by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
There are two more worrying sections squirrelled away in SOCPA, Sections 145 and 146, described as ‘economic sabotage by animal rights protesters’. Now, animal rights protesters make most people squirm. Animal rights organizations are a byword for extremism and its activists are seen by many of us as hypocrites for endangering human life under the banner of saving the lives of animals This probably explains why so few of us were concerned by a new law that was deliberately designed to target that one protest group. It would be a little dangerous, however, to jump to the conclusion that all people who want to save animals’ lives are prepared to use violence. The vast majority of animal rights campaigners find such aggressive tactics counterproductive and absurd. So, assuming that these protesters are entitled to protest on behalf of their cause despite sections of their supporters being violent extremists, why is ‘economic sabotage’ such a dangerous piece of law?
Again, it’s the breadth of the legislation. The law creates two types of offender: those who carry out criminal acts (the few extremists) and those who commit ‘torts’ (everyone else). Now, a ‘tort’ is a civil offence. A civil tort would be something like defamation or trespass. Most leaflets handed out by animal rights activists will contain lines such as ‘These people are murdering animals!’ It’s just an opinion, they’re not hurting anyone, but the fact that it is defamatory means it has now become a criminal offence. And if I’m standing outside someone’s gate handing out leaflets I’m probably also trespassing on their property and committing a tort. Because any act of protest against a corporate body could be considered ‘economic sabotage’, I’m probably committing a criminal offence by writing this book. Again, the government said, ‘Don’t worry, we won’t use it like that.’ Well, on the one hand that’s simply not good enough, and on the other they have used it to target people handing out leaflets, so they were lying. Any act of protest against a corporation must be an act of economic sabotage because you’re trying to undermine their business.
Of course, once ‘economic sabotage’ is accepted as a way to tackle animal rights protest groups, you could be forgiven for expecting it to emerge in all sorts of unrelated legislation to combat other forms of protest too. A road protest could be construed as economic sabotage. Chanting outside an arms dealing convention could be economic sabotage. Demonstrating outside a high-street store that uses sweatshops could be economic sabotage. A group of thirty people standing outside Charing Cross police station blocking the road to traffic because one of their friends has just been arrested in Parliament Square for holding up a banner that said ‘Freedom of Speech’ could be economic sabotage too. In fact you’d be hard pressed to name any act of protest aimed at a private institution that can’t be described as economic sabotage.
1. ID Cards
They saved the best for last. Although the ID card bill is not actually a law, the threat of it is still enough to warrant top billing in the Crap Laws top ten. Not content with making criminals out of teenagers who kiss; adding levels of bureaucracy to Social Services that will put children’s lives at risk and granting huge powers that attack familial privacy; giving public bodies the right to snoop into our private lives; criminalizing and ostracizing some of the poorest, youngest and most vulnerable members of society; retaining DNA and fingerprints from people who have never been found guilty of any crime; making the wearing of a T-shirt illegal; calling anyone who campaigns against tyrants and dictators terrorists; using legislation designed to combat terrorism to intimidate, harass and threaten law-abiding citizens who oppose government policy; and giving people who hold banners in support of freedom of speech criminal records, they also expect us to trust them with every private detail of our lives.
Even if there was some kind of justification for ID cards, the government have proved beyond doubt that they cannot be trusted with the kind of information they would charge us all £90 for them to keep. But there is simply no justification for ID cards. Every one of the government’s arguments is without merit. Let’s take them one at a time.
1. ID cards will prevent terrorism. If that was the case, the men who blew up the train station in Madrid in March 2004 should not have got through (Spain has compulsory ID cards). It’s also worth pointing out that every suicide bomber seeks fame with his peers. They want the opposite of anonymity. And remember, even Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary at the time of the London bombings, confirmed ID cards would not have stopped the terrorists getting through.
2. They will cut crime. Not in every nation that currently has them - France, Germany, Italy and Spain. There is absolutely no evidence that having an ID card will stop a robber, rapist or burglar breaking the law.
3. The government can be trusted. Even if so far the government’s behaviour doesn’t strike you as alarming, in 2006 it emerged that false information on the files of the Criminal Records Bureau had led to people erroneously being given criminal records and refused job interviews as a result. These mistakes were discovered only because the CRB has an audit so they were able to locate the errors and amend them. The National Identity database will not have an audit because it will be far too big, so you won’t be able to find out what information the government has on file about you or change it if it’s false.
