Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Gordon Brown's "Don't call it a relaunch" is now fully underway. The scene was set by his long interview with John Mulholland and Nicholas Watt in Sunday's Observer. Three things are striking about it from an all-kingdom point of view. Given its panoramic range, where are the great constitutional themes Brown led with when he opened his Premiership? There is nothing this week about the need to restore trust in politics (doesn't that seem a long time ago!), the governance of Britain, Britishness itself and the citizens' summit on its 'values'. This was the stirring claim at the start of Brown's successful first launch as PM, in the opening forward to the Green paper:
"Today... we want to forge a new relationship between government and citizen and begin the journey towards a new constitutional settlement - a settlement that entrusts Parliament and the people with more power".
Is it all discarded? A senior Tory told me he thinks it has been, "Going on about Britishness just reminds people that he isn't English, he's going to drop it". Evidence that this may be right was provided by the same day's Sunday's Telegraph. Less than a month ago it launched with a great fanfare its "Call yourself British" campaign (with a ridiculous article by Andrew Roberts - 'Hold Fast to the Union that makes Britain Great'). It was followed with a major article by Brown himself, announcing the coming launch of an Institute of Britishness (David Cannadine, please don't do it!). But the letters page filled with people calling themselves English. This Sunday, the paper ran a long editorial on migration headed, "Even as Britain changes, its values must endure'. But there was no mention of its campaign, or what its readers had to call ourselves. Ominously perhaps, the last article link to be found on the campaign's home page predates its launch and is by Simon Heffer. It a good read, says that the moral case for Britain has withered and that, the Union, like the empire, is over.
So is that that, then, with the constitution? No, because the other side of Brown's reform agenda concerns the reverse side of the state's coin. Identity cards and extending detention without trial. Here he tried to make a desperately liberal case for his approach. If No2ID's withering press release is as accurate as it seems, the Prime Minister was frankly misleading in his presentation of his ID card policy. I hope they will set out their case in OK and we'll see if there is any official comeback. Meanwhile in an exceptionally well-written article in the Guardian Shami Chakrabarti rebuts the shocking claims Brown makes repeatedly that Liberty has 'proposed' a way of extending detention without trial beyond 28 days and he is seeking a reasonable compromise on this basis. Shami says:
For notwithstanding the PM's conciliatory words towards Liberty in recent interviews, the Home Office pre-Christmas paper is a world away from anything we could defend in good conscience or logic.
She asks Brown to apply at home the universal human standards he asserts abroad; slaps down Henry Porter without naming him (unfairly and perhaps jealously); calls for a break from Blair's "shameless authoritarianism" and makes the point,
With no change of direction in key areas of human rights policy, both constitutional and social cohesion agendas will be undermined.
