put the point more generally: We need a society which makes
political and civil freedom something which
all can have access to ('equality of liberty'), and not merely a preserve of the rich and
powerful. The Green Party stands
for this; David Davis does not.
OK will be continuing this debate in a vigorous fashion over the coming weeks.
Comments
Rupert
I will repeat to you what I have said elsewhere. Support for the death penalty does not make someone illiberal. Locke and Mill were both in favour. Hobbes was against. I think the mistake people make is to think that capital punishment is a case of the state taking a life. It isn't, because the state can't find someone guilty - only a jury can. That said, I'm against capital punishment myself.
Clause 28 outlawed "promotion of homosexuality". The majority of parents may well have agreed with this, so it was arguably just democracy in action. Of course it was more a case of pandering to the tabloids, but if you support something as grossly illiberal as a state education system (See JS Mill again) you will get decisions made by politicans which you disagree with. (Look on the bright side though - most of the curriculum is green propaganda these days). When I'm running the country, all schools will be private and can make up their own minds about what they want to tell children about homosexuality. Anyway, to focus more precisely on the point, having ones sexuality promoted in schools is hardly a fundamental civil right, is it?
You are getting onto dangerous ground when you talk about "equality of freedom". Freedom means absence of coercion (look it up in a dictionary). Equality is something different and doesn't come into it. Either there is coercion or there isn't. If you want to talk about equality, feel free. Just don't pretend it's something to do with freedom.
That said, you are right about 3-7 days, and I think Davis's views on CCTV are weak too.
Much as I like the Green Party, and usually vote for them, I am depressed about how the liberties debate in general has really brought two things into focus:
1. The sectarian nature of the left and, more broadly, the party political/tribal nature of so much of the 'political' debate in this country. In this case, it manifests itself in a common response - seen again here - which tends to run, 'well, Davis has a point but, look, he's a Tory/is right wing/isn't a member of my party/has some views on other things which I disagree with and, well, obviously this means that i can't side with him; instead it's my duty to explain why he was wrong about Section 28 15 years ago'
2. The authoritarian nature of the left. I don't include the author in this and I think Rupert and the Greens are quite right about 28 days becoming 3/7. Neither do I think Davis is a 'poster boy' for anything, except possibly boxing. But the silence of most (not all) of those who call themselves 'left' or 'progressive' (whatever that means) on the erosion of civil liberties has been thunderous for years, and the Davis resignation has merely underlined it. Many on the left have decided to react not by expressing outrage at the loss of our right to protest/remain silent/not be watched by cameras/not be lockeed up for 6 weeks without charge, but instead to bang on about homophobia, the death penalty and the general badness of Tories.
There was once a proud libertarian left tradition in this country and it seems now to have been entirely swallowed up the ban-everything-trust-no-one brand of authoritarian leftism which is exemplified above all by the last 11 years of Labour government. Using the state to control peoples lives at every level seems to be the only remnant of socialism left at the heart of the Labour party: only they use the power of the state not to tackle corporate power or inequality but to stop people having a fag with their pint or wearing anti-government t-shirts.
The liberties debate is a test of whether the 'left' in this country has any principles left at all, or whether it is simply now a tribal rump held together by a dislike of Tories.
I don't know if your comments can be restricted to the left. The lukewarm support of the Conservatives for Davis's actions speaks volumes too, although it is probably fair to say that in the blogosphere, the left has by and large restricted itself to jeering at Davis (Liberal Conspiracy being the honourable exception).
Anonymous - true, it's not just the left. But the right in this country has long been authoritarian, so their reaction can probably be expected. What worries me is that there is little challenege to the authoritarianism of the entire political establishment, from anywhere now. It bodes ill.
Paul, you are of course right that there are other critically important freedoms which successive authoritarian Tory and Labour governments have been taking away from us, very notably the freedom to protest (which was explicitly highlighted by Derek Wall, here, in our candidacy announcement against Davis: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/3473. You say: "Many on the left have decided to react not by expressing outrage at the loss of our right to protest/remain silent/not be watched by cameras/not be locked up for 6 weeks without charge"; you're right, and that is why the Greens are different. See e.g. http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/1646 http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/3283
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/1872
for more on our expressing outrage over recent years at the loss of our right to protest.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, in the post above, about the question of freedom being an absolutely central value for Greens -- but a contested value. For an initial stab at what I meant by this, see my post over at TOTAL POLITICS on this: http://www.totalpolitics.com/blogs/campaignsblog.php/2008/06/26/the-green-party-will-stand-against-david
especially the bit about Lakoff, who is excellent on this, and whose book 'Whose Freedom?' is an important read.
'Anonymous', just above, was me, Rupert Read, btw (I don't know why my name is no longer appearing when I make these comments?).
Rupert.
p.s. The debate is continuing under Anthony Barnett's recent post, the charmingly-entitled "Are the Greens just silly sods?"
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