Civil liberties at stake

The only thing Britain’s Labour Party has in common with the country’s working people is its name. It’s been demonstrated over and over again in the past two decades that parties claiming to uphold the interests of the poor must do more than just being seers of truth and guardians of traditions.

The neo-liberal agenda has won out wholesale in respect of New Labour’s credentials. Crafty thing, this neo-liberalism. It captures existing organs of popular rule, hollows them out from the inside, fills them with a new content and parades the new monster from platforms, evoking cynicism and disgust rather than identification and sympathy. New Labour cannot even see the road ahead; if it is unable to induce the vision of the seer, it is less able to evoke the vision at will. The least it can do, standing confirmed in utter failure of simple tasks, is to keep clean the window through which that vision is likely to come. On this, however, the sun has also set. The passing of anti-terror legislation in the British Parliament on June 12 2008 established a new low water mark for Britain’s sacrifice of civil liberties.

Along with its existing powers, the government can now detain suspects and interrogate them for 42 days without those held having any legal recourse or even knowing the reasons why they are being held. This extension of detention for 42 days without charge is an abuse of democratic safeguards. The argument that the government will resort to using these powers only under “grave and exceptional” circumstances is humbug. This invocation is not subject to any legal requirement and can be taken in response to a supposed threat from anywhere in the world.

William Buis, writing in the Financial Times, is correct in drawing the analogy with “Britain [being] on the road to a police state … [with] this introduction of state-of-emergency-instruments and powers during ‘normal’ times”. The prime advocates of these emergency powers were the police and security services. Curtailing democratic rights at home is an inevitable consequence of the predatory foreign policy outlook of any bourgeois government. We’ve seen this clearly in the case of the US and its spying on its own citizens.

New Labour’s class character is shown in the extraordinary lengths it went to secure the passing of this draconian legislation. If it was not for the cooperation of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, the legislation would not have been passed. Claims by the DUP that it acted out of principle are an outrage. There was nothing principled about this burying of democratic liberties. There was quite a lot of horse-trading involved, though. Brown pledged the DUP a financial package of £1,2-billion in return for support, a further £1-million from the proceeds of sales of army bases and £200-million through relaxation of Treasury rules on the proceeds of water charges. New Labour apparently also pledged that the abortion laws of Britain will not be extended to Ireland. What this has proved is that there’s always a price tag to the principles of bourgeois politicians.

New Labour is nowhere near anything working class, and yesterday it took one step forward in entrenching a culture of abuse of civil liberties across the UK.