Guy Aitchison (London, OK) John Reid and Tony Blair’s plans for draconian new anti-terror laws are a sobering reminder that, despite recent talk of constitutional reform and a Bill of Rights, the New Labour leopard won’t easily change its spots. In an article in today’s Sunday Times Blair argues that it is a “dangerous misjudgement” that “we have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first”. For Blair and Reid the ‘outcry’ over the three terror suspects absconding under control orders is a vindication, proof that they were right in demanding ‘stronger powers’ and that parliament and the judiciary were wrong to oppose them. Reid and Blair’s preferred option to control orders is to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights so as to allow detention without trial. This means abandoning fundamental principles of justice and liberty. In a classic piece of Blair rhetoric, the man who is still Prime Minister tells us that civil liberties arguments are “traditional”. Those who make them are apparently failing to be “modern” about the threat of extremism. (Perhaps they are failing to “get it”). In a revealing conclusion he says terrorism, “will be defeated only by recognising that we have not created it; it cannot be negotiated with; pandering to its sense of grievance will only encourage it; and only by confronting it, the methods and the ideas, will we win”. Each clause is worth a rebuttal but the last is the most important. Retaining, indeed strengthening and expanding our civil rights is the way to confront the methods and ideas of terrorism.
As we approach Gordon Brown’s accession, the Blair-Reid arguments must be challenged. Henry Porter argues in today’s Observer that a strong constitutionally entrenched Bill of Rights is “unlikely” as it “would militate against the very control that Labour has sought to impose”. Such healthy scepticism is needed, not to induce resignation or passivity but to make the demand for a clear change of direction all the more urgent.
