Читать книгу The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights - Dominic Raab - Страница 6

A visitor to Britain arriving on International Human Rights Day might be bemused to read the following newspaper headline: ‘The liberties stripped from the weak today could be lost to us all tomorrow’. He will be positively perplexed if he compares it to another just a few weeks earlier: ‘Human rights is merely a sweetener for rapists, murderers and violent criminals’.

This is not an isolated example of the conflicting views on ‘human rights’ in Britain today.

On the one hand, we now regularly hear that the government is seizing the ancient birthright of Britons, tearing up freedoms nurtured since the thirteenth century and ushering in a dark new chapter in British history. Over the last twelve years, the police have clamped down on freedom of speech, restricted public demonstrations and stifled peaceful protests – using an array of new powers bestowed by a blizzard of legislation, hastily enacted by Parliament on the flimsy pretext of national security. Wave upon wave of antiterrorism measures have been introduced by an increasingly authoritarian government, including proposals to extend police detention without charge that even the former head of MI5 describes as draconian. Wide new surveillance powers allow half a million private conversations between British citizens to be bugged each year by snooping spooks, including hundreds of local authorities.

Meanwhile, our traditional pillars of justice are also crumbling under the immense strain of law enforcement short cuts taken in the name of fighting crime. Basic safeguards put in place to protect the innocent have been wrenched from our justice system by politicians desperate for tabloid headlines: the presumption of innocence reversed, the burden of proof watered down, our courts sidelined and the right to trial by jury subject to sustained, and ongoing, assault.

The creeping powers of the state at every level – from the intelligence agencies through to quangos and councils – are creating a surveillance society, with neighbourhood spies even checking our rubbish and following innocent children home from school to confirm that they qualify for the local catchment area. The Home Office’s imminent national identity register will store masses of sensitive personal details, for each and every British citizen, on a vulnerable central government database. Careless and unaccountable civil servants will then liberally share our private information around the disparate, sprawling and utterly unreliable arms of government – as likely to lose or abuse as protect our personal data.

To cap it all, Britain, the cradle of liberal democracy, now has the unsavoury honour of topping a dubious array of international league tables – including boasting the largest DNA database and the most CCTV cameras in the world.

On the other hand, our visitor may draw little sense of public order or security, as might be expected from a government with such a heavy-handed reputation. On a daily basis, we read about the steady stream of human rights rulings undermining law enforcement, criminal justice and national security. Common sense turned on its head – warped by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and magnified by Labour’s feckless Human Rights Act – allows human rights to be wielded to protect and compensate serious criminals rather than their victims. Police now invoke the human rights of fugitive killers, to protect their privacy rather than alert the law-abiding public. The Prison Service compensates drug-addicted prisoners for the hardship of going clean, and gives jailed criminals access to fertility treatment. Airline hijackers successfully claim their ‘rights’ to fend off deportation, illegal immigrants sue the immigration service for holding them in detention and bogus asylum seekers claim access to state benefits. Children show off their novel rights like new toys, challenging authority at every level – including police officers in the street, teachers in the classroom and even their parents at home.

Add in, for good measure, the reams of new government regulation that have spawned a health and safety culture – preventing the police from rescuing a child drowning in a pond, but prosecuting them for mistakes made during the heat of a counter-terrorism operation – and the prevailing sense of confusion is complete.

The conventional explanation is that these are two mutually hostile positions, set amidst a polarized debate that pits a liberal elite against a populist press. But what if, far from antagonistic, there is a kernel of truth, and some measure of substance, to support both sides in this debate?

The British idea of liberty, developed over eight hundred years, is now caught between conflicting tides, cast adrift from its natural moorings. It has been both corroded and conflated. It has been corroded by the government’s direct assault on our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, the presumption of innocence and freedom from arbitrary police detention. British liberty was hard won over centuries – millions died in the struggle, revolts and wars that secured and then defended those freedoms. Yet, since 1997, in a vain effort to prove itself tough on crime and counter-terrorism, historically weak flanks for the Labour Party, the government has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences. As the power of the state has grown, so has the scope for its abuse, whether by police officers operating under ever-increasing pressure, invisible civil servants concealed within grey bureaucracies or over-zealous council officials relishing their windfall of extended authority over local residents. These incremental extensions in the reach and authority of government, and the mounting abuse of power by its agents and officials, have led to a tectonic shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen. As our liberal democracy becomes less liberal, the government is inflicting lasting damage on the very bedrock of what it means to be British – undermining the fundamental freedoms we enjoy as citizens, our sense of fair play as a society and the checks and balances that restrain the state’s ability to interfere in our daily lives.

At the same time, and in parallel, the British tradition of liberty has been conflated as swathes of other comparatively minor grievances, claims and interests have been shoe-horned into the ever-elastic language of inalienable, unimpeachable and judicially enforceable rights. In place of our most basic – fundamental – freedoms, steadily eroded and undermined since 1997, we have witnessed the expansion of a range of novel, often trivial, rights.

Over the last thirty years successive governments have tried to grapple with, or plain ignored, the inflation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. But since 1997 the government has fuelled the proliferation of rights by passing its flagship Human Rights Act, importing lock stock and barrel into British law the European Convention of Human Rights and all of its accompanying case law. The Act forms part of a broader government strategy that seeks to anchor Britain to Europe and introduce a socialist conception of human rights, fundamentally at odds with the British legacy of liberty going back hundreds of years.

The result has been to upgrade endless ordinary claims – including to social services, NHS treatment, welfare payments and even police protection – to the status of fundamental human rights.

Civil servants, the courts, police, prison officers and numerous other officials have struggled to keep up, distracted by the growing number of rights they are forced to service along with the wider public interest, and baffled by the legal confusion it has created. There is a real and rising risk that this exponential expansion of new, individual rights will drown out a balanced assessment of public service priorities, displace broader social interests, fuel a growing compensation culture and undermine this country’s traditional ethos of civic duty and social responsibility.

The dramatic expansion of rights in the UK is not the result of public debate, nor has it been endorsed by our democratically elected representatives. On the contrary, it has emerged by stealth, pioneered by judges in Strasbourg – and more recently the UK – at the expense of any meaningful British democratic control. Whatever the differing views on human rights – and those on the left and the right may reasonably disagree – the massive proliferation of rights through the courts is difficult to square with basic ideas about how a democracy should function.

If these twin developments have frayed the threads of our liberal democracy, they are not yet beyond repair. As a general election beckons, with all three political parties proposing constitutional reform – including proposals for a modern British Bill of Rights – this book aims to inform that debate, by drawing on our history, constitution and a consideration of the practical impact of human rights on our daily lives. To do that it is necessary to ask – in the mother of parliamentary democracies, which enshrined the first fundamental freedoms some eight hundred years ago – what went wrong with rights?