Guy Aitchison (London, OK): Simon Jenkins uses his valedictory column in today's Sunday Times to blast MPs for not standing up for liberty against an authoritarian Home Office.
Some highlights:
Since 9/11 there has sprung into being a war-on-terror version of the “military-industrial complex”, against which Eisenhower warned Americans as the cold war developed in the 1950s. The complex roams seminars and think tanks with blood-curdling accounts of what Osama Bin Laden is planning. Visitors need go no further than the biennial defence sales exhibition in London’s Docklands to see Eisenhower’s monsters on parade. They feed on the politics of fear, a leitmotif of this government. The entire nation is regarded as under suspicion....
A feature of this campaign is its sheer mendacity. Smith last week promised that her surveillance regime would cover only details of electronic communication, not contents. This is incredible. It reminds me of the old Home Office lie that all phone taps “require the home secretary’s personal authority”. Smith’s apparatchiks want to read the lot...
This month some worms started to turn. The Lords rejected Smith’s demand to be allowed to detain suspects for 42 days without charge. A galaxy of former judges, law officers and ministers opposed her. In response to the proposed expansion of surveillance, Sir Ken Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions, accused Smith of going down a path “in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state”. Even the Association of Chief Police Officers warned that collecting so much data was “a real threat to the individual”...
The war on terror has been a wretched blind alley in British political history. It has revealed all that is worst in British government – its authoritarianism, its sloppiness and its unaccountability. Yet restoring the status quo ante will be phenomenally hard.
Read the article in full here.