4. They won't be expensive. That depends on whether you think £90 for an ID card/passport is expensive. Every time you move house you’ll have to buy a new one. But the government will own it even though you have paid for it, and they’ll reserve the right to remove it from you at any time. In which case you would cease to exist.
5. They will solve our immigration problems. That assumes our ID cards will be the first set of identity papers in history that can’t be forged. If it can be made, it can be forged. Besides, all asylum seekers have been required to carry identity cards since 2000.
6. They will stop benefit cheats. Not the 90 per cent of benefit cheats who use their real identity but make false claims.
Gordon Brown is as much a fan of ID cards as Tony Blair and thinks that giving businesses access to the National Identity register that accompanies the ID card system would be a good way to help pay for it. According to a source close to Brown, ‘There is going to be a key issue over the next ten to fifteen years about identity management right across the public and private sectors ... It’s about people coming to accept that this is not only a necessary but desirable part of modern society over the next ten years. What [the Tories] are objecting to in the political sphere is going to be absolutely commonplace in the private sphere, and saying, “it’s not the British way” is just not going to work.’41 It’s interesting to note that it has become acceptable to those close to Gordon Brown for the private sphere to dictate the direction of government policy. The rest of us, it seems, just have to accept that it is ‘desirable’ because our elected representatives are so spineless when it comes to standing up to private interests.
I spoke to my dad about ID cards and he told me an interesting story from when he lived in Jersey in the 1970s about sharing personal information with the state. At the time the States of Jersey were undertaking a census and the old woman my dad lodged with when he first arrived on the island refused flatly to fill in a census form. He asked her why she was making such a fuss, and she gave an interesting reply: ‘When the Nazis arrived during the war the first place the soldiers went was the town hall. A few days later they rounded up everyone listed as Jewish on the public records and sent them to concentration camps. I never saw some of my friends ever again. I might trust this government but how do I know if I can trust an unknown government of the future?’ Putting aside the hyperbole for a moment, it is worth considering what her experience under German occupation had told her rather than what her, or anyone else’s, opinion might be. You may trust the government to have that kind of information about you now, but what about a government of the future of which you have no knowledge? Once you’ve given up that kind of information you will never get your privacy back.
Of course there
is one argument for having a voluntary ID card and that would be to give people better access to benefits or public services, but there is no justification in making that kind of card mandatory. So why is the government so determined to make us all carry an ID card? Because it’s not financially attractive for a private company to run the ID card system unless it is a mandatory policy. The only way the government could get companies to tender for the contract is if we are all made to have one. Hence the argument about terrorism and crime — it’s their only hope of persuading us that ID cards are necessary. They unquestionably are not.
Before my meeting with Liberty’s policy director Gareth Crossman ended, I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to record about the law for Albion that he felt was being ignored. Once again, asking that question caused the kind of eruption of intelligent passion and outrage I had now become accustomed to. ‘Back in 2002,’ he began, ‘the Prime Minister’s Performance and Innovation Unit came up with a document called “Strategies for reassurance: public concerns about privacy and data-sharing in Government”42 which said it wanted a world that had changed from one where information was only shared if there was a need to do so to a world where it was all shared unless there was a reason not to do so. And this is why we get the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” argument from politicians whenever they do something that takes our freedom away. But this is a seismic shift in the way things have always been in Britain historically. If you combine that with the way in which this government has taken all the best things about what the British legal system is — how we presume people are innocent, how we give people fair trials, how we don’t pass laws to stop things unless there’s a need to do so — and they’ve turned all that on its head, it’s created a country where we all live in fear, where laws are passed not because we need them but because it’s a greater means of social control, where we collect information on people not because we need it but because it might be needed at some random point in the future. It threatens everything about what it is to be British. I think there’s a quote from the mid to late nineteenth century which said something along the lines of “a gentleman of this nation can go from birth to death never needing to prove his identity to the government”. Now of course that’s not going to reflect modern-day life, but it’s this idea that people’s individuality is something sacred. Well, it’s simply not any more.’
Speaking as someone who has spent months trying to get his head round government legislation, which is written in the kind of absurd language few of us can ever hope to understand, I recognize that Liberty is trying to occupy the void Parliament is supposed to fill by acting as a barrier of conscience between our civil rights and a government that seems increasingly determined to undermine our freedom and our legal system at the same time. They are a membership organization and rely on subscriptions to fund their work. They have a website, www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk.
The worst of the laws in our top ten are the result of the government’s response to terrorism. The threat of terrorism has brought about an unprecedented attack on our civil liberties from those who are supposed to protect us. The ones added in the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7 have created an atmosphere of fear that even Osama Bin Laden could only have dreamt of. Of course the government is privy to secret information and that could perhaps explain the hysteria of their policies, but we are not allowed to know about this ‘evidence’. After the laughable dossier that was misused to justify the Iraq war we must be extremely cynical about claims of a ‘secret threat’.
In fact, ‘state secrets’ are rarely kept for our protection at all, according to the American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, whose books are quoted so often in humanities circles that only the works of Shakespeare and the Bible rival him. ‘I spend a lot of time looking at declassified government documents,’ he wrote. ‘You take a look at secret documents from the United States or, to the extent that I know about them, other countries. If they are protecting secrets, who are they keeping them from? Mostly the domestic population. A very small proportion of these internal documents have anything to do with security, no matter how broadly you interpret it. They primarily have to do with ensuring that the major enemy — namely, the domestic population - is kept in the dark about the actions of the powerful. And that’s because people in power, whether it’s business power or government power or doctrinal power, are afraid that people do care, and therefore you have to ... consciously manipulate their attitudes and beliefs.’43 One thing is certain: we have definitely not had a reaction from our leaders that our enemies wanted the least. Terrorists have achieved more through the hysterical reactions of our elected representatives than they ever did with their bombs. When a policeman can arrest a Charlie Chaplin impersonator for holding a sign that says ‘Not Aloud’ outside Downing Street because of the ‘terrorist threat’, it’s clear the government is playing into the terrorists’ hands. When the act of protest can be criminalized in Britain because of something statistically less dangerous to the public than putting up some shelves, you have to start believing in magic. How did they manage to convince us that it was all so necessary? There has been little actual convincing when you think about it; they’ve just fanned the flames of our paranoia. Not to mention the fact that they haven’t proved their policies are a realistic way of combating terrorism even if it was as great a threat to our well-being as they claim.
The government always cites public safety when questions arise about their response to terrorism, so it is surprising that they have refused to have an inquiry into the 7 July bombings. It’s almost as if they don’t want to know why a British citizen felt compelled to become a suicide bomber. Shezad Tanweer, one of the terrorists who blew himself up on 7 July, explained his motives on a video callously released on the first anniversary of the bombings. He said that Britain ‘deserved to be attacked’ because it elected a government that ‘continues to oppress our mothers, children, brothers and sisters in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya’. Regardless of his despicable behaviour, it is surely sensible to stop for a second and assess what he’s going on about if we want to understand why we have become a target. Just because his desire was to create a way of life reminiscent of feudalism or one that in our eyes is ‘evil’ doesn’t mean that we should assume by default that we are progressive or ‘good’.
Robert Pape, Professor of Political Studies at the University of Chicago, published a study of 462 suicide bombers in August 2006 that gives an even greater insight into what makes someone prepared to blow up themselves and slaughter innocent members of the public. Its findings completely contradict the government’s insistence that terrorists are all fanatical Muslims who want to destroy ‘our way of life’.
Previous analyses of suicide terrorism have not had the benefit of a complete survey of all suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. The lack of complete data, together with the fact that many such attacks, including all those against Americans, have been committed by Muslims, has led many in the US to assume that Islamic fundamentalism must be the underlying main cause. This, in turn, has fuelled a belief that anti-American terrorism can be stopped only by wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, which helped create public support of the invasion of Iraq.
But study of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism shows that the presumed connection to Islamic fundamentalism is misleading.
There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation.
Understanding that suicide terrorism is not a product of Islamic fundament
alism has important implications for how the US and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea as long as foreign troops remain on the Arabian peninsula. The obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether. Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues its vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.’44
Rather like their approach with ASBOs, the government has reactcd to terrorism in a heavy-handed way and made little or no attempt to tackle the causes of the problem. Of course it’s obvious why they can’t: their economic policy is incompatible with dealing with grinding poverty and our dependence on cheap oil. So instead, all we got from our leaders was defiance. In a statement after the attacks on London, Tony Blair, flanked by George Bush, said of the terrorists, ‘They should not and they must not succeed. When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life, we will not be changed.’
When you look at the anti-terror legislation and how it has actually been used by the police, it is clear that the bombers have achieved far more than they could possibly have hoped for in terms of undermining ‘our way of life’. The dreadful irony is that their greatest successes have come from our own Parliament’s overreaction to their behaviour.
